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By Root 178 0

December 1874. The wind was swirling in between the blocks, buffeting the buildings on the forest ridge. The open gaps between the window frames and wooden doors were howling lowly with each forceful gust. In Block 6, patient Thomas Hart was busy worrying away at the wall of his room, inching ever closer to the other side. The catalyst for Hart’s labours had been an unexpected discovery: that at the point where his bedroom wall abutted the bricks of a chimney flue, there was a much thinner skin of brick between him and the outside world, only nine inches thick instead of eighteen. Furthermore, after a little over a decade of weathering, the mortar joints had perished in parts of the outer course. Lying in his room, Hart could see daylight.

He was a destructive patient, and his bedstead had been long removed from his room. Instead, he slept on two mattresses, and it was this arrangement that afforded him the chance to begin to deconstruct the wall at its weakest point. Scraping away manually at the mortar, he managed to work first one brick loose, and then another. The noise of the gale ensured that no one heard Hart as he was working during the night. By placing his mattresses in front of his growing shaft, Hart could cover up his operations but also place the bricks that he removed between the two pieces of bedding. At the same time, throughout the night he listened out for the attendants, for by now each room had an observation hole in the door. He would be checked on roughly every hour; in between, he could execute his plan.

The patient was a twenty-two year old hawker, married with one child, who like many Broadmoor convicts before had come from the central London prison at Millbank. Hart was a thief who was serving seven years. At Broadmoor he had been found to be difficult to employ, but had taken to feeding the birds in the grounds of the Block 6 airing court, and to flying a kite for exercise. As a result, Hart had been allowed to keep both a bag in his room containing bird food and a ball of twine for his kite wire. These items were about to be put to alternative use.

Hart worked throughout the night at his painstaking task. Then, shortly before 6am, he had pulled out enough bricks from the wall to create an aperture large enough for him to squeeze through. He gathered up all the pieces of discarded brick and put them into his bag of bird food. He dressed in a jacket and trousers that he had previously managed to secret in his room. He knotted his blankets together, and moved his bedding away from the hole. Then he took up the blanket rope, the twine and the bag and manoeuvred himself through and down into the airing court.

If that was not ingenious enough, Hart’s next moves were unsurpassed by previous escape attempts. Pawing away at the ground of the airing court, he scooped up earth and sand and added this to the contents of his bag, which by now contained a considerable amount of weight. He took a length of the kite twine and tied one end to the bag, and the other to his plaited blankets. Then he took hold of the other end of the blankets, picked up the bag, and swung the latter backwards and forwards until he had gathered enough momentum to throw it over the wall. It landed on the other side, still attached to the kite twine. This produced a cantilever effect, using the wall as the fulcrum. Hart had secured the heavy bag sufficiently to bear his own weight as he began to climb the boundary wall, gripping onto the blanket rope and easing himself one step at a time to the top.

He was missed at the hourly check at six, and search parties were immediately dispatched. Hart had begun to walk south, towards Blackwater, and he was spotted at half past nine in the morning begging for bread. A local labourer raised three friends, including the Asylum’s coal man, and the four of them detained Hart that evening on the road from Blackwater to Fleet. The one item of clothing that Hart had not been able to hide in his room were his shoes, and once chased, the barefoot patient was soon caught. He was back in Block 6 again