Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [60]
Pleased with the improved level of control subsequent to the decrease in number of time patients, Orange continued the moratorium, and trimmed the numbers further the following year. He also began purposefully to divide each Block into wards which contained convicts, and wards which did not. If nothing else, this efficiency does seem to have made it easier for him to deploy staff resources where they were more likely to be needed, and by 1876, he declared confidently that the management of the time patients was no longer a problem.
The presumption in favour of sending time patients to Woking Invalid Prison would continue until 1886, the year of Orange’s retirement. Never again would he have to deal with as many admissions from the prison population. It was only when the decision was taken to close that prison that Broadmoor became the principal recipient of such patients once again. Orange’s successor, David Nicolson, was given what Orange had asked for: funds to extend Blocks 2 and 5, and undertake sundry other improvements for better security, before the accumulation of convict lunatics in Woking made their way to Crowthorne in autumn 1888.
In consequence of Hart’s escape, the Office of Works was instructed to examine the condition of all the other flues in the Asylum and rebuild them where necessary. During 1875, Orange also began the task of raising both the external and internal boundary walls, which divided the airing courts, to a height of between fourteen and fifteen feet, a protracted piece of work which continued into 1876. The inner compound was now over-engineered for safety, and the staff enjoyed a much higher level of confidence in the accommodation provided to Her Majesty’s lunatics.
This was the end of the great escape period in the Asylum’s history. It was not the end of escapes: that day never came. The patients continued to make efforts to remove themselves, but the successful conclusion of such plans became a more rare thing. In the remaining period of Orange’s leadership, only one further patient managed to escape successfully, Charles Weldrick, in 1878, and even then he was recaptured the next day.
Since 1863, a total of eighteen patients had been able to help themselves to forbidden liberty, mostly for just a few hours, though with three evading re-admission in perpetuity. Most of these escapes had resulted in some direct alteration being made to the Asylum or the way it worked, and the level of public protection was increased continuously. Both Meyer and Orange learnt from the eighteen mishaps, and the result was, by 1875, a much more secure hospital. It was now twelve years old, more adult and fully-formed than when it had opened. Victorian Broadmoor was ready to receive greater numbers of patients, and to ensure that their discharge came about only via the due process of the law.
Only Passing Through
Broadmoor was not what I expected. When I came to visit, I had prepared myself for something fortified and frightening. Indeed, when you enter into the reception block at the modern boundary to the Hospital, this view is reinforced. Security is abundant and invasive before you pass through it, to find yourself in an irregularly shaped and anonymous waiting room, with various standard NHS notices fixed upon the wall. Then you are collected and cross over to the other side. Your host can only take you through each coming door once its predecessor is locked behind you, and you begin to feel the claustrophobic sense of what it must be like to experience this, possibly forever.
The entrance these days is different to that experienced by the Victorian patients, and it is difficult to recreate the journey of their own reception. The original Gatehouse sits marooned within the site, bereft of its former function and now an exit to nowhere. But soon after you are through the modern frontispiece, a sense of the original Asylum does open up before you. There are the original male blocks, for