Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [7]
Block 3 housed the infirmary, and Block 4 included the admissions ward, but both these blocks also housed those in-between patients who did not fit into the categories of being either dangerous or trustworthy. These were the biggest blocks, housing one hundred patients each, and also had the most communal dormitories on the site.
Dormitories were gradually reduced in number during the Victorian period, with the result that the majority of patients had a single room to themselves. Such rooms measured twelve feet long by eight feet wide, and were equipped with a single bed, or a mattress only in the back blocks, and a desk. The linen was changed twice a week. Patients were also allowed personal possessions if it was safe to have them, which would vary from patient to patient and block to block. A set of cufflinks proudly worn in Block 2 would become a potential weapon in Block 1.
Once assigned a block, a patient could settle into his or her routine. That would mean a day which started at 6am (or 7am in the winter), when the day shift attendants came on duty, and ended at 7 o’clock at night when the night shift came on. In between those fixed hours, the day was punctuated by segments of time filled by meals, work and leisure.
The bulk of the day would be spent at work, if a patient was able to do so. For those capable of only basic labour, work consisted of ward cleaning, the endless washing, scrubbing and polishing required to keep the Asylum and its contents clean. For the more able, women were employed as seamstresses or in the laundry, and men as tailors, shoemakers, upholsterers, tinsmiths or carpenters, or on the Asylum farm, garden or wider estate, tending crops in the fields. Victorian Broadmoor was a largely self-sufficient community, and much of the patients’ work benefited directly their quality of life.
Such leisure time as there was might be spent reading or playing games in the day rooms in each block, walking in the airing court attached to the block or, for the more trusted patients, playing outdoor sports such as croquet or bowls or even walking (accompanied, of course) around the local area. Evening entertainments were regular, though not frequent, and cricket was played in the summer months. Special interests were encouraged, such as Dadd’s painting or Minor’s research work.
Despite these spiritual comforts, physical comfort could be hard to come by. A patient’s life could be cold and dark. At first there was no heating in any of the bedrooms, with only open fires and hot air grates in the day rooms to provide any warmth. Central heating was slowly introduced to the blocks from 1884, first through solid fuel and then by gas, though it was still a while before the individual rooms all felt the benefit. Similarly, oil and gas lamps were used for lighting the communal rooms and corridors until the end of the nineteenth century, but there was no artificial lighting in the patients’ bedrooms. In the winter months, patients spent half the day in darkness.
Patients changed their clothes at least twice a week, were washed daily, and bathed once a week in the block’s bathroom, under the careful eye of an attendant. The male patients were also shaved by an attendant, if they wished to be. Such was the risk attached to this operation that while one attendant worked the razor, another attendant was always present to keep an eye on proceedings.
Patients were fed four times a day. Everyone was returned to their block to be fed, as each block had a dining room for its own use. Before each meal, every item of cutlery was counted out by one of the attendants, and then counted back again at the end of it. Although diets varied, it is possible to describe a basic pattern of food. For breakfast, patients