Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [8]
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Charged with implementing this routine was a staff of around one hundred Asylum employees. Two men were there at the start: Medical Superintendent John Meyer, and his Deputy, William Orange. They recruited a third doctor as well as the much greater number of male and female attendants, who were the bulk of their employees, and provided the nursing staff in Victorian Broadmoor.
The attendants often had little or no previous medical background, and physical presence was considered as important an attribute as any other. Many of the male staff had either served in the forces or come from the prison service to join Broadmoor’s establishment. The early years, in particular, saw a mixed success with this recruitment strategy, as in the 1860s the annual rate of turnover approached 50%. It was expected that female attendants would resign upon marriage, but discipline was also a significant problem. The Asylum archive includes staff ‘defaulters’ books’ that list dishonesty, incompetence and drunkenness amongst the attendants’ sins.
It would be wrong though, to conclude that this was an inhumane regime, where brutality and immorality were commonplace. On the contrary, there were a number of rules in place which provided attendants with both a moral compass and with procedures for physical restraint. The latter was seen as a last resort and all incidents tended to be noted in one record or another. The large turnover of staff gradually decreased as well in the period after 1870, when Orange succeeded Meyer. The Asylum appears to have been a happier place under Orange, and amongst other things he made small improvements to the terms and conditions of the attendants’ employment. Perhaps he also leant a different touch to recruitment.
The personality of Broadmoor’s chief doctors was bound to leave an impression on the institution that they ran. There is a little more about Meyer and Orange in the Escape from Broadmoor chapter to give you an outline of each doctor’s character. It is possible to cast Meyer in a slightly more villainous role: a man who seems to have fought with most of his senior staff at one time or another; a man who had the most violent male patients segregated in caged areas of their blocks; a man who perhaps was not the most enlightened brain doctor of the Victorian age. Nevertheless, Meyer had the unenviable task of trying to find a blueprint for a new type of institution, and also dealing with the inevitable flaws in the design and fabric of the building he inherited. He was nearly fifty when he took charge of Broadmoor, having previously run the Convict Lunatic Asylum in Tasmania, served in the battle hospitals of the Crimea, and then led the Surrey County Asylum for a period before he was charged with mastering Broadmoor. He also suffered from ill health. He was attacked by a patient called John Hughes in the Asylum Chapel in March 1866, struck a severe blow on the temple by a large stone, and never fully recovered. Hughes, a despoiler of holy images in a north London church, stated that Meyer had accused him of ‘murdering the Queen of Heaven’, and that he was obliged to avenge that insult. He was put in solitary confinement for his trouble.
Attacks would form a part of each of the first three Medical Superintendents’ careers, and were an occupational hazard. Orange was attacked by an insane cleric called Henry Dodwell in 1882, who argued that attacking the Superintendent was the only way to draw attention to his wrongful detention, much like he