Until Jonathan had been allowed in to make a TV series in 2014, Broadmoor had been closed to the scrutiny of cameras and its 800 staff members were warned not to discuss patients outside the hospital walls. Partly because of this – and partly due to the many high-profile cases brought to the public’s attention by the media – Broadmoor, out of all the high security hospitals in Britain, has always had a hold on the public’s imagination.
Most people we spoke to about the book think of Broadmoor as a prison, isolated on a windswept heath somewhere miles from any human habitation. Far from it. Broadmoor is a hospital perched on the eastern edge of a bustling and populous village just 40 miles from central London. In keeping with the oddly rural and idyllic connotations of the name Broadmoor, there are several local nature reserves. South of the village on the way to Sandhurst, which shares its name with one of the Broadmoor wards, is pretty Edgbarrow Woods. On the northern edge of Crowthorne is a site of Special Scientific Interest, Heath Lake, and a second such site, Sandhurst to Owlsmoor Bogs and Heaths, including Wildmoor Heath, can be found in the south-east. These quaint fairy tale places belie the fact that they’ve acted as a haven for many of Broadmoor’s escaped killers over the decades.
Crowthorne is pleasant enough, slightly old-fashioned and down-at-heel. A packed Lidl car park lies at its centre, often the scene of minor road rage incidents as locals slip into disputed spaces, jumping the queue and provoking stand-up rows outside the budget supermarket. The village has precisely all the stuff you would expect. Fish and chip shop, betting shop, butcher’s, Chinese takeaway. Completely unexceptional and ordinary in every way except one.
Crowthorne is a civil parish in the south-eastern Berkshire district of Bracknell Forest, forming part of the Reading/Wokingham Urban Area. Today, it has a population of about 7,000 people, but in the mid-19th century, it was a tiny hamlet until a couple of momentous arrivals put it on the map.
The renowned public school, Wellington College, opened in 1859. Wellington eventually gave rise to one of Crowthorne’s few local celebrities outside Broadmoor’s walls, Sir Anthony Seldon, political biographer and Headmaster of Wellington College. A year later, the opening of Crowthorne railway station marked the landmark of public mass transport coming to Crowthorne for the very first time. Then, of course, Broadmoor opened its gate in 1863. This activity prompted a period of rapid growth for the village.
The first inmates of Broadmoor were 95 women who arrived in 1863, most of whom had killed their children while suffering post-natal depression. It was first built as a Victorian lunatic asylum for the criminally insane.
Broadmoor was founded on idealistic and often forward-thinking principles. These early patients all went through some standard experiences upon admission: a medical examination, an interview with a doctor and then off to the admissions ward. Treatment involved fresh air, labour, exercise and regular meals. For many, having experienced the horror of life as the Victorian poor, the asylum was exactly that – a genuine and therapeutic refuge from the hardships of the world outside. Hardships which in many cases might have fuelled their mental illness or criminal acts. One innovative treatment was the ‘rhubarb treatment’, in which patients were fed an average of 50 pounds of rhubarb annually. Although the programme of drug therapy was virtually nonexistent compared to modern Broadmoor’s use of pharmaceuticals as part of the therapy process, sedatives were used.
There was just one female block, which had taken less time to build than the five male blocks. Those were completed and opened in February 1864, bringing some notorious inmates, including the celebrated artist Richard Dadd, who had killed his father, and Edward Oxford, the failed assassin of Queen Victoria.
Writing in 1903, George Griffith described the place: ‘The only likeness that Broadmoor bears to a prison consists in the fact that you can go nowhere without the unlocking and relocking of solid doors and iron gates; but within these there is no evidence of restraint. In the male wing you see men lounging about the long, airy corridors, or sitting in the big, well-furnished, common rooms, reading, smoking, looking out of the windows, or sitting motionless, thinking the thoughts and dreaming the dreams of a world that is not ours.
‘So, too, in the female wing there are women sitting about the corridors, knitting and doing lacework or embroidery, or, like the men, sitting in their common rooms, reading or talking, or also thinking those strange thoughts. In another room you will find one at a grand piano, playing, it may be, some standard piece of music, or it may be some weird creation of her own, and others sitting about on the chairs and lounges listening to her.’*
Then, as now, Broadmoor had a very lively cultural and spiritual life. Victorian Broadmoor hosted regular dramatic productions and concerts. Male and female patients were carefully segregated, but the women were allowed to hold a female-only dance once a fortnight. The amount of thought that the new Broadmoor Hospital has put into its new visitor centre harks back to the hospital’s very earliest days, when the families and friends of patients were welcomed.
The Mental Deficiency Act was introduced in 1913 to replace The Idiot’s Act of 1886. The Act, now a tasteless relic of pre-war Britain, distinguished between four categories of people who should no longer be in the mainstream prison system. These were ‘Idiots – People so “deeply defective in mind as to be unable to guard against common physical dangers”’, ‘Imbeciles – Able to protect themselves from common dangers, but not capable of caring for themselves. Imbeciles were thought of as more intelligent than idiots, but still incapable of managing themselves of their affairs’ and ‘Feeble-Minded Persons – More intelligent than an imbecile, and therefore able to support themselves to some extent, but with “defectiveness” still “so pronounced that they require care, supervision, and control for their own protection or the protection of others”’. There was another vague category just called ‘Moral Defects’, who displayed some form of ‘mental defect’ alongside ‘strong vicious of criminal propensities on which punishment had little or no effect’.
The fundamental aim of the Mental Deficiency Act was to remove the mentally ill from prisons and poor houses and place them in specialist ‘mental deficiency colonies’.
The idea of colonies was based on Winston Churchill’s now breathtaking proposal to the House of Commons in February 1911 that those who were thought to be ‘mentally defective’, according to a report he had read nearly 150,000 people, should work in forced labour camps.
In addition to being guilty of a crime, anyone deemed to fall into any of the four categories above could also be placed in one of the colonies if they were thought to be homeless, abandoned, neglected, unschoolable, or habitually drunk. At one point, these criteria led to almost 65,000 people being placed in colonies or other institutions. Many of these people were simply convicts, who were free to leave when their prison sentence expired, and not considered to pose a lasting danger to the general public.
For the first 50 years of its existence, Broadmoor was the sole facility of its kind serving England and Wales, until Rampton opened its doors in 1912 to service the North of England.
In 1959, the Mental Deficiency Act, and the Lunacy and Mental Treatment Acts, were replaced by the Mental Health Act. The biggest achievement of the Act was removing the legal distinction between mental deficiency and mental illness. The main direct implication for Broadmoor was that it became possible to admit non-offenders for the first time, acknowledging a proactive approach to those with ‘dangerous, violent or criminal propensities’.
From 1863 to 1949, Broadmoor was a criminal lunatic asylum under the Home Office. During that time, a medical superintendent was in charge of the daily administration of the hospital. When Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum became Broadmoor Institution in 1949, it was vested in the Minister of Health and placed under the management of the board of control, but also still administered by a medical superintendent. Then, in 1960, it came directly under Ministry of Health management as a ‘special hospital for mentally disordered persons who in the opinion of the Minister require treatment under conditions of special security on account of their dangerous, violent or criminal propensities’.
Of course, as with any institution, the culture was driven by those in charge even more so than by these changing government acts. The 1895 appointment of a prison medical governor, Dr Richard Brown, drove patient numbers up and saw a much stricter regime. His two successors, however, Dr Baker and Dr Sullivan, had a more humane approach, taking the feel back towards more of an asylum than a prison by offering greater chance of work, play and for patients to engage in their own treatment.
Many staff and patients speak of not just Crowthorne but of Broadmoor itself as a village. This quaint and startlingly odd terminology might at first be taken as ironic. In actuality, it seems intended to tame the notion of Broadmoor as a volatile and violent environment, alienating and atomised. There is a saying, ‘There is time and then there is Broadmoor time’. For the less unwell, who are acutely aware of their surroundings, it is often agonisingly slow.
Patrick McGrath is a writer, whose father Pat McGrath became Broadmoor’s last superintendent in 1957. McGrath and his family lived in an expansive Victorian villa near the Main Gate, which his parents named Kentigern after the patron saint of Glasgow where they’d grown up. Kentigern came complete with a pond, grounds, servants’ quarters and so on. Patrick McGrath had friendships with parole patients, and he also described patients being employed in a series of artisan workshops, and staff versus patients sports days.
As a child growing up on the Broadmoor campus, he had a level of interactions with patients that is jaw-dropping now. McGrath visited Broadmoor again, many years later, and was struck, as many others have been, by the taming and corporate blandness creeping into the place, with lawns and offices replacing wild spaces and his childhood home.
He was disturbed by the walls, fences, floodlights and control room. The cash shelled out on the hightech set of barriers would have been better spent on patient care, he felt. Maybe McGrath’s childhood Broadmoor was brilliant at the gentler bits of therapy and care, but its security levels to modern eyes look woefully dodgy.
Gwen Adshead is a psychiatrist and a doctor who has lived and breathed Broadmoor for 30 years. Gwen is a Christian, and someone who believes that evil acts exist. Her memories of Broadmoor stretch back to the eighties.
‘I remember visiting when I was still a very junior doctor, having only just completed basic training in psychiatry. I remember that I visited Broadmoor on what was a regular open day during the week when members of the public and professionals could visit for an afternoon. The afternoon began with a talk and then an escorted trip around the hospital, looking at various wards and workshops. I remember the feeling of anticipation as I had the same fantasies as everyone else and found the idea of Broadmoor to have a Gothic quality, with its dark brick walls and its forbidding nature.
‘I remember the first time feeling incredibly naive and being patronised by the nurses who worked there, who were in fact all members of the Prison Officers’ Association; and acted very much as prison officers wearing uniform that had epaulettes and badges. They very much took the approach that the visitors knew nothing and had to be protected from their own naivete.
‘Like the patients, we were corralled and had to walk around in a crocodile, like school, with restrictions on what to do and what not to do. I remember that we were taken to see one of the men’s workshops, where the men were making bricks and we saw the women’s workshops, where the women were sewing. I remember that my friend and I both found visiting the hospital oppressive and found the sexism of the workshops very dispiriting. We went to the pub afterwards and felt very gloomy about Broadmoor as a place and I remember feeling glad to get away and having a strong sense that it would be professionally unethical to work in such a repressive and authoritarian kind of place.’
In those days, in the early to late eighties and early nineties, Broadmoor was not a popular place for consultants to work. As a result, all the colleagues there had massive workloads; one colleague of Gwen’s notoriously had 70 patients. To put that in perspective, the number now is more like 20.
Gwen recalls ‘the nursing staff wore long white coats and wore peaked hats as well; they expected the patients to address them as Mr so-and-so whereas they would address the patients by their Christian names. It was not unusual for patients only to see the consultant once or twice a year, although there were other non-consultant doctors (often from India) who saw patients more frequently and who attended to their physical health. I remember the ancient paper files which went back ages; and were very thick; the average length of stay in the hospital was about 10 to 13 years because there was less expectation that people would leave the hospital.’ Those were the days before the expansion of secure psychiatric services so there was nowhere for them to go.
‘I remember the very busy workshops: the carpenter’s, the picture framer’s, the bricklayer’s and the electrical shop. I remember the Central Hall with its stage where the Broadmoor Players used to put on the annual panto with amusing jokes about the staff and doctors. I remember that there were 500 men and 100 women, who would occasionally meet at discos which were closely supervised like a school dance. I remember hearing the screams and yells on the female side and how silent the male side was in contrast.
‘I remember walking up and down the terrace, which gave the most beautiful view of three counties. I remember thinking that it was sad that people who came to the hospital and saw this view would never go out and how generous it was of the architects to give them a view to look at. Later, I realised that people would leave the hospital and seeing the view gave them inspiration and hope. I remember the education centre and how busy it was, with men doing a variety of exams and lessons, and the kindness of the staff there. I also remember the wonderful kitchen gardens where the hospital once used to grow all the fruit and vegetables that the inmates would need (including an astounding amount of rhubarb in the early years). However, when I went to the hospital first the kitchen garden still provided work for patients, raising fruit and plants for sale. It was a lovely place to be; there were also animals: goats, rabbits, birds.
‘I remember the language of the hospital and how the nurses used to refer to themselves as staff or staff men. I remember that I was firmly told that I was “not staff” and how I was told that I could not work or walk around the hospital without someone knowing where I was at all times. I remember receiving the message that the nursing staff really owned the hospital and every ward was a kind of individual fiefdom.’
As the 1980s myth goes, admission to Broadmoor was granted only to members of an exclusive club of the criminally insane. When Gwen Adshead arrived, Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe was there, convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 prostitutes; Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell strangler who murdered seven elderly people in 1986, is still there; and London nail bomber David Copeland, who targeted blacks, Bangladeshis and gays, killing three people and injuring 129, of whom four lost limbs, has also spent time in Broadmoor.
In the 1970s and 80s, Gwen explained, people were given mental health disposals who wouldn’t do now. ‘I am thinking of a man who, aged 18, broke into an elderly lady’s home and raped and murdered her. A nasty offence. And he went straight to Broadmoor. If you did something that was nasty and weird back then, you would go straight to Broadmoor. The thinking was not terribly sophisticated back then: if you had done something weird, you must be mad.’ Now, however, there are far fewer people being diagnosed as criminally insane, and those who once would have been admitted to Broadmoor, are now incarcerated within the general prison population.
The world is changing, and Broadmoor is changing too. For example, the number of beds has dramatically reduced. At one point Broadmoor had over 1,000 beds, now it has just 200. We spoke to former clinical director Dr Amlan Basu, who is very concerned that this particular myth, about Broadmoor functioning as a long-term dumping ground for incurable psychopaths, is busted: ‘There is still a public perception that when you go to Broadmoor, you are there for life, but the high-profile individuals that are there for decades are outliers.’
Broadmoor is certainly a place with a great deal of myth and misunderstanding surrounding it. Its genesis as a criminal lunatic asylum that offered precious little hope of any return to normal life lingers to this day. But, as we will see, Broadmoor offers hope to its patients, the hope of rehabilitation and the hope of one day returning to the outside world a changed person.
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* George Griffith, Sidelights on Convict Life, London: John Long (1903)