Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (11 page)

Margaret had
already given birth to four children, including two daughters.
These were all now deceased. The two boys had died from natural
causes while in infancy; her younger daughter, also Elizabeth, was
twenty-two months old, and elder daughter Margaret, six, when in
June 1872 their mother had held their heads under water in a pan
mug until they drowned. Margaret Davenport had then attempted to
drown herself in the tub, then to hang herself, and finally to cut
her wrists but had been unsuccessful in all these tasks. So she
washed the children, laid them out in her bed and then made dinner
for her husband.

She had been
found insane when she was due to plead at her trial at the
Liverpool Assizes. The supposed cause of her illness was given on
her admissions statement to Broadmoor as ‘family troubles’. She had
married Joseph Davenport in 1862, after they met while working as
servants for a landed Cheshire family. Joseph worked long hours as
a delivery man, and the family lived a basic existence in the
centre of an industrial town. Margaret had apparently been taken
ill after the birth of the first Elizabeth, becoming depressed and
twice being found wandering the streets at night. The local Police
felt that she was the victim of domestic neglect, and that it was
her isolation as the homemaker which had led to her depression. She
was advised to return to her native Shropshire for a break, and the
effect of this was beneficial. A cheerier woman returned to
Warrington, and life for the Davenports carried on much as before.
There had been no recovery, though, and Margaret was still thinking
irrationally. At her first committal hearing after the murders she
had stated that ‘I was very much provoked before I did it. I was
made in hell.’

Now that she
was resident in Crowthorne, her mental state continued to be a
cause for concern. Like Catherine Dawson, the Broadmoor doctors did
not let her nurse her baby. They considered it unsafe for her to do
so. Instead, little Elizabeth was taken from her mother at birth,
and reared on cow’s milk elsewhere in the Asylum. It is unclear who
decided to name the girl, and to create the arguably morbid
situation where she was named after her dead sisters. It is
possible that it was Margaret, for she was a little more reliable
than Mrs Dawson. She saw the baby frequently, though under
supervision, and this bonding did not include any unfortunate
incidents. Nevertheless, the doctors noted that on more than one
occasion, Margaret expressed the hope that her new daughter would
die. It would never be safe to let her have the connection enjoyed
by Mary Meller or Margaret Crimmings.

In line with
previous practice, the Broadmoor authorities busied themselves
organising who would take in the child. As Margaret was married, Dr
Orange’s first correspondence was with her husband, Joseph
Davenport. He wrote to Davenport in early April, but the working
man refused point blank to have his baby daughter, saying, like
Henry Dawson, that he was too poor to be able to take charge of a
child and provide care for it. His circumstances were different to
those of Mr Dawson, however, who was already looking after his
other children in reduced accommodation. Nevertheless, for the time
being, Orange changed his line of enquiry. Instead, his next move
also echoed that of the Dawsons’ case. He wrote to the Poor Law
Guardians for Warrington Union and asked them to take charge of the
child instead.

Unlike the
Chorley Guardians in the earlier case, the Warrington Guardians did
not see their acceptance of the child as the logical outcome.
Replying to Broadmoor in May 1873, they stated that they saw no
reason why the able-bodied Joseph Davenport could excuse himself
from the care of his only living child, and no reason why the
burden of her care should fall upon the parish ratepayers. They
dared Orange to provide a legal authority upon which he could base
his request.

Dr Orange did
not give up easily. He saw no benefit to anyone in having the child
remain at Broadmoor longer than necessary, and felt that the
Guardians of the Union were being unnecessarily difficult. He
gathered together what precedent he could find, and wrote again to
them suggesting that under statute, the child’s legal place of
settlement was Warrington; that the father was destitute; and that
the mother might destroy her child. The Guardians did not dispute
the need for safety, but they did dispute the extent to which
Broadmoor could rely on laws created many years before its own
invention, and they also disputed whether Joseph Davenport was
truly destitute. It was known that he was a working man of working
age, employed as a carter, and the Guardians stated confidently
that a man in this position would be turned away from their own
workhouse, should he fall upon it for relief. By extension, they
did not see why there was a need for them to provide poor relief to
his child. The Guardians finished off their financial reasoning
with an attempt to reclaim the moral high ground, arguing against
the harm that could be caused by the removal of such a young child
from its parents.

The Home
Office was compelled to make a decision in the matter. In July, it
instructed Broadmoor’s Council of Supervision, and by default, Dr
Orange, to send the girl to Joseph Davenport. Orange wrote to him
again. This time Davenport sent a long reply in September, once
again pleading poverty, and also saying that he had a bad leg which
meant that he was currently out of work. No sooner had the
situation appeared clear than it was muddied again. Orange
forwarded Davenport’s response to the Warrington authorities,
saying that as ordered, he would still send the child to its father
but would be grateful if the Union could stand by if Joseph
Davenport refused to take custody of his daughter. The last thing
that he wanted was to send an attendant and the baby all the way to
Warrington, only to find no room at any inn. He also threatened
Joseph Davenport with legal proceedings if he did not agree
voluntarily to the arrangement. This threat seems to have finally
done the trick. In late October 1873, when she was eight months
old, one of the female attendants took Elizabeth on the long
journey to Warrington and delivered her to her father.

But this was
not to be a happy ending, like the Mellers’ tale. Elizabeth
Davenport the second was another sickly child, and she would only
live for another two years, dying as a toddler at the end of 1875.
Joseph Davenport lived on, alone, though he remained in regular
contact with his wife down south. He died fourteen years later, in
June 1889.

Margaret
continued to be a Broadmoor patient while her family’s story was
played out Warrington. She remained delusional and persecuted. She
stated that the other patients threw knives at her, and that she
was visited and tormented by them at night, with one particular
patient taking the form of a serpent. She evidently lived in fear
and tried to hide. Dr David Nicolson, Deputy Superintendent, wrote
that ‘when spoken to she covers her face with her hand, shuts her
eyes and looks downwards and away from the speaker, with an air of
intense timidity and shyness’.

By January
1890 Dr Nicolson, then Superintendent, was of the view that
Margaret could be discharged to an ordinary asylum. For several
years she had been withdrawn and uncommunicative but otherwise well
behaved. The official description of her was ‘demented’ but
‘harmless’. It was decided to move her to the Rainhill Asylum in
Liverpool, where Catherine Dawson had stayed some three decades
before. By now, her husband was dead, and the move north would not
bring her closer to any family connections. But perhaps that was
irrelevant, as she continued to write to Joseph and to talk to him
long after his death. So on 10th February 1890, she was transferred
to what became her final home.

At Rainhill,
Margaret carried on much as she had done at Broadmoor. She wrote to
Joseph and worked a little on the wards until her health failed.
For the last seven years of her life, she was effectively immobile.
She died on 3rd February 1912, choking on her own vomit as she
tried to digest her lunch.

Those four
cases in nine years constituted the initial glut of Broadmoor
babies. Afterwards, there were fewer cases, and as these drift
later towards the twentieth century, a number of the Victorian
babies become part of case files which will remain closed for some
years to come. There is one more baby to include at present, and
this one came after a gap of nearly six years from the birth of
Margaret Davenport’s child.

This time, the
labour was long, despite it being the mother’s fourth child. The
new baby entered the world at eight o’clock on the morning of 14th
January 1879. A third Broadmoor boy, William, he was born to
Catherine Jones, a thirty-three year-old farmer’s wife from
Llanllyfni, Caernarvonshire. Catherine was described by Dr Orange
on her admission notes as ‘of respectable appearance but with a
decided air of melancholy’. She had been brought from Carnarvon
Prison the previous September, where she had been in custody since
May. She had been aware of her own pregnancy while in prison, and
when her transfer was arranged she had informed the authorities
that she was pregnant, so they had been prepared for the birth
since her arrival.

Catherine’s
case was yet another of infanticide. She had killed the youngest of
her children, her eighteen month-old daughter Sarah. Catherine’s
was considered by the medical men to be a classic case of
‘puerperal mania’, or of dangerous postnatal psychosis. She had
already attempted to cut her daughter’s throat at the family
farmhouse in North Wales, when on 9th May 1878 her husband William
left her alone with the child in the kitchen for a few minutes. On
his return, the child was dead, with blood trickling from its nose
and ears. Catherine said that the little girl had fallen from a
chair, but her past history meant that this story was challenged.
Later the same day she confessed to one of her servants that she
had placed her hand over the toddler’s mouth until she had
suffocated. Her case proceeded to a full trial at the local
Assizes, where the jury acquitted her on the grounds of
insanity.

Catherine
brought an additional complication to Broadmoor as well as her
pregnancy. For she could not speak, read or write a word of
English. She was a native Welsh speaker, with no other languages.
This was a comparatively unusual situation for the Asylum. There
were a few patients in Victorian Broadmoor for whom English was not
their first language, but many of these spoke French or German
instead, and the medical staff, not least Orange, were able to
converse in these other tongues. This would not be so with
Catherine. When she arrived at Broadmoor, she could not communicate
with any of the staff, and so some other method was required. As
luck would have it, there was another Welsh female patient who
could speak a little of the language, and so she was drafted in to
act as Catherine’s translator. This was just as well, as Catherine
quickly fell ill, showing signs of pleurisy, and was confined to
bed.

William Jones
was informed of his wife’s dangerous condition, and visited her for
a brief spell in late October 1878. He too spoke no English and
arrived with a handwritten note prepared by friends. This note
introduced him to the Broadmoor staff, and asked whether they could
recommend him lodgings during his visit. Of course, they
obliged.

The fact that
no one could understand Catherine was a source of concern to both
the Broadmoor doctors and the Home Office. It was not safe to have
a patient sick in bed, yet unable to communicate their needs.
Orange soon began agitating for his patient’s transfer back to a
Welsh-speaking asylum, as quickly as her health was up to it. Even
when she rallied, after December 1878, Orange still sought to
transfer her to an asylum nearer her home before she gave
birth.

The Home
Office took a different view, possibly as it was so soon after her
verdict and sentence had been delivered, and instead asked Orange
to find ‘some respectable woman, who can speak the Welsh language’
to act as a dedicated attendant to Catherine. Orange retorted that
employing a dedicated member of staff to act as translator was not
seen as practical. So the other Welsh patient, who came from
Glamorganshire, continued to act as Catherine’s official
interpreter during her time at Broadmoor.

Perhaps
because of the inability to communicate with her, the staff at
Broadmoor did not feel able to let her nurse her child, and the
baby boy was removed from her immediately after birth. Without the
possibility of a thorough interview, and given her previous medical
history, it was felt too risky to leave little William in the sole
care of his mother. One of the female attendants, Harriet Hunt,
took charge of him instead. The suggestion, though, is that
Catherine was recovering from her mental illness, even if her
physical health continued to be poor. She was allowed to see her
baby on the infirmary, and bond with him while the usual
arrangements were made for his removal. This case was a simple one,
as William Jones was very eager to take care of his infant
namesake. He visited both mother and child regularly before he took
the three-month old baby home on 16th April 1879, with Harriet
Hunt, the nursemaid, accompanying him on the journey.

At roughly the
same time, the Home Office finally acquiesced regarding Catherine’s
transfer. They delivered the warrant that Dr Orange had requested
to remove Catherine to the Joint Counties Lunatic Asylum at Denbigh
in North Wales. Yet Orange’s satisfaction was tempered by the fact
that Catherine’s health took another turn for the worse. She was
bedridden again, and her transfer was postponed. Over the spring,
she remained in Broadmoor’s infirmary while her husband and child
were at home.