Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (7 page)

Despite the
therapeutic effects of his work on the dictionary, Minor’s
condition deteriorated over the years. The delusions and
frustrations never left him. Reading his notes gives a sense that
sometimes he probably internalised them, and that when it all got
too much he would suddenly explode, making an accusatory outburst
to the attendants or to the Super. Eventually he took matters into
his own hands, and on the morning of 3rd December 1902 he tied a
tourniquet around the base of his penis and sliced off the
offending organ. He was 68 years old, and had never been able to
come to terms with his own sexual urges. Asked why he had done it,
he replied: ‘In the interests of morality’. He testified that for a
long time previously he had been taken out of the asylum at night
and forced to fornicate with between fifty and one hundred women
‘from Reading to Land’s End.’ He spent time in the infirmary but
was discharged after four months back to Block 2. Sadly of course,
his retaliatory act did not defeat his delusions, which remained as
before. In his last letter to Dr Brayn, shortly before his
discharge, Minor was complaining still of ‘these nightly sensual
uses of my body that I experience and struggle against.’

As indicated
earlier, the nature of these ‘sensual uses’ may provide some help
in understanding Minor and his mental illness. Winchester’s book
suggests various hypotheses about Minor’s own sexual motivations,
from dusky eastern maidens with pert breasts to disease and
prostitution in New York’s metropolis, and to guilt about his
feelings for Eliza Merritt. However, Minor’s early delusions at
Broadmoor all seem to relate to his body being used by men, and it
is only in the later years that women play the more significant
part. To the modern reader, Minor may be repressing homosexual, or
even paedophiliac tendencies as much as heterosexual ones. Plenty
of things may have happened to Minor before he came to the
attention of the authorities, though we may never know exactly what
Minor’s own sexual experiences were, and how his obsessions led him
to such a dramatic conclusion. What is beyond doubt is that Minor
was able to concoct outrageous tales of depravity, experienced with
a multitude of other bodies, of both sexes and all ages, and that
his mutilation of his own body was a direct result of his
discomfort with that fact.

Still riddled
with fear and hampered by his lifelong burdens, Minor was also
becoming a very old and frail man, which brought on additional
problems. In December 1907, he neglected to check the water
temperature and severely scalded himself when bathing in his room.
In 1908, he suffered from a serious bout of flu. The facts of his
advancing years and ill health was not lost on his family and
friends, who remained in constant touch with the hospital. The
first formal petition for Minor’s release was delivered to the Home
Office in 1899, who rejected it quickly. But by 1903, Dr Brayn was
suggesting to Minor’s step-brother that a proposal to remove Minor
to America might be received favourably, providing suitable care
could be found for him.

It took seven
years before matters reached a resolution. In 1909 and 1910, Dr
Brayn felt compelled from time to time to remove Minor to the
infirmary, not thinking it safe to leave Minor alone in his room
day after day, as he was no longer capable of looking after
himself. Laid up, and deprived of his books and his art materials,
Minor was increasingly miserable, as well as increasingly harmless.
Finally, in April 1910 a conditional discharge was granted for his
release. Both Sir James and Lady Murray visited him one last time
before he was escorted to the Tilbury Docks on 15th April (via
Bracknell, Waterloo and St Pancras), where he was put on board a
steamer and handed over to the care of his step-brother for the
journey back across the Atlantic.

After
thirty-eight years in Broadmoor, Minor arrived back in America to
return to the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington.
There he swapped one similar regime for another: a private room,
certain privileges, and nightly torments. Though the Broadmoor
authorities had thought he was nearing the end of his life, he did
in fact keep going for a further decade, reading, writing, and
making the occasional outburst. He remained in Washington until
November 1919, when he was compassionately released to be nearer
his family, at the Retreat for the Elderly Insane in Hartford,
Connecticut. He died there on 26th March 1920.

Inevitably for
Minor there has to be a postscript, because unlike Dadd, whose work
was acknowledged during his life, Minor’s place in history has only
really been secured after his death. Hayden Church, an American
journalist and author of the imagined Minor/Murray first meeting,
published one romantic piece about Minor in 1915, and another in
1944. He intended to write a book about Minor – there is a relevant
letter in Minor’s file stating this intention – but eventually did
not. Little more happened until the 1980s, when the Oxford
University Press was becoming aware of its own history and Minor’s
place in it, and a more scholarly article about the American in
Crowthorne was published. Then came Simon Winchester, a full
biography and worldwide recognition. Once it happened, it seemed
like it was an obvious conclusion: Minor’s story is ultimately one
of triumph in adversity, and that always makes for a good read.
Revisiting Minor’s life for this short piece has made me realise
how much might still be written about him, for while aspects of the
man might have become obscured by the clouds of myth, there is a
man to be discovered, all the same.

The Venus of
Broadmoor

The most
celebrated Victorian female patient at Broadmoor has been
remembered for the cause of her admission rather than any wider
social impact. This is perhaps a reflection on how scandalous women
fulfilled the voyeuristic delight of Victorian society. For
Christiana was a woman who satisfied certain stereotypes, and her
story included sex and murder. The tabloids christened Christiana
‘The Chocolate Cream Poisoner’.

Born in
Margate, Kent, the daughter of a local architect, and sent to
private school, Christiana grew up in a household already touched
by insanity. For the Victorians, the mental illness found in
Christiana’s close family would prove to be a strong factor in her
own diagnosis. Hereditary insanity was marked: her father had
apparently gone mad before his early death, and two of her siblings
died in adulthood, a brother in Earlsfield Asylum in London, and a
sister allegedly by her own hand. Nevertheless, she came from a
very comfortable, middle class background, and was described at her
first trial as ‘a lady of fortune, tall, fair, handsome and
extremely prepossessing in demeanour’. From the age of around
fourteen, she lived alone with her sister and their mother, an
aging landlady..

Little is
known about her early adult life, except that as a party to an
independent income, she did not need to work. The family moved to
Brighton in the mid 1860s. Her recorded history properly begins
when in the middle of 1869 she first met, then fell in love with a
Dr Charles Beard who lived nearby. She sent him love letters, and,
to begin with he reciprocated her friendship. In such times, any
form of intimacy was significant, and it appears that they carried
on some level of romantic relationship for the next few months. The
nature of this level has to remain a matter of conjecture, and the
extent of the relationship may have been greater in Christiana’s
mind than in reality. Dr Beard always maintained that there had
been no affair in a physical sense, but even if it was purely an
emotional affair, some sort of connection had been made.

There was a
small problem, however: Dr Beard was already married. He now found
himself a respected member of the local community who was being
disloyal to his wife. Whatever he was up to, it was unwise. During
the summer of 1870, the burden of deceit became too much, and Dr
Beard asked Edmunds to stop writing to him: ‘This correspondence
must cease, it is no good for either of us’. Edmunds did not stop.
By now, she was used to calling on the Beards from time to time,
and she used this familiarity to take additional action. One day in
September 1870, Edmunds visited Mrs Emily Beard, the good doctor’s
wife, with a gift of chocolate creams for her. Mrs Beard ate some
of the chocolate, and was promptly, and violently sick afterwards.
Dr Beard accused Edmunds of poisoning his wife, although Edmunds
refuted the allegation. Instead, Christiana complained that she was
as much a victim as Mrs Beard, for the same chocolates had made her
sick too. Beard withdrew his accusation, but Edmunds was banished
from the Beard household, after a last, climactic meeting in
January 1871. Dr Beard also wished to banish Edmunds from his life,
but in this respect he was not successful. The letters continued to
arrive at his offices, sometimes forwarded to him from home, two or
three times every week. He ignored them.

This might
have just become another case of a spurned lover, except that over
the next few months there were many further cases of people falling
ill in Brighton after eating sweets and chocolates. None of these
cases was newsworthy on its own, despite their personal drama. All
of them featured a violent sickness, which passed quickly and
without lingering harm. Consequently, stories of them spread by
word of mouth rather than through the local media. Then on 12th
June 1871, a man called Charles Miller, on holiday in Brighton with
his brother’s family, bought some chocolate creams from a sweet
shop called J.G.Maynard’s, ate a few, and gave one to his four
year-old nephew, Sidney Barker. Miller became ill but recovered.
Barker died.

This was
altogether a more serious episode. It was necessary to hold an
inquiry into the tragic event. Amongst those who came forward to
give evidence at the inquest was Christiana, who claimed that she
and her friends had also become ill after eating sweets from
Maynard’s store. She blamed Mr Maynard for some personal discomfort
caused the previous year, when the wife of a good friend had
suffered a similar event. There was evidence to back this up,
because tests before the inquest discovered strychnine in the
chocolates sold by Maynard’s. What was not resolved at this inquiry
was how the strychnine had come to be within the chocolates. As a
consequence, a verdict of accidental death was recorded on the boy,
and the shop owner John Maynard exonerated of any intentional
poisoning. He destroyed all his stock.

If, at the
time, Barker’s death was considered to be an unfortunate accident,
there followed a series of occurrences to arouse suspicions of foul
play. Shortly after the inquest on Sidney Barker, three anonymous
letters were sent to the boy’s father urging him to sue Maynard for
his son’s death. All the letters suggested that the ‘young lady’
who spoke to the inquest would be prepared to help in further
proceedings. Did someone know more than had been discovered at the
inquest? Also, the poisonings continued. A palpable sense of fear
crept through the streets of the seaside town: where and who would
the poisoner strike at next? The Police had no leads, and no
obvious way of protecting the local population. They decided to
make a public appeal. Brighton’s chief constable placed an
advertisement in the local newspaper offering a reward for any
information which led to the arrest of the poisoner.

That action
became part of the endgame. Another element was the imminent
departure of the Beards from Brighton to a new life in Scotland.
The intrigue culminated on Thursday 10th August 1871, when six
prominent local men and women, including Mrs Emily Beard, received
parcels of poisoned fruits and cakes, couriered on a train to
Brighton from Victoria Station. This time, two of Mrs Beard’s
servants had been invited to taste her gift; they had duly eaten a
poisoned plum cake and fallen ill. Mrs Beard’s household was not
alone: one of the Beard’s neighbours had also been poisoned, along
with the editor of the local newspaper. And, once again, Christiana
Edmunds had received one of the poisoner’s parcels. When the Police
arrived to remove her parcel, she told them that that she feared
for her safety, as it seemed impossible that the culprit could ever
be found. ‘How very strange’, she said, ‘I feel certain that you’ll
never find it out’. After she had shut the door on the local boys
in blue, she took up her pen and paper, and wrote her latest letter
to Dr Beard, drawing much attention both to Mrs Beard’s near miss,
and to the Barker inquest earlier in the summer.

Christiana was
taunting the Police, and she was taunting Dr Beard; in fact, she
was taunting everyone. Did she want to be caught? If so, she had
sown the seeds of her own capture. It was after he received that
latest letter that Dr Beard decided to go to the Police and voice
his suspicion that Christiana Edmunds might have something to do
with it all. He handed over the large cache of letters which she
had continued to write to him, even after her banishment from his
presence. That he had kept these letters, secretly, meant that they
were potentially incriminating to him as well; but he concluded
that the seriousness of the situation required him to face his own,
social judgement. The Brighton Police decided to test his theory.
They wrote to Edmunds about the Barker case, and received a reply
in the same hand as the doctor’s correspondence. They decided that
the matter warranted further investigations.

Christiana was
arrested a week after that last batch of poisoned parcels arrived.
Immediately, the Police began to ask around about Miss Edmunds and
what she did, and suddenly, many small and unconnected incidents
began to make sense. It did not take long to discover that she had
left Brighton on Tuesday 8th August to spend two days in Margate,
attending to family business. Further enquiries indicated that she
had then caught the train to London, before returning to Brighton
from Victoria on the Thursday in question. She was on the same
train that carried the poisoned post, and had been placed at the
scene of the crime However, what exactly was the crime? The Police
worked forwards from Dr Beard’s letters. They concluded that the
motive must be sex: Christiana was demonstrably in love with Dr
Beard, and had decided that her only hope at union lay in the
removal of Mrs Beard from this mortal coil. Edmunds was charged
with attempted murder.