Inconvenient People (71 page)

No name
: a man was placed in Wyke House Asylum in Brentford, Middlesex, because of his addiction to Holloway’s Pills, a quack medicine. He escaped, was recaptured and placed in Sussex House Asylum, escaped again and remained at liberty.

No name
: a mother and stepfather confined their daughter, who was of slightly weak intellect, in a West Country asylum. Her friends were not allowed to visit her. The stepfather’s lunacy order was found to be ‘informal’ in nature and contained falsified documents put forward as evidence of her insanity.

No name
: a woman was put away by her father – firstly in Moorcroft House and subsequently at Lawn House, Hanwell – in order to control her money. The Society failed to persuade the Commissioners in Lunacy and a judge to intervene, but when a local magistrate became involved, the woman was released immediately.

Captain Digby and Ellen Finn:
Hansard
, Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, 82, cols 410–13, 11 July 1845.

William White and John Gould: Luke James Hansard’s
What Are To Be the Tendencies of the Community of the British Nation? To Sanity? or To Insanity? A Question
, 1845.

Edward Fletcher:
Daily News
, 8 July 1859; and Wayne Burns,
Charles Reade: A Study in Victorian Authorship
, 1962.

James Hill:
The Times
, 30 January and 18 February 1852.

Charles Verity: PP 1860, LVIII.959,
Accounts and Papers: Return of Charges of Ill-usage and Cruelty towards Patients in Northampton Hospital, 1857, Evidence by Commissioners in Lunacy on Inquiry
.

‘T.C.H.’ and James Drury:
Report of the County Chairman
[Purnell B. Purnell]
to the Gloucestershire Epiphany Court of Quarter Sessions
, 2 January 1849.

Edward Vicars:
Liverpool Mercury
, 7 and 28 August 1849.

Arthur Legent Pearce:
Poems by a Prisoner in Bethlehem
, ed. John Perceval, 1851.

George Hubback, Richard Hennah, Reverend Wing, Robert Orme Smith: Richard Paternoster,
The Madhouse System
, 1841.

Miss Mackray: Nicholas Hervey, ‘Advocacy or Folly’, and The National Archives, MH 50/9, Minute Book of the Commissioners in Lunacy, February 1858–December 1858.

Young man with ‘utter want of self-control’:
First Report of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society
, 1846.

Mr Evans, Mr S—, the daughter of slightly weak intellect, and the Holloway’s Pills addict:
Report of the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society
, 1851.

Woman put away by her father:
Report from the Select Committee on Lunatics
, 1859.

Brief outlines of alleged wrongful incarceration cases that received the support of the Lunacy Law Reform Association (LLRA) or of its breakaway group, the Lunacy Law Amendment Society (LLAS)

These are the cases that appear in the surviving documentation, and there may well have been more.

Julia Wood
was a Shaker certified insane in 1875 after pledging £2,000 to build the Girlingite religious community’s new lodge in the New Forest. Wood’s nephew wrote out a lunacy order and went with two doctors and police officers to the Shaker encampment. When Wood resisted seizure, other Shakers tried to prevent her being taken, but the doctors and officers grabbed her and carried her to a waiting carriage, ‘her grey hair streaming in the wind’, as
The Times
had it. She spent seven years in Laverstock House Asylum, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, before the Home Secretary discharged her because of a technical error on the certificates; as she walked to the end of the asylum’s drive, she was apprehended by doctors with fresh, correctly filled out certificates. The LLRA applied repeatedly to the Commissioners in Lunacy to be allowed to send an eminent London alienist and a lawyer to interview Wood, but were each time refused. She died in 1903 in Ashwood House Asylum, Kingswinford, in the West Midlands.

Alice Petschler
, a widow with three children, had set herself up as a photographer in order to support herself upon the death of her husband. Her wealthy and well-connected sister, Harriet Cuffley, objected to her being in ‘trade’, and in November 1871 had Mrs Petschler consigned to the Macclesfield County Asylum as a pauper – even though Mrs Petschler had an income and assets worth £200. Mrs Cuffley achieved this illegal use of the public asylum system by seeking out not a local magistrate to sign the lunacy order, but a sympathetic vicar friend and the Altrincham Poor Law Officer, whom she knew socially. To certify a non-pauper lunatic
as a pauper was a misdemeanour; and neither man had ever met Mrs Petschler. During her detention, which lasted ten months, Mrs Petschler was warned not to alert the visiting JPs or the Commissioners in Lunacy to her plight, as this would convince them that she was mad. While she was confined, Mrs Petschler’s photography business was sold off. In Manchester, a committee comprising the mayor, town clerk, JPs, barristers and bankers pressed for an investigation of the case by Whitehall’s Local Government Board. Subsequently, the Commissioners in Lunacy received mild censure for failing to have spotted the illegality of the paperwork. Public funds were collected so that Mrs Petschler could bring a legal case, but this failed, and she could afford no further action. Even the powerful Manchester support committee baulked at pursuing the case further.

J. L. Plumbridge
, a wealthy fruit merchant of Thames Street in the City of London, began to suffer bouts of diarrhoea in 1873. It occurred to him that his illness might be the result of his food being tampered with, and he uttered this thought; on hearing this, one of his business associates decided the notion was delusional, wrote out a lunacy order and found two doctors to certify him. Plumbridge’s family had gone along with the associate’s actions, as he had persuaded them that certification would mean a swift cure to a temporary bout of insanity. But the associate went on to install his own son in Plumbridge’s business, and ran it so badly that it came close to collapse. He refused to tell the family which asylum Plumbridge had been taken to and they lost all sight of him. He was first at Northumberland House, Stoke Newington, North London, where he was badly treated and tried to escape, assaulting two keepers in the process. He was next placed in Sussex House Asylum, Hammersmith, West London. He later wrote: ‘The asylum has a river on one side and I escaped and swam across it but was recaptured. I was confined every night in what was called a seclusion room, the windows of which were blocked up with wood in which small holes were bored to admit the light, the door was fastened outside with three enormous iron bolts, my clothes were every night taken away, and the only furniture consisted of a hard mattress on the floor. Worse than all, however, separated from this den by only a thin wooden partition, was another of these seclusion rooms, in which raving madmen and the most noisy and violent patients were every night immured, so that, as I could hear them as plainly as though they were in the room with me, I could scarcely get any rest from the groans and cries that were often
kept up through the livelong night.’ Plumbridge escaped again by going over the wall and fleeing to Boulogne. Upon his return to England, he decided not to mount a legal action because he felt he could not prove malicious intent. He had himself certified sane by two doctors, despite influential alienist Dr Charles Lockhart Robertson saying that Plumbridge was still ‘convalescent’. He received a great deal of help from Louisa Lowe, founder of the LLRA, then fell out with her, and became treasurer of the LLAS. In 1876 he wrote an anonymous account of his and other patients’ experiences,
Slavery in England
:
An Account of the Manner in Which Persons without Trial are Condemned to Imprisonment for Life
.

William Thomas Preston
, a barrister and once a member of the Athenaeum, was confined in Barnwood Asylum, near Gloucester, in the mid-1850s, having been found lunatic by inquisition. His younger brother gained control of all his assets. Louisa Lowe said that Preston had recovered his wits, but that the Commissioners, the Lord Chancellor and the local magistrates wavered because they had listened to slanderous stories put about by the very people who benefited from Preston’s ongoing incarceration. Dr Lockhart Robertson told Lowe that Preston was ‘a most dangerous lunatic . . . He cannot be trusted in the road with a woman’; but Mrs Lowe countered that he had spent much of his time before confinement at the Athenaeum, where all the servants were young women, and he had always been ‘proper’ towards them. However, so concerned were Barnwood Asylum staff, they ensured that Preston had a very discreet male attendant who shadowed Preston, but kept himself out of sight, whenever he went out for walks around Gloucester. The doctors claimed that it was very odd that Preston liked to darn his own clothes with string – and that he heard voices. Lowe argued that although the latter could be of concern, all sorts of religious experiences featured the hearing of voices, and so in itself, it was not evidence of insanity. Preston had hoped to be a witness at the 1877 Select Committee on Lunacy Law, but was not called. He died shortly afterwards.

Sir Samuel Fluyder
, baronet, was certified into Ticehurst Asylum in Sussex on 30 September 1839 by Drs Sutherland and Monro and the lunacy order of Fluyder’s brother-in-law, Cobbett Derby Jnr of Brighton. Fluyder had been his father’s heir, and had never been thought insane – until he came into his inheritance. A solicitor who believed that Fluyder had always
been sane contacted the LLRA in 1873, but Fluyder never won his freedom, dying in the asylum in March 1876.

Miss M—
, the joint heir, with her two brothers, to a wealthy aunt, was a ‘nervous patient’ who boarded with a Miss P— at 42 Harley Street. On Saturday 20 March 1880, her elder brother, Colonel Le Champion, sent two female keepers from Northumberland House, who barged past the servants and up to Miss M—’s room, where she had retired for the evening. They handed her a letter saying that she must accompany them to the asylum. The servant dashed back down to the sitting room where there were a number of other ladies, who all came up to defend Miss M—. During the melee, two policemen were called in, who thought that the letter was ‘all right’, and after an hour and a half of ‘terrible scenes’, Miss M— was dragged into the carriage. She was kept at Northumberland House for eight weeks, held on lunacy certificates procured at Bath and signed by medical men who had chatted with her there a few days before her capture. The colonel drafted a letter for her to sign, stating that she accepted that she was now under certificate but could come out on ‘parole’ and would do all that she was told. The colonel’s plan was to encourage the aunt to change her will to exclude this now ‘lunatic’ niece. Miss M— alleged that the colonel kept her on the move, changing lodgings every three days, and tried to agitate her into a state of mania, but that he never managed it. Miss M— said that she had written to the Commissioners in Lunacy about this, but that they had replied that she must continue to be self-controlled during her probation, and that the colonel would no doubt before long release her from certification.

Peter Chance
, a printer from Stourbridge, Worcestershire, was a man of some means and had local political ambitions; but in May 1874 he was confined by his wife as a pauper in the local county asylum, on the certificate of one medical man and one magistrate. Mrs Chance’s action had been triggered by her husband’s decision to sell his freehold properties and to convert the money into an annuity for himself; this would have lessened the amount of her inheritance upon his death. Later, when the true extent of his wealth was revealed to the authorities, along with the illegality of his having been declared a pauper, Chance underwent a lunacy inquisition and was declared sane. He wished to sue for perjury the
business associate who had conspired with Mrs Chance but found that he was unable to afford to do so, the £600 cost of the inquisition having almost bankrupted him.

Elizabeth Donney
, seventy-seven, of Marylebone, was seized from her almshouse and placed in the lunatic ward of the local workhouse after telling the almshouse physician that money had gone missing from her bureau. The physician wrote out an informal (and, as such, illegal) certificate for her admission to the lunatic ward, stating she was ‘old and silly’. Her daughter quickly removed her, but Mrs Donney died shortly afterwards. A subsequent coroner’s court hearing heard of the illegal removal and detention.

James George Lamb
, of Curtain Road, Shoreditch, East London, was confined to Northumberland House by his wife and sons, who did not like the way he was managing the family business. Other family members requested an inquisition, and Drs Harrington Tuke and J. Russell Reynolds swore affidavits that Lamb was insane. Mrs Lamb, however, changed her mind, and just before the inquisition was to start, went to the asylum and discharged her husband. He died of lung disease the next year, and Louisa Lowe claimed that this was a result of ill-treatment at the asylum.

In his letter to Lowe, Lamb had alleged that Lunacy Commissioner John Cleaton had a very cosy relationship with the owner of Northumberland House, and that Cleaton’s ‘inspection’ of the asylum consisted of a good lunch and a guided tour, and that whenever a patient would begin to say something not to the owner’s liking, s/he would be silenced.

Reverend Robert Bruce Kennard
of Marnhull, Dorsetshire, a wealthy clergyman in his sixties, was to be married to Miss Bade, a former governess to his family, at Woodford in Essex. But on the day of the wedding, he was abducted to a room at 41 Hunter Street, St Pancras, central London, and detained there pending the arrival of doctors to certify him. Reverend Kennard bribed one of his abductors, escaped and married Miss Bade two days later. The culprit was a relative who had hoped to benefit from the vicar remaining unmarried.