The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester

Author:Simon Winchester
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141942049
Publisher: Penguin Publishing
Published: 2009-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

‘Minor, William Chester. A thin, pale and sharp-featured man with light sandy-coloured hair, deep-set eyes and prominent cheek bones. He is thirty-eight years old, of superior education, indeed a surgeon, but of no known religion. He weighs ten stone, one pound, and is formally classified as being Dangerous to Others. He was charged with the willful murder of one George Merrett of Lambeth, was found Not Guilty on the Grounds of Insanity. He says he has been the victim of persecution for years – the victim of the lower classes, in whom he has no faith. Persons unknown are trying to injure him, with poison.’

So begin the case notes for Broadmoor Patient Number 742, based on an examination conducted in the afternoon of the day he was admitted, Wednesday, 17 April 1872.

Guards had brought him there in shackles, along with another murderer – a man who was classified as too insane to be tried – named Edmund Dainty: both had been waiting in gaol at Newington in Surrey until the necessary papers had been brought down from London. They were brought first by steam train to the small red-brick and Gothic railway station that had been built by and then named for Wellington College, one of the great public schools of southern England, which stood near by. A black Broadmoor landau, its roof closed shut, then took Minor and his escorts through the narrow, leafy lanes winding around the tiny village. The horses were sweating slightly as they hauled the four-wheel vehicle and its occupants up the low sandstone hill at the top of which stands Broadmoor itself.

The Special Hospital, as it is called today, still looks a forbidding place, even though much of what must have rendered it quite terrifying in Victorian times is now hidden discreetly behind its high, smoothly round-topped modern high-security walls. In 1872 Minor came to the original front gate: two triple-storeyed towers with heavily barred windows, with a high archway between, topped by a large black-faced clock. The arch was closed by a massive pair of thick green outer wooden doors. A peep-hole in one snapped open at the sound of the horses’ hoofs, the doors swung back to reveal another set of heavy gates ten yards deeper into the asylum.

The landau moved swiftly inside, the front doors were slammed closed and bolted hard, and the lights in the dim and cavernous reception area were turned on. Minor was ordered to step out, to be searched. His chains were removed, and would be taken back to Surrey. The escorting tipstaff handed over the papers – a long warrant in elegant copperplate, under the signature of Henry Austin Bruce, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department. The asylum superintendent, a kindly and sympathetic man named William Orange, had his deputy sign the receipt.

Minor was led through the second set of gates and into Block 4, the admissions block. He heard the horses turn around, heard his escort get back on to the leather seat and order the driver to return to the railway station.

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