wfgodot
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Terrific short memoir by Patrick McGrath - whose novels I've read and would recommend: The Grotesque; Spider; Dr Haggard's Disease; and Asylum, a novel which draws on his experience of Broadmoor. Gothic fiction. Several have been made into feature films.
I grew up in Broadmoor: Psychopaths tending our garden. Christmas with Ronnie Kray. The Teacup
Poisoner next door. My VERY strange childhood as the son of the doctor in charge of Broadmoor
(from Intelligent Life magazine, via Daily Mail)
I grew up in Broadmoor: Psychopaths tending our garden. Christmas with Ronnie Kray. The Teacup
Poisoner next door. My VERY strange childhood as the son of the doctor in charge of Broadmoor
(from Intelligent Life magazine, via Daily Mail)
much more at link above, with tales of infamous patientsMy father, Dr Pat McGrath, was appointed the tenth and last medical superintendent of what was then called Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum, in 1957.
The place was in bad shape. It was in many respects obsolete, and chronically overcrowded: 800 mentally ill men and women confined in a top-security institution designed for 500. Patients slept in corridors and day rooms.
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It was a good place to grow up.
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It had opened its doors in 1863, during the great progressive era of Victorian social engineering, when the asylum was regarded by many as ‘the most blessed manifestation of true civilisation that the world can present’.
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I was often inside Broadmoor as a boy, usually when my mother took me to visit Dad. In his office hung drawings and watercolours by the distinguished Victorian artist Richard Dadd, who in 1843 murdered his father, believing him to be the devil. He then fled to France intending to kill the Pope.
He was captured while trying to cut a man’s throat in a coach. After a spell in Bedlam he was transferred to Broadmoor and there, in tranquil surroundings, he resumed painting, controlled, he believed, by the Egyptian god Osiris. He died of consumption in 1886 and is buried there.
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Broadmoor celebrates its 150th anniversary next year. It continues to serve society, and its patients, in its ill-matched twin functions as both a custodial and a therapeutic institution. Long may it continue to do so.
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For all its failings, Broadmoor continues to offer safe harbour to the lost and bewildered psychotic souls who fetch up there.
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