From Hartwith Moor to Broadmoor

Broadmoor Asylum for Criminal Lunatics, from The Illustrated London News, 1867” (via historic-hospitals.com / Wikimedia Commons)

The story of Broadmoor begins with Daniel M'Naghten. In 1843, his trial for the killing of Edward Drummond created the famous M’Naghten Rules, the legal test for insanity that asked whether a man understood the nature of his act, or that it was wrong. Nearly twenty years later, those rules shaped the Criminal Lunatics Act of 1860, which authorised a new kind of institution: an asylum built for offenders judged “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

When Broadmoor opened its doors in 1863, Daniel M’Naghten himself was among the very first prisoners transferred there. With him came others, including James Atkinson, whose sentence was not death on the gallows but indefinite confinement under Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

Broadmoor was raised by convict labour on a Berkshire plateau, walled and watchful, its architecture both fortress and hospital. Life inside was governed by routine: plain meals, shoemaking and tailoring as therapy, the curious “rhubarb treatment”*, and, until 1874, two glasses of beer a day as reward. Escape attempts and sudden violence marked its early years, while the silence of locked wards bore down as heavily as the stone itself.

This is where James’s story ends. But our film Sweetheart: Angel of the Moor begins elsewhere, on Hartwith Moor, a place bound in English folklore to death and the uncanny. By opening and closing the film on that windswept landscape, we link Mary-Jane Skaife’s final steps to the broader cultural truth: from moorland freedom to Broadmoor’s confinement, this is a journey where love, loss, and death are forever entwined.

* The “Rhubarb Treatment” was introduced under Broadmoor’s first superintendent, Dr John Meyer. Rhubarb was cultivated on the asylum farm and each patient consumed an average of 50 lbs a year. It was believed to cleanse body and mind, one of the many crude remedies of Victorian psychiatry.

Sources: John R. Hamilton, “The Development of Broadmoor 1863–1980”; Patricia Allderidge, “Daniel M’Naghten: His Trial and the Aftermath”; R. Partridge, “Broadmoor”.