volume.
Tony Baekeland would not have the same opportunity to linger that his celebrated ancestor had had. He was driven up a winding road past a cluster of white cottages to the place where he would be detained indefinitely, “at her Majesty’s pleasure.”
The red-brick Victorian institution called Broadmoor Special Hospital was built in 1863 as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. It is surrounded by a wall of uneven height that weaves snakelike through open fields. With its pink-blossomed trees that line the road in front of the main buildings and its rows of daffodils hugging the walls, Broadmoor looks like a friendly New England college campus. But its blue-uniformed nurses look more like guards and in fact belong to the Prison Officers Association; and all staff members are required to sign the Official Secrets Act. Patients’ mail is routinely censored, and occasionally even books are withheld on the grounds that they are “bad influences.”
“At Broadmoor, security is the first consideration,” a staff member says. “We are always concerned with the escape and welfare of our patients, since we’re dealing with very violent and dangerous persons here.”
Of the approximately 750 patients at Broadmoor, many have committed “heinous, headline crimes”; more than a quarter have committed homicide or attempted murder. There are also patients who have committed no crime but who are mentally ill. There are over twenty attempted suicides a year, and it has been estimated that at any given time Broadmoor houses between 200 and 250 psychopaths. Indeed, it has been described as “the asylum of last resort.”
A Dent of London clock sits above the impressive entrance gate through which Tony Baekeland was led that June 6th into a small courtyard. From there he was taken down a passageway to a door where he heard what would become a familiar sound to him: the jangle of the large metal keys carried by every Broadmoor attendant. The door was unlocked for him, then locked again.
Tony Baekeland was now in the main body of the hospital, which consisted of eight residential “blocks.” In 1969, in an attempt to abolish prison terminology, the blocks were renamed “houses,” Block A becoming Kent House; Block B, Cornwall House; Block C, Dorset House; and the other blocks becoming Essex, York, Somerset, Lancaster, and Norfolk.
From A Family Motor Tour Through Europe, Leo Hendrik Baekeland, Horseless Age Press, New York, 1907
The farther we went away from London the better became the roads. We were driving through a lovely, rolling country, with a smooth highway and green fields. Now and then we met a cheerful-looking cottage, its stony façade made lovelier by some creeping tea roses. Carpetlike lawns, tastefully laid-out gardens, with very old trees, and everything cared for to perfection—all this gave us a strong impression of pretty, rural England.
The main part of the house under the hospitable roof of which we were going to stay had been built in Shakespeare’s time, in the quaint architecture of that day, and the modern additions had been made in tolerable conformity with the original style.
The ensemble, with the surrounding gardens and lawns, made a delightful specimen of an English country house.
The liberal supply of rain which makes the British climate so humid is also the main reason why, in that country, it is possible to produce such well-kept lawns, better than are to be found anywhere else, and which look more like immense green carpets.
There, the lawn extended to a sort of terrace, with a green stairway, and reached out toward a very tastefully arranged rose garden. Stately trees, several of them many centuries old, were artistically grouped all over; giant yew trees next to imposing cedars of the Lebanon; exotic-looking araucarias in proximity to glossy-leaved hollies, the latter with trunks almost a foot in diameter. A shady pathway lined by tree-like rhododendrons led toward an old church.
Tony Baekeland would not have the same opportunity to linger that his celebrated ancestor had had. He was driven up a winding road past a cluster of white cottages to the place where he would be detained indefinitely, “at her Majesty’s pleasure.”
The red-brick Victorian institution called Broadmoor Special Hospital was built in 1863 as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. It is surrounded by a wall of uneven height that weaves snakelike through open fields. With its pink-blossomed trees that line the road in front of the main buildings and its rows of daffodils hugging the walls, Broadmoor looks like a friendly New England college campus. But its blue-uniformed nurses look more like guards and in fact belong to the Prison Officers Association; and all staff members are required to sign the Official Secrets Act. Patients’ mail is routinely censored, and occasionally even books are withheld on the grounds that they are “bad influences.”
“At Broadmoor, security is the first consideration,” a staff member says. “We are always concerned with the escape and welfare of our patients, since we’re dealing with very violent and dangerous persons here.”
Of the approximately 750 patients at Broadmoor, many have committed “heinous, headline crimes”; more than a quarter have committed homicide or attempted murder. There are also patients who have committed no crime but who are mentally ill. There are over twenty attempted suicides a year, and it has been estimated that at any given time Broadmoor houses between 200 and 250 psychopaths. Indeed, it has been described as “the asylum of last resort.”
A Dent of London clock sits above the impressive entrance gate through which Tony Baekeland was led that June 6th into a small courtyard. From there he was taken down a passageway to a door where he heard what would become a familiar sound to him: the jangle of the large metal keys carried by every Broadmoor attendant. The door was unlocked for him, then locked again.
Tony Baekeland was now in the main body of the hospital, which consisted of eight residential “blocks.” In 1969, in an attempt to abolish prison terminology, the blocks were renamed “houses,” Block A becoming Kent House; Block B, Cornwall House; Block C, Dorset House; and the other blocks becoming Essex, York, Somerset, Lancaster, and Norfolk.
From A Family Motor Tour Through Europe, Leo Hendrik Baekeland, Horseless Age Press, New York, 1907
The farther we went away from London the better became the roads. We were driving through a lovely, rolling country, with a smooth highway and green fields. Now and then we met a cheerful-looking cottage, its stony façade made lovelier by some creeping tea roses. Carpetlike lawns, tastefully laid-out gardens, with very old trees, and everything cared for to perfection—all this gave us a strong impression of pretty, rural England.
The main part of the house under the hospitable roof of which we were going to stay had been built in Shakespeare’s time, in the quaint architecture of that day, and the modern additions had been made in tolerable conformity with the original style.
The ensemble, with the surrounding gardens and lawns, made a delightful specimen of an English country house.
The liberal supply of rain which makes the British climate so humid is also the main reason why, in that country, it is possible to produce such well-kept lawns, better than are to be found anywhere else, and which look more like immense green carpets.
There, the lawn extended to a sort of terrace, with a green stairway, and reached out toward a very tastefully arranged rose garden. Stately trees, several of them many centuries old, were artistically grouped all over; giant yew trees next to imposing cedars of the Lebanon; exotic-looking araucarias in proximity to glossy-leaved hollies, the latter with trunks almost a foot in diameter. A shady pathway lined by tree-like rhododendrons led toward an old church.
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