Civil War "sites" outside America

[bill_torrens]

BROADMOOR ASYLUM FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE, CROWTHORNE, ENGLAND


William Chester Minor was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in June 1834, the son of wealthy missionaries from Connecticut. He returned to America to study medicine at Yale, and graduated in February 1863.

He became a contract surgeon with the U.S. Army and mainly served away from the front line. But for a few, crucial days in May 1864 he was embroiled in the action at and after the Battle of the Wilderness. He was sensitive man, by all accounts, fond of reading, painting water-colours and playing the flute. His experience in Virginia seems to have permanently unhinged him.

The key incident appears to have when he was required to brand a deserter. The latter was a young Irishman, and Minor spent the rest of his life in morbid fear of all sons of Erin…he seems to have believed that the deserter or his friends were searching for him in order to wreak some terrible vengeance.

After the end of the war Minor remained in the Army, but his behaviour began to unravel. He became an enthusiastic habitué of the brothels of Brooklyn, and had to be treated for repeated doses of venereal disease. Eventually he was consigned to an asylum.

He was released early in 1871 and, for reasons unknown, took it into his head to travel to London. After a period staying in a first class hotel, which he could easily afford, he then moved to modest rooms in the run-down district of Lambeth – an area whose only apparent attraction was easy access to prostitutes. There, in the early hours of 17th February 1872, he shot a complete stranger dead in the street. There was no suggestion of provocation, and it appeared that Minor had somehow convinced himself that the victim was his Irish deserter or a friend thereof.

Minor was found to be insane and was sentenced to be detained “until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known”. He was taken to Broadmoor Asylum. And there he stayed until, on 6th April 1910, the Home Secretary – one Winston Churchill – authorised his discharge on the condition that he be removed from the country. He returned to the States and lived out most of the rest of his life in St. Elizabeth’s Asylum, Washington D.C. He died in an asylum in Hartford, Conn., on 26th March 1920.

But this is only part of Minor’s story. Because he had spent the 38 years in Broadmoor Asylum in an extremely constructive fashion. He was, in fact, one of the most noteworthy and prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary. He was nothing short of a lexicographic tour de force. For further details I heartily recommend The Surgeon of Crowthorne: a tale of murder, madness and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester.