A boy’s own Broadmoor

By Patrick McGrath

In 1957 my father, Dr Pat McGrath,wasappointed the tenth and last medical superintendent of what was then called Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum. The place was in bad shape. It was in many respects obsolete, and chronically overcrowded:800mentally ill men and women confined in a top-security institution designed for500. Patients slept in corridors and day rooms. Security was paramount. The staff comprised a corps of custodial attendants in black uniforms and peaked caps and, according to Pat McGrath, just one-and-a-half psychiatrists.

I remember being with him once, at dusk, crossing a yard inside the hospital. I was eight or nine years old at the time. A scream came from a high window in Block Six. Even now, more than half a century later, the words "block six" arouse an echo of the dreadful fascination I once felt with that building. It was where the most disturbed male patients were housed. New admissions went into Block Six, if they presented any risk—men who had in most cases committed grievous acts of violence while psychotic. But it wasn't a scream of demented fury that I heard that evening; it was a scream of the most wretched misery. I turned to my father. "Poor John," he murmured, and I understood that he understood what his patient was suffering; and the fact that he understood it robbed the scream of much of its terror for me.