Accessibility and Archives: “Mad, Innocent or Criminal?”

In this, the 18th in a sequence of blogposts around disability and inclusion from the Accessibility working group of ARA’s Diversity and Inclusion Allies, Philip Milnes-Smith considers a single case of ‘criminal insanity’, attempting to place it both in the context of provision made for the mentally ill in the past, but also the eugenicist thinking of the time.

The title for this blog is drawn from a newspaper article published in Adelaide, Australia, in July 1914.  But the news story (a domestic double homicide which had occurred five months earlier and had now reached the Assizes) was not a local one.  The question being asked referred to someone who lived more than ten thousand miles away in a farmhouse in the Nottinghamshire village of Whatton-in-the-Vale.  Rather than focus on the killings, I want to use a disability lens to reframe the perpetrator as someone with a condition greatly affecting his everyday activities over a prolonged period of time.  Evidence for this was evidently compelling enough to outweigh the prosecution case at the Nottingham Assizes (which was that the killings had a financial motive).   The verdict actually delivered was guilty but insane (a special verdict under section 2(1) of the 1883 Trial of Lunatics Act).  The convicted man, John Frederick Houghton, then aged 27, would go on to serve a considerable period in the Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Broadmoor – he can be found listed there in the 1921 Census.  He was eventually discharged, and, in the 1939 register, he can be found living with cousins (described as ‘retired’).  Had he been found straightforwardly, he would have forfeited rights to be a financial beneficiary from his father’s demise (the case is still cited as precedent).  Instead, his mother too having predeceased him, he died in 1944 a comparatively rich man (effects of £13,347 9s 11d).

Fred’s mother testified that back in April or May 1912, the family had been warned by a doctor that Fred should have a ‘mental specialist’ and that he might benefit from time in a nursing home.  By August 1913, his father was warned that Fred “might eventually become insane.”  This warning appears to have been linked to what was here termed “minor epilepsy”.  That may sound trivial, but the reports note that some of the seizures required Frederick to be held down by more than one other person.  Having a physical origin, epilepsy is not now deemed psychiatric, so it may not be obvious to us how epilepsy and insanity were related.  But, by 1893, as Laura Fitzpatrick has noted  “the general public believed all people with epilepsy to be insane.”  Maudsley’s Responsibility in Mental Disease published six years later notes “the result of long-continued epilepsy is to impair and weaken the mind, producing first failure of memory and ultimately a condition of dementia… in the end, both moral and intellectual faculties are involved in a common ruin.”  Medical opinion at that time held that such persons “often show sudden homicidal tendencies” and the family was advised not to leave razors lying about.  However, they lived on a working farm and there would then have been nothing unusual in having a shotgun (for quick access) on the kitchen mantelpiece.

In Cesare Lombroso’s view, first published in Italian in 1876, “Epilepsy has a disastrous effect on the character. It destroys the moral sense, causes irritability, alters the sensations through constant hallucinations and delusions, deadens the natural feelings or leads them into morbid channels.”  He theorised that “Epilepsy represents the genus of which criminality and moral insanity are the species” and compared those so affected to “ferocious carnivores and rodents”, a ‘less than human’ species, not deserving even of our pity.  In the twentieth century, Nazis and Harvard professors alike advocated the elimination of epileptics from the population, and laws attempted to prevent future epilepsy by restricting rights to immigration and marriage.  It should be remembered that while in-patient medication might include Bromides, this was not a specific anti-seizure treatment (which were not discovered until the 1960s).  A longitudinal population-based study (1973-2009) in Sweden would ultimately find that “after adjustment for familial confounding, epilepsy was not associated with increased risk of violent crime”.

Paul Tobia’s thesis (on Bristol asylum patients in the nineteenth century) notes that although women were admitted in similar numbers to men in his sample, women were over-represented in asylum populations despite the fact that women were more likely to recover.  Partly this was because men were more likely to die within a year of admission.  Women (overall) were admitted in the largest numbers between the ages of 21 and 30 (c.24%), perhaps associated with perinatal difficulties, whereas for men c.27% were admitted between the ages of 31 and 40.  A smaller percentage of women were admitted due to epilepsy (c.8% compared to c.14%).  In Fred’s case, evidence was later presented (by a doctor from the City Asylum) about his health in prison, including that in the five weeks after the killings he had fourteen “attacks like fits” including four on a single day.  In a prison rather than a healthcare context, we can speculate that these totals were an underestimate, even if Fred himself considered them overestimates.  Paul Tobia notes that, in 1869, epileptic inmates in his sample were averaging five seizures per week.

Fred’s mother and his own doctor also referred to an incident, at some point in the intervening two years, when Fred had attempted to shatter a crucifix in his bedroom with what is described as a ‘truncheon’, crying out, “You have brought this on me!”  One report of this incident enables us to understand that he was sharing this room with his younger brother Jasper and that this ‘truncheon’ had been supplied (by a Police Constable) so that Jasper could summon assistance by banging on the floor (which, arguably, could mean for his own protection, as well as Fred’s well-being).  The doctor’s interpretation of this episode was that it showed Fred to have a “maniacal tendency”.  Additional precautions appear to have been taken in the form of a special constable being deputed to “look after him”, but there is no evidence of a proposal of precautionary institutionalisation at this stage.  It is difficult to judge whether this option was considered but rejected, but around that time, psychiatric specialists were concerned that the stigma caused by the legal technicality of a patient being designated a ‘Pauper Lunatic’ could be causing a “serious and even disastrous delay” in accessing appropriate support. 

More recently, Fred had reported that he was being watched and threatened by an armed stranger.  The special constable had asked around, but nobody he asked had seen anyone untoward.  Again, the delusion was not, it seems, considered grounds for precautionary referral to an asylum, but it was about to be too late.  Right after the killings, Fred indicated that this unidentified third party (or parties) had been responsible: “Someone has shot them, and they have gone out by the back door.” This was the defence he persisted in, and he thus differs from Maudsley’s examples where, eventually, “the person comes to himself… [and] realises for the first time what he has done.”  Maudsley acknowledges that while motiveless attacks and a lack of premeditation were more common indicators of epilepsy being the cause, the presence of both (as the prosecution attempted to show in Fred’s case) did not rule it out.

In this series, we have repeatedly found that the disabled person’s voice is one that has not survived.  Ironically, because of the homicide, we have been left with reports of more of Fred’s words, than his father and brother.  Sometimes this was used as evidence against him.  The police inspector, for example, reported Fred to have said: “It's a bad job for mother, but I don't know so much about me, as I am the eldest son, and my father has not made a will since August 1906."  There is much about his life that is now irrecoverable (and there are records which must once have existed which appear not to have survived).  He lived outside an asylum for more years than he was in it, and the newspaper accounts only selectively cover a two-year period.  We may not feel inclined to believe his mother’s seemingly incredulous insistence that, “We were always a perfectly happy family” – it might represent life as she wished it to have been – but perhaps the Houghtons had believed that the best care for Fred would be afforded in the familiar surroundings of home, where they had perhaps been managing his seizures long before consulting the doctor in 1912.  We hear that Fred wept when his mother was describing the murders (the only time in the proceedings he had shown any emotion).  We may perhaps also see affection for her in his actions and words on the night of the killings, when he tried to prevent her going for help saying, “Mother there is a man there, go in, go in.”  Fred is believed to have been allowed leave to attend her funeral (with family standing surety), and he was in due course buried in the same plot as her and his ill-fated father and brother. 

My great-grandfather and Fred’s mother were first cousins.

Contributions to this series are welcomed, particularly if you have experience of working with mental health or asylum records, or using historic records with current patients.  If you are interested in contributing to a similar post, in the first instance, email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk