TOM POOLEY IN THE ASYLUM.

 THOMAS POOLEY IN THE ASYLUM

“So if mines His a Delusion, it Carried me into the Christian Heaven that is the Asylum wear they say mad People are Bound.  This I sternley Deni.   They may Be mase or, like the Christain Christ, insane But I will give Honest justice to All men.  Thir is madder and unjuster men and women Left Loose on the face of this Globe that are worthy of a mad House.”   T. Pooley 

It was on Thursday the thirteenth of August that Tom was taken out of Bodmin Gaol and transferred to the County of Cornwall Asylum, also in Bodmin.  He had been in the ‘Christian dungeons’ for less than a fortnight but for such a childlike spirit the experience had been harrowing.  He was more than ever excitable and incoherent.  He was unsure whether to triumph or to despair, whether to be happy or sad.

From George Holyoake’s brief description of the Cornwall Asylum in ‘The Case of Thomas Pooley’ one might take the impression that this asylum was an intimate enough place, cosy even, where a just Governor and an able Medical Officer were concentrating their efforts on poor Tom Pooley.   In fact, the Asylum, which had been built as a refuge for the lunatic poor in 1815, was a huge institution with all the dismal characteristics of such places: bare rooms, long desolate corridors, strict disciplines and regimented meal times.   The food was adequate but dull.   Breakfast was meat broth or gruel with bread.  At midday there was a cooked meal with meat and two vegetables or soup and bread and there was a pudding once a week.   In the evening there was either bread and cheese or bread and milk.   Tom had probably not eaten so well for years.  He does seem to have attracted more of his share of attention from the Governor and the Medical Superintendent but on a daily basis he was in the hands of other, no doubt less gentle, officials.  The Asylum was supplied with an army of officers, attendants, nurses and servants.

Extensive though the buildings were, nineteenth century Cornwall was able to provide the Asylum with more pauper lunatics than it could hold. The remarkable asterisk-shaped building by the Plymouth architect, John Foulston, which survives and is now converted into apartments soon offered too little accommodation and, by Tom’s time, the buildings had been extended twice, in 1844 and again in 1849. In these years three-storey blocks of living quarters had been added.  Tom was just one of more than five hundred inmates and he was as much a prisoner here as he had been in Bodmin Gaol.  It would seem, however, that he soon became one of a select group of prisoners considered to be harmless, separated from the main, and to some extent favoured, by the senior management.  Moreover, perhaps because of Holyoake’s visit, Doctor Adams seems to have taken a personal interest in Tom’s case.   Certainly Tom, in sharp contrast to the way he behaved in prison, was happy to conform to the Asylum’s regulations and there is no record of him defying authority there.  Holyoake records a conversation, which he could not have witnessed, between the Superintendant and Tom which took place on the day of his September visit. Tom had already been a month in the Asylum and was wearing the uniform of the institution.  The Governor, according to Holyoake, had the kindness to tell him that if he had any objection to wearing the Asylum dress furnished to him, he was quite free to wear his own.   Tom responded to this by saying that the Asylum dress was “ordinary and better than his own and as it bore no badge of crime, it would do.”  The Governor then “humanely” told him that “no disgrace attached to him in being an inmate of the Asylum, which was simply an hospital and he a patient.”  This seems an unlikely exchange between governor and inmate but there seems no reason to doubt that Tom was conforming to the best of his ability and finding life tolerable.   At some stage Tom lost the beard that he had so stoutly defended in prison, for by the time he reappeared in Liskeard he was ‘shaven’ though maybe not clean-shaven. He was later to imply that he had enjoyed the company of the other maze men, some of whom perhaps were mazed enough to listen patiently to Tom’s eccentric views, and he enjoyed the security that the Asylum, with its three meals a day, represented. His expressed opinion was that the conditions in the Asylum compared with those in the prison were as heaven compared to hell.   It was thus that he later compared madhouse to gaol and the warmth of his experience of the former is witnessed by the fact that, later in life, at least on one occasion, he chose to return there rather than to visit the Liskeard workhouse.  

One of the greatest privations Tom had suffered in prison was not being allowed to write home.   On his first full day in the Asylum this was remedied and Tom had pen, ink and paper and was once more able to indulge his obsession and to pour out his heart to Mary, his wife, in writing.  He found five hundred words to write home to Liskeard.  The shock of his experiences of prison was still upon him and his writing is more than usually self-indulgent and he is desperately homesick.

“Mary, I take my pen in hand to write you and with tears in my eyes.  Mary, I hope you and the children are all well; as for me I am very much cast down.  My wish is to see you as quickly as possible.  I want to see you to know how you are living, whether you want for anything or not.  Mary if I could but grasp you in my arms once more I could die happy.  my love for you is not gone and I hope your love is not gone from me.  Mary, I should think that you and John could get a donkey and a cart and come down on Sunday.  I must see some of you on Sunday either William and Mary or John and his mother; but send me a note so quick as possible to let me know how you are all.”

As it happened, all was far from well in Dean Street.  Money was short and the parish was not prepared to help.   Mary, his wife, was having to work harder than ever at her washing and none of his family were yet able or willing to visit him.  Tom, in his first letter home, was still declaring his faith in his One Great Almighty and he did not spare Mary from a full recital of the Articles of his homespun religion.  Despite the admonitions of Judge Coleridge and the best efforts of the prison chaplain he was more than ever convinced of the truth of his gospel.   The Great and Grand and Wise Almighty who brought all Things into Being has not deserted him and will not desert him.   He prophesies, truly as it turns out: “My mind is clear at present and I don’t feel my mind condemns me as I put my faith in the Grand and Wise and Powerful Almighty, and he will bring me through all my trials and troubles;  and you and I, Mary, shall come together again.  So truth must come to light as time, tide, life and death are here by the power of this globe so grand.”    He was again happy to present himself as a martyr to the grand cause for which he had suffered and for which he was ever and always prepared to die.  He had only done that work which he was born to do.  He was a prisoner for truth like that honest Galileo.  His fame is yet to come.  “Death is my friend.” he writes, “Every man, woman and child will say in their dying moments: ‘Tom Pooley is right.’  Dying is no gammon.” 

Richard Adams,The Medical Superintendent, had received with Tom Pooley the letter which George Holyoake had written “on behalf of the Promoters of Freethought,” to the Governor of Bodmin Gaol.   Adams replied on 14th August, Tom’s first full day at the Asylum.   Holyoake, as we have seen, had written to Tom, “We think your language thoughtless, and likely to prejudice the cause of Freethought.  But this is not the time to dwell upon this point.  We think it possible to obtain from the Government a pardon, or a mitigation of your sentence.”   He intended Tom to know that the Freethinkers had written to the Law Officers of the Crown and that they would bring his case before Parliament. Adams, quite rightly, was of the opinion that the letter might unduly excite his patient and he forwarded it to the family at Moon’s Court asking them not to let Tom see it.  On August 19th, Tom’s faithful daughter, Mary, wrote the letter of a “simple character” that was published in the pages of The Reasoner and that brought Holyoake down to Cornwall.

Mrs. Pooley had no doubt heard the litany of Tom’s curious beliefs a thousand times before but Tom in his letters home, like many a more eminent Victorian, was conscious that he was writing for posterity and he did not spare her. “Mary” he wrote, “I hope you will keep all my writings.  The day will come when truth will be looked for, and happy they will be who keep this.”

Remarkably, because he had not seen Holyoake’s letter, the possibility of his own redemption was already on his mind and his thoughts followed much the same path as those of his would-be rescuers.   Indeed, even in prison he had expressed his hope that all would yet be well.  He prophesied to daughter Mary that “friends would rise up” for the Pooleys and soon enough he was being proved right.  One might expect his fate to have appeared beyond hope.  His situation was parlous.  He could expect to be held in the Asylum for not only the remainder of his sentence, another twenty months, but possibly for the rest of his life.  Many a lunatic had died in the Asylum but Tom was astute enough, and once again prophet enough, to think in terms of petitions and pardons.  He wrote to his wife, “Mary, I wish you to talk to Mr Allan and ask of him whether he would be so kind as to get up a petition and send to the Queen of England, and if she is a human being and a lover of truth and justice she will give me a free pardon for bringing to light the laws of this Great and Grand and Wise Powerful Almighty.”   Whether this Mr Allan, who might well have been John Allen, the author of The History of the Borough of Liskeard, would or could have done anything to help Tom is not known, but already the Freethinkers of London and of the nation were onto his case.

September the fifteenth was the day when George Holyoake brought daughter Mary to Bodmin to see her father.   Holyoake wrote that he had been able to “cause some little presents of food to be purchased for Mr Pooley” and that Mary spent the time with her father in the Asylum and had two meals with him on that day.  It would seem that Mary told Tom nothing of the Freethinkers and their plans and that Tom was left in ignorance of Holyoake’s visit. 

Time passed and, some weeks later, Tom wrote a second letter.  While Tom had been in the Asylum, young Richard Adams, he was only twenty-four, had married a certain Mary Frances Gaudhen. Adams was setting out on both what was to be his long and distinguished career at the Asylum and his long married life.   There was a wedding cake and Tom had been given a piece.   Tom approved of the young couple.  He wrote to Mary, probably in early November,“Mr and Mrs Adams has given we maze men a treat after their marriage and some say your husband is one of the maze men so this is a maze man wish them peace, love and happiness and never to be parted in that disgraceful manner as you and your husband is.”   (Maze for mad is one of the very few dialect forms which Tom employs.) 

The essential poverty of Tom’s life is illustrated by the fuss he makes about his slice of wedding cake, probably one of those miniscule iced slabs in a tiny cardboard box, and by the couple’s touchingly pathetic exchange of other gifts.   “This cake is for you and the children.  You may let my friends taste it if you please and think on me.”  He had devised further presents for Mary.  He had for her from somewhere two shillings, a significant amount of money for a lunatic to have acquired, and, as a token of his love, a nutmeg and a grater,  and two pears, no doubt from the Asylum’s extensive gardens where he had been working.   Mary, for her part, had sent to him, by means of another visit from daughter Mary, two newspapers and some tobacco.

Tom, the countryman, confided in this same letter an idea that he has been nursing as to how the authorities, instead of feeding him from the public purse, might have more usefully employed his strength and skills.   What if they had built a rough cottage for him, he asks, on the South side of Saint Clear Down and given him all the land that he could have brought into cultivation in a year?     “How grand this would have looked in ages to come .    Then some men might have smiled at this kind deeds and your husband, Mary, would have been the happiest man on the face of the Globe with this land to call his own, And why shall this honest request be denied?  For all men are plants of this Globe and can’t be destroyed.”

And Tom also sent to Mary some turkey acorns which he wished her to have planted on their little son’s grave in the plot in the Municipal cemetery at Liskeard that he intends to share.   “I have sent those turkey acorns I wish for you to have planted on Thomas Pooley’s grave …. How grand they will appear!  Far grander that the monument that is built by man.  Let these words be engraved on my gravestone!  “That sword is not made nor never will be made by man that will destroy the body or life of man.  Behold the tides how grand they ebb and flow by the thinking powers of the globe.”    Peace, love and justice, truth and harmony is your husband’s cry and the voice of the grave says my laws is like the tides, never at rest, always living and taking the life of man.”

The family by now, was in receipt of funds from subscriptions to The Reasoner and, soon after Holyoake’s return to London, the princely sum of five pounds was sent to Liskeard.  This must have been more money than the Pooleys had seen for a long time.  It represented two years’ worth of parish shillings!  Nevertheless, the Pooleys still had their troubles.  on 26th November, with Tom still in the Asylum, Mary Pooley wrote to Holyoake in London the following letter: “Most worthy Sir, for your kindness that you have shown to us we shall be indebted to you for life.  Mr Holyoake, I have been down to Bodmin to see father and the doctor gave me very good encouragement.  He told me that my father would be home soon, how glad he was that our hopes would be realised.  I came home with a good deal lighter heart than I went because my father is in pretty good health.  ---- Mother has got a wound in her leg.  My brother is unwell.   My youngest brother and me are pretty well.  We all owe the Freethinking Society a thousand times our thanks.  We all remain, with reverence, your humble servants, Mary Pooley.”

Once again it seems remarkable how much personal attention the Pooleys were getting from Dr Adams.  Both he and Governor Hicks had confirmed that in their opinions Tom was insane but harmless.   They were both equally sure that he should go home as soon as his sentence was pardoned and, already in November, Adams seems already to know that a pardon is not far away. 

The Freethinkers had been busy.  Since April there had been a Whig government at Westminster,   Palmerston was again Prime Minister.  Tom was in luck for under a Tory administration he would have had little hope of a free pardon. On the Freethinkers’ behalf the Member for Southwark,  John Locke, had applied to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, and  by the second of December the Home Secretary had written to Sir John Coleridge requiring his notes of the evidence and asking for any remarks the judge might wish to make.   Sir John wrote as follows: 

 Sir, - Thomas Pooley was convicted before me on three charges of blasphemy of a very offensive character. There was not the slightest suggestion made to me of his being other than perfectly sane , nor was there anything in his demeanour at the trial or in the conduct of his defence by himself which indicated it; nor did I collect it from the manner in which he, as it seemed, habitually committed the offence.  But I see no reason whatever why he should not receive a free pardon under the circumstances stated in your letter.   Had I been informed of anything which had led me to inquire into his sanity during the trial, it is possible that I might have discovered enough to have led to an acquittal on the ground of insanity, which on such a charge I should have been very glad to have arrived at.

I have the honour to remain, sir, 

Your obedient servant,

John T. Coleridge 

 The Freethinkers’ victory was complete.  The unrighteous foe was routed.  On the eleventh of December they received the good news from Whitehall:

 “Sir, The Secretary of State for the Home Department having had under consideration your application in behalf of Thomas Pooley, I have the satisfaction to acquaint you that, under all the circumstances he has felt warranted in advising Her Majesty to grant a free pardon to this man who will be released from the Cornwall Lunatic Asylum if the medical authorities are of opinion that it may be done without danger to himself or others.”

Tom was a free man and no doubt a happy one.   His Queen had proved herself a human being and a lover of truth and justice and she had freely pardoned him.  He was released without delay.   The Reasoner reported his return as a triumph, driven home in a carriage on Christmas Eve by the Superintendent of the Asylum in person.   In fact, he was already home by the nineteenth of December when the newly instituted Liskeard Gazette ungraciously reported how Thomas Pooley had been liberated “and is now at home again with his family, shaved and we hope in his right mind.”