As we shall see in a later chapter, 1953 saw the first suggestion of a supernatural solution to Bella’s murder, hence the comments above.
Much as I hate having to use a nom-de-plume [the writer called herself Anna] I think you would appreciate it if you knew me. The only clues I can give you are that the person responsible for the crime died insane in 1942 and the victim was Dutch and arrived illegally in England about 1941. I have no wish to recall any more.
Intrigued, and obviously scenting a bigger scoop, Byford-Jones contacted the police. Tom Williams was by now a superintendent and doubtless had moved on to other problems but, like Quaestor, he could not leave this one alone. Donald McCormick, without access to police files, adds to the frisson of mystery. Anna was traced but would only talk to the police ‘at a place far out into the country outside Wolverhampton in a waiting room which could be viewed from outside without risk of detection and through which women were passing frequently without the company of men’. She did not want press there, except, it transpired, Byford-Jones and a minimum police presence. Williams took along a policewoman, thin on the ground though they still were in 1953, perhaps to put Anna at her ease. Today, such an interview, without counsel and tape-recording equipment, would contravene the PACE regulations of 1994, but it was standard procedure in the 1950s.
Byford-Jones recorded the essence of what was said, without giving anything away. ‘My lips are sealed,’ clichéd the reporter:
I cannot tell the dramatic story I heard one cold winter’s night in an ancient habitat in the country together with Detective-Superintendent Williams and a woman detective. What I can say is that the details told were most impressive and contained names and that some details about the man concerned were verified by another person who had accompanied Anna.
This person had come out of left field, but he/she was probably there to give Anna moral support. Byford-Jones had assumed when he got Anna’s letter that she was ‘an educated woman of about sixty who was down on her luck’. He admitted he was wrong about that, without telling us why and that the testimony of Anna’s companion was every bit as impressive as Anna’s.
Williams’ comment after the interview was:
I cannot divulge who ‘Anna’ is or where I saw her. The matter is not by any means closed. Inquiries are now to continue through a contact in Holland to see whether there is any likelihood of a Dutch girl of that description being recognized by certain authorities. Inquiries have been made with the assistance of police forces in the Midlands, also in the London area, on the facts disclosed by ‘Anna’.
Persons who knew the man referred to by ‘Anna’ have been identified and interviewed, but none has been able to offer any useful lead to the identification of the victim. ‘Anna’ has been seen again, but she is not able to identify the victim and states that the story she has given was told to her by the person who died insane in 1942.
Williams’ handwritten notes on Anna’s story still exist in the police files. They are undated and it is not clear whether they were taken at the first meeting or subsequent ones. Bizarrely, Williams wrote in green ink (unusual in 1950s police procedure) but from this, it emerges that Anna was actually Una Ellen Hainsworth, formerly Mossop. She lived at Four Acres, Long Common, Claverley, a village near Bridgenorth nearly forty miles from Hagley. Her typewritten statement, undated, runs to two pages. She had married an engineer, Jack Mossop, in 1932 and they lived at the Bridge House, Wombourne, five miles from Claverley. Their only child, Julian, was born in the same year and was, at the time of her statement, ‘somewhere in America’.1 Although this is clearly not in the statement, Julian acquired a police record. The fact that Una had no idea where he was screams unhappy and broken home. In 1937, Jack Mossop joined the Air Service Training Corps as a pilot officer working for the Armstrong Siddeley Works in Coventry and later the Standard Aero Works at Banner Lane in the same city. The couple lived at 39, Barrow Road, Kenilworth, a small town complete with ruined castle, a few miles away in the Warwickshire countryside.
It was in 1940 that a man named Van Ralt came to our home … I believe this man was Dutch and as far as I know had no particular job and I have a suspicion that he was engaged on some work that he did not wish to talk about, but in my opinion it might have been that he was a spy for he had plenty of money and there were times that my husband appeared to have plenty of money after meeting him.
All this is very confusing. If Van Ralt had no job, how had he met Mossop? It could have been a casual pub situation, but this was wartime Britain. Mention 1940 and Coventry to locals even today and they will regale you with folktales of ‘coventration’. In November of that year, the city was pounded in a ten-hour raid that destroyed the city centre including its fifteenth-century cathedral. The Netherlands had recently been overrun by the Wehrmacht, but nobody was naïve enough to believe that every Dutchman was an ally of Britain. In fact, as we shall see, there were two parallel and popular Dutch Nazi parties and they were indeed supplying spies as agents for the Abwehr, the German secret service (see Chapter 11). Did no one find it odd that a foreign national (people who were routinely rounded up) was wandering around the industrial Midlands heartlands, flashing his cash and teaming up with a man who worked for an aircraft production company?
‘In March or April 1941,’ Una went on, Jack came home ‘white and agitated’. It was one o’clock in the morning and he asked Una for a drink. Reluctantly, she poured one for him and he told her that he had been to the Lyttleton Arms with Van Ralt and the ‘Dutch Piece’ who had got awkward. Perhaps it was Jack Mossop’s style to go drinking at a pub twenty miles away, but again, this was wartime; petrol was rationed, signposts had gone, car headlights were dimmed. Were there not pubs in nearby Kenilworth?
According to Una, Jack was driving Van Ralt’s Rover and the Dutch girl sat next to him, with Van Ralt in the back. Suddenly, she slumped against Mossop, presumably passed out with drink. Van Ralt told Mossop to drive to a wood ‘and [he] stuck her in a hollow tree’, assuring his friend that she would come to her senses the following morning.
From then until December 1941when they left Kenilworth, Jack’s mood grew worse. He drank more heavily and appeared to have more money than usual. He was also often off work and Una could not understand where the money was coming from. He had his own car, a Standard, and he would often drive off in it for days.
Una left Jack that December, with no reason given and moved to Henley-in-Arden, where she lived for ten years. ‘We [presumably this refers to her second husband, Jack Hainsworth] lived there for ten years.’ In 1951, they went back to Kenilworth and two years later, shortly before Una contacted Quaestor, to her present address.
Back in 1941–42, she saw Jack Mossop three times ‘after I was forced to leave him’. She was trying to sort out the furniture and on the last occasion he told her that he was ‘losing his mind as he kept seeing the woman in the tree and she was leering at him’. In June 1942, Una heard that Jack had been taken to the ‘Mental Hospital’ in Stafford. He died two months later.
Una told the police that she had no knowledge of the Hagley Wood murder until she read Quaestor’s articles. She was concerned that now that she had married and had three small children, she did not want her name splashed all over the papers. She admitted that she had no proof of anything she had said.
A number of things from Una’s statement should ring alarm bells. The police, no doubt heartened by any scrap of information relating to the murder, would have had no truck with Mossop’s assertion that he and Van Ralt shoved the Dutch girl into the wych elm to sober up, but they may have put her corpse there to avoid an accusation of murder. It was possible to convict without a body – as John George Haigh found to his cost in 19492 – but it was considerably more difficult. Despite the misgivings they must have had, Worcestershire CID contacted the City of Coventry police in relation to the players in Una’s story. Jack Mossop had been born in 1912 in Kenilworth and did a number of factory jobs before starting in the assembly shop at Banner Lane in November 1940. Before the war, he had been discharged from the RAF (why was unknown) and he had worked for two years at the Lockheed factory in Leamington Spa. There is an unexplained complaint made by him in February 1942 of a missing car and driver.
Jack Hainsworth was actually Alfred James Ainsworth and once again we are in the shady wartime world of aliases, however little removed from the truth. He was born in 1917 and worked, like Mossop, in Banner Lane from 3 September 1940 until January 1944 when he was transferred to Aircraft Production at Anstey Aero. He too had been discharged from the RAF in August 1940 (at the height of the Battle of Britain) after four months – again, no reason given. Before that he had been a garage mechanic in Berkswell, Warwickshire and had moved twice while at the Banner Lane works.
Williams also traced Bill Wilson, who lived at 45 Birches Lane, Kenilworth and he made a statement at the end of December 1953. He had known the Mossops well, lodging with them at 39 Barrow Road. He remembered Jack Mossop as a heavy drinker, becoming increasingly unstable and had a lot of absenteeism. The Standard car that he drove was a four-door black saloon model – he and Wilson shared its running expenses. Wilson knew nothing about Mossop’s complaint to the police relating to the car and driver but he told police that Mossop had been invalided out of the RAF after a bad landing in a plane and that he had head injuries.
The only Rover that Wilson knew about was a write-off he and Mossop had bought from a scrap merchant and which they could never get going. He knew nothing about the Lyttleton Arms. Jack Mossop knew lots of people, but ‘foreigners, I don’t think’. The police had clearly given Wilson a vague description of Van Ralt with his expensive car and wads of cash. The only person Wilson could equate with this was a 20-year-old Englishman with bad skin. He worked at Banner Lane and may have been called Vic. Jack was a flirt and would often buy girls drinks – ‘I think they felt sorry for him,’ Wilson remembered, ‘the type of fellow that would not harm anyone … he did not have much backbone.’
Wilson tended to lose touch with the Mossops towards the end; he had noticed increasing moodiness but he put this down to tensions at home. He worked in Baginton, two miles away, while Jack stayed on at Banner Lane and it was from there that he was committed.
From somewhere – remember, the police archives are incomplete – comes ‘Frak or Froak’ – no one of that surname could be found by Coventry police. Elsewhere in the file the names are found, but no explanation is given. On the same day that Wilson was interviewed, DS Murray of Worcestershire CID was reporting on Frick and Frack, a Swiss ice-skating duo who had performed at the Hippodrome theatre in Coventry in 1938. The police had contacted theatrical agent Tom Arnold but he was hazy about them. In fact, by 1953 the pair were very well known. Frick was Werner Groebli; Frack was Hans Mauch and they had gone to the States in 1937 to join the Ice Follies Show. They performed a comedy sketch act wearing lederhosen and were so good that the term ‘frick and frack’ became synonymous with two people being indistinguishable from each other. Bill Wilson was clearly asked something about this because he said he had no knowledge of any ‘theatrical types’ in the context of the Mossops.
As time went on, the dramatic intervention of Anna of Claverley assumed an importance way beyond its bodyweight. The place ‘far out in the country’ was actually the Dick Whittington pub in Stourbridge and the ‘waiting room which could be viewed from outside’ was a snug on the premises. In the midst of all this, the mysterious Dutch girl left in the wych elm to sober up disappears. Una clearly had no idea who she was and the police were hoping that finding Van Ralt would give them some answers. They found two of them.
Bizarrely, Laura van Raalte is listed in the police files as a potential victim (i.e. Bella) but she clearly is not. On 6 January 1954, the chief constable of Nottingham contacted Worcestershire CID with the information that Laura Frances Ryllis van Raalte had been the subject of police correspondence before, in fact in the ‘Spitfire Summer’, August 1940. She was born in London to German parents in 1899, had a home address in Golders Green and was lodging in All Saints Street, Nottingham. She had been a teacher since 1936, employed to teach German at Mundella Grammar School in the city. Since she had held seven teaching posts between that and May 1940, we are entitled to doubt her teaching abilities. In that month, an anonymous letter accused her of teaching the German national anthem to her charges. May 1940 was the month that Winston Churchill took over from Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. Europe was reeling from the speed of the Blitzkrieg advance of General Heinz Guderian and his panzers and a shattered British Expeditionary Force was limping back from Dunkirk; perhaps it was not the best time to get British girls singing Deutschland Uber Alles!
Fraulein van Raalte seemed determined to draw attention to herself. On 17 August she wrote to the chief constable of Worcestershire telling him that she was staying in Malvern for a week (the school holidays) and she wanted a guide book for walking and touring purposes.
The anonymous letter ‘fingering’ van Raalte is in the Archive. She is described as ‘M. Van Ralty (an alien) … I am sure you will realise that [teaching the German national anthem] is a gross insult to girls whose brothers and fathers are at the present moment faced with grave peril from our enemy.’ There were threats to contact the Home Office and have her imprisoned. Since van Raalte clearly stopped the exercise and behaved without suspicion during her stay in Malvern, no further action was taken. Clearly this van Raalte has no links with Hagley Wood or the Mossops, despite the fact that she stayed briefly in Worcestershire on her holiday.
The only other van Raalt was Marius Pieter (the right gender at least!) who came to Britain in 1948. The police could find no record of employment and assumed that he was simply a tourist. His passport had been issued at Leiden in October of that year and he could not possibly be the Van Ralt that Una Mossop claimed to know.
Days after Superintendent Williams had spoken to Bill Wilson, he wrote to the police with more information. The Vic he remembered was tall and fair with a surname Draco or Drarco. He drove several cars and one of them could have been a Rover but he worked at Banner Lane throughout the war and Una Mossop would not have confused him with anyone named Van Ralt. Then again, Bill Wilson himself referred to Vic as an Englishman, when, certainly by the sound of his name, he was not.
Una Hainsworth might have been working with the best of intentions when she contacted Quaestor, but she was relying on the hearsay of a mentally ill man who drank heavily and she seemed to have met a character who did not actually exist. Una herself was of questionable integrity. She had approached Quaestor in 1953 because, via the Express and Star, he had offered a cash reward of £100 (around £3,000 today). According to the Kenilworth CID, when Una left Kenilworth, she owed a number of people considerable sums of money and they, in the words of the police, ‘would have been delighted to have got their hands on her’. In the meantime, in 1953, while Quaestor was rekindling the horror of the woman in the wych elm and ladling it on with a trowel, Bella’s murder was no nearer to being closed.
Chapter 11
The Spies Who Came in From the Cold
There is one phrase in Una Hainsworth’s statement to Superintendent Williams that was music to the ears of Donald McCormick and everybody else since. When referring to the mysterious Dutchman, Van Ralt, she said, ‘but in my opinion it might have been that he was a spy…’
‘The first casualty of war is truth,’ wrote Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917 and that can be said to apply to almost all the Hagley Wood case. Behind the lethal machinery of the Second World War, the tanks, the aircraft, the bombs, was a whole underground industry devoted to espionage. All nations used spies, agents of differing backgrounds and abilities and both sexes, to discover what they could about the enemy, to probe and exploit his weaknesses.
Little of this was known to most of the public in the Second World War. There was censorship everywhere, from actual government legislation to the limited amount of newsprint available for ordinary people to read. Had the body of Bella been found today, every national would carry long stories on it, with exclusives, photographs of the supposed murder sites and interviews with locals, if only to reassure the readership that ‘such things don’t happen here’. And of course, television and social media would get in on the act with a vengeance, about the vulnerability of women in the MeToo generation. As I write, the Mail on Sunday carries a very small article, rather lost on page 19, with the headline ‘Police find “body of mother” in woodland’. The vital difference between this case and Bella’s is that we know who the victim was and someone has already been charged with murder. Had that not been the case, that the remains could not be identified, it would have hit the front page by Monday with speculation drifting on for days.
In 1941, there was nothing traceable about a woman who had gone missing among the hundreds who made up such a list. In 1943, in local papers like the Birmingham Post and the Wolverhampton Express and Star, there were a few scattered columns devoted to the finding of the body. One or two nationals mentioned it briefly – the Sunday Despatch and the Sunday Mercury – but most of the newspaper coverage comes from the assertions of Dr Margaret Murray (see Chapter 14) and Quaestor in the early to mid-1950s, by which time the case was as cold as the grave.
Much of this comes from the wartime admonishment that ‘careless talk costs lives’ and that some things were best not discussed in public, if at all. But it was the sheer anonymity of Bella that set off alarm bells in the minds of the detectives involved in the case at the time. There were no labels in any of the dead woman’s clothing. Her shoes, that looked so promising as a clue at first, had yielded nothing. Her wedding ring was anonymous and ‘fake’. Even the most likely item to produce identification results – her ‘snaggle’ teeth – drew a firm and resounding blank. That blandness, that lack of traceability, locally or even nationally, led some to the conclusion that Bella was not a local; she was not even a British national. And that in turn led to a more bizarre suggestion. Bella might have been a refugee; after all, there were hundreds of them in England in 1941. And what about Una Hainsworth’s assertion, that Van Ralt had a ‘Dutch piece’ in tow who had had too much to drink and had been stuffed into a tree?
The previous year, when Hitler’s awesome war machine was poised to invade Britain, the SS’s Walter Schellenberg drew up, as we have seen, a ‘black list’ of the Reich’s most wanted: people who had crossed the Nazis already throughout Europe and had run for their lives to the relative safety of Britain. Many of the 2,694 names on the list were celebrities, famous, among other things, for open anti-Nazi statements or actions. The singer/actor Paul Robeson was there because he was not only a Communist, he was black; for both reasons, Schellenberg’s people wanted him dead. A large number on the list were home-grown Britons; people like Robeson were just passing through, in his case having made a film in South Wales shortly before the war began. But the majority were foreigners, refugees from the various European countries that Germany had invaded by the summer of 1940.
As would perhaps be expected from a list of anti-Nazi ‘subversives’, the vast majority are men. But there are 231 women in the list; could Bella be among them? This list was not known in Britain at the time. It would not be discovered until the fall of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945, but we can use it as an investigative tool today. In terms of the British hierarchy at the time, there were no women in Churchill’s cabinet, none in the higher echelons of business and positively none in the church. The home-grown women in the list were people like Virginia Woolf, famous on the literary scene, and Viscountess Rhondda and Eleanor Rathbone, politicians and philanthropists. Many of them were in the list because they had lost fathers, husbands, brothers and sweethearts in the First World War and were outspokenly anti-war as a result.
By and large, we can rule out conventional British women as potential Bellas because they were so high profile that their sudden disappearance in the summer or autumn of 1941 would have been noticed. A Dutch woman, Anita Denmer, had been writing anti-German copy for her paper in The Hague before she got out and ended up in Ventnor, Isle of Wight. She survived the war. Another female journalist who was not home-grown was Sigrid Lilian Schulz. Oddly, her name is not in the black list but it should have been. She was born in Chicago and the family moved to Berlin when she was eight. Hating all things Nazi, she steeled herself to interview both Hitler and Goering, head of the Luftwaffe. She may have been an active double agent in Berlin and telephoned journalist William Shirer on 1 September 1939 to tell him that the Germans had invaded Poland. Hurt in a later air raid, she wisely got home to Chicago and was safely there and accounted for by the time Bella died.
Moura Budberg, from Ukraine, often referred to as the ‘Mata Hari of Russia’ was an alcoholic and her life story is full of inconsistencies that do not add up. The widow of a Tsarist count before the Russian revolution, she had a torrid affair with the British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart and was imprisoned for a time in Moscow’s notorious Lubianka prison. In London by the early 1930s, she became the lover of both the writer Maxim Gorki and the novelist H.G. Wells. She is on Schellenberg’s list, but she could not possibly be Bella. She survived the Second World War too and would have been far too old for the body in the wych elm.
One of the few women in the academic section of the list, Mathilde Hertz, had a doctorate in biology and comparative physiology. Not remotely a Nazi, she was nevertheless allowed to continue working after Hitler’s takeover in Germany in 1933. Two years later, however, she was in Cambridge and had stopped working by 1937, disappearing from public life. Dora Fabian was another philosopher from Berlin and, like Bella, was a murder victim. She was born Dora Heinemann and married liberal politician Walter Fabian in 1924. She obtained her doctorate in economics and political science from the University of Geissen four years later. She became an outspoken critic of the Nazis, especially in their misogynistic views, expecting women to be loyal only to the notion of Kinder, Küche¸ Kirche (children, kitchen, church) as well as the Führer, of course. She attended the colossal rallies at Nuremberg just to watch the crowds. When the Nazis took power, Dora was arrested and, after her release, travelled west to England, reaching London by September 1933. She worked as a translator but appears to have been watched by the German embassy. Her flat was burgled twice. On 4 April 1935, she and her roommate, Mathilde Wurm, were found dead in their Great Ormond Street flat. Their bedroom door was locked and the coroner decided that the cause of death was suicide by Veronal poisoning. The substance was widely used as a sleeping pill and was available over the counter in pharmacies throughout the country. Since Dora had been supplying information to an anti-Nazi agent, Roy Ganz, there is a strong suspicion that the Gestapo, free to stroll around London in what was still peacetime, had been looking for payback for some time. But Dora was long dead when the body of Bella was stashed in the wych elm.
If the corpse in Hagley Wood was not a named refugee in the black list, could she be a spy? And, straight away, we are in to the realms of fantasy. If Van Ralt was a spy, handsomely paid by the Third Reich, there was surely every chance that his drunken girlfriend was too.
‘The whole point of a secret service,’ wrote Compton Mackenzie in his novel Water on the Brain, ‘is that it should be secret.’ In wartime Britain, there was a need for all this, but eighty years on, and despite the Freedom of Information Act (2000) there are still files in Whitehall which are closed to the public’s enquiring mind. As a result of the Second World War in particular, Britain, especially Britain’s government, became a secret society where some questions cannot be asked and if they are, no answers are forthcoming. Had they pursued an espionage angle, even the police in 1943 would have met doors closed to them even more surely than they are today.
In the inter-war period, information on Britain was being collected by the German secret service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) because that was what secret services did. The German embassy passed on all sorts of information and judging by the quality of information in Schellenberg’s Black List it was extraordinarily accurate. Home addresses, telephone numbers, even car registration details were all typed diligently in the Wilhelmstrasse offices of the SS in the summer of 1940. The Ausland (Outland) organization was a worldwide movement composed of Germans living outside Germany, who were expected to be loyal to the Führer and the Nazi cause. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy (stellvertreter) was responsible for the British arm of this, collecting random information from hiking and cycling parties who took photographs of each other in dockyards and near aerodrome hangars. The outbreak of war, of course, stopped all that. From 3 September 1939, the only effective way for a German to glean intelligence was to be parachuted in or dropped on the coast. The case of Laura Van Raalte is unique, but at least it can be argued that she was British born and, as things turned out, harmless.
‘Espionage’ wrote Michael J. Barrett, Assistant General of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with his tongue firmly in his cheek, ‘is the world’s second oldest profession and just as honourable as the first [prostitution].’ Germany’s leading spy organization, the Abwehr, had its headquarters on the Tirpitz Ufer, the embankment of the Landwehr Canal in the centre of Berlin. The word means ‘defence’ but the Abwehr was solely to do with ‘offence’, at least until the rest of the world closed in on the Third Reich by 1945. It was headed by Wilhelm Canaris, a former naval officer, who was both ambitious and competent. Unfortunately, like so many of the second rung officers of the time, he fell foul of the endless bickering and jockeying for position of Hitler’s closest subordinates, men with issues as big as their egos: Himmler, Goering, Heydrich and Goebbels.
Hitler never entirely trusted Canaris or the Abwehr and put more faith in his own black-shirted SS and the SD, which was run from 1931 by Himmler and became entangled with the various police forces of the Reich, especially the secret police, the Gestapo. It was Canaris and the Abwehr, however, who bore the responsibility for planting agents in Britain. Both ways of doing this were fraught with danger for the agents concerned and the risk of detection was high. There are hundreds of bays, inlets and coves around the British coast where a U-boat could sneak close enough to land for a man to swim ashore or row a dinghy. But Coastal Command, the Home Guard, the police and the world and his wife were watching around the clock for this; not for nothing was the country called ‘Fortress Britain’. There were gun-emplacements and barbed wire on the beaches and dunes and every port had an army of guards on permanent watch. When Dorothy O’Grady, a home-grown spy in the Isle of Wight was found wandering on the beach at Sandown, which was out of bounds, the authorities quickly jumped into action and arrested her. She was sentenced to death in 1941 under the Treachery Act because she had sabotaged telephone wires to impede troop movements. Her sentence was reduced to fourteen years in gaol after an appeal.
The alternative was for an agent to jump out of a plane and take his or her chances with a parachute. Thanks to the British invention of radar, which the Germans did not possess or even know about, we were able to locate aircraft coming over the Channel, unless they were virtually at sea level, in which case they were plainly visible from the ground, even at night. Assuming a plane could get through (and some did) the jump itself carried a huge risk. Paratroopers were trained long and hard to do this, but civilian agents less so. If they landed without injury, what then? They had to hide or bury the yards of silk and rope that had brought them down and find their way in an alien country where all the signposts had been removed just to make things difficult for people like them and their comrades-in-arms who were believed to be hard on their heels. In 1940 and even 1941, this was an important point. Operation Sealion had been shelved in the autumn of 1940, but there was no way of telling what project Hitler had up his sleeve. It is likely that the agents parachuted in were firmly of the opinion that they were a secret advance guard to the thousands very close behind them, rather as the Allied glider units were in D-Day, June 1944.
Joyce Coley cites just such a parachute drop in the context of Bella. ‘Later,’ she writes, ‘the police did get a story from Mr Basterfield who, before his call-up, had been a member of the Home Guard.’ According to Coley, he was patrolling in Hagley Wood Lane with a friend. Operating out of a hut in Halesowen, they ‘had turned out to investigate a parachute alert’. We shall look at the Bella-related results of this later, but there is nothing in the Worcester Archive to corroborate it. And we have come across the name Basterfield before. He is likely to have been the son of the widow who lived at 408 on the Halesowen Road in Hasbury, opposite the Rose and Crown where Bella, according to one wall-writing, was supposed to live. His mother was interviewed on 1 August 1943. It is surely too much of a coincidence that he was also in Hagley Wood Lane in 1941. When did he report the incident? Was he the author of the Hasbury graffito, rather enjoying the limelight?
