Most Poles did not accept the offered British naturalization, longing instead to go home once the Germans had been removed. Most of them lived in camps, without barbed wire or gun-emplacements of course, and were infamous for scrounging in their neighbourhoods, especially firewood. Over a short period, they moved to hostels and disappeared into civilian life, setting up delicatessens, cafes and clubs that we still see in all major cities and larger towns today. They even had a Polish university in Earl’s Court and twenty-one schools for their children. There were Polish comedians and nearly 200 Polish pubs. Inevitably, some locals took exception. An alleged 56 per cent of the nation wanted them to go home, but the point was that the Poles were very like the British – white, Christian and rabidly anti-German. To those who complained about Polish demands, the magazine Truth had an answer:
A little sensitive? Are we surprised?
Four times partitioned, murdered, robbed, despised …
No man has taken Oxford from us, yet;
No man says ‘Give us Scotland, and forget.’
But if he did, I fancy we should strike
The same proud poses that you so dislike.
The Czechs were regarded in much the same way, although there were fewer of them than Poles, but the Jews might be regarded as a special case. When Oswald Mosely’s Fascists had marched through Cable Street in London’s East End, intent on giving local Jews a hiding, large numbers of gentile East Enders backed the Jews against the blackshirts. But it was not always like that. Such was the intensity – and longstanding – of anti-Semitism that some people could fully accept that Bella was killed by a Jew, just as their grandfathers had believed that a Jew was Jack the Ripper. Between 1933 and 1939, 60,000 Jews came to Britain, all of them on the run from the Nazis. Three future prime ministers – Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher – all put up refugees in their homes. Among the Jews were intellectuals whose names appeared in Walter Schellenberg’s ‘Black Book’. ‘Thank you, Hitler,’ said the Minister of Pensions, ‘for sending us men like these.’
The arrival of Poles and Czechs in Britain as a result of Hitler’s invasion of both countries added to the numbers of foreigners who could potentially cause trouble. Two spectacular examples were Henryk Malinowski and Marion Grundkowski of the Free Polish Army. Deserters, they got involved in London’s racketeering and were hanged in 1946 for the shooting of rival Reuben Martirosoff (‘Russian Robert’) in Notting Hill. Technically, the war in Europe was over by then (November 1945) but the Poles had not gone home, potentially to face the music over desertion, but shared a flat in Ilford, Essex. The pair were easily caught for the murder and proceeded to blame each other. Under the law of joint culpability, whoever had actually pulled the trigger was irrelevant – both men had to hang. This kind of killing was, of course, very different from the murder of Bella, but we shall have cause to return to London’s underworld later in this book.
Any of the strangers passing through the Hagley area in the summer and autumn of 1941 could have been Bella’s killer, but there is no hard evidence against anyone. One group, however, stood out; they were the Children of the Moon.
Chapter 9
The Children of the Moon
The Reverend Burns’ churchwarden, A.H. Hodgetts, took the stranger-killer theme in a specific direction. With the police drawing blanks in all directions and the graffiti on local walls increasing, fireside and barside detectives all over the area were free to speculate. Hodgetts spoke to the local press in the early 1950s when the case was already cold and the war over – ‘I think [Bella] was a gypsy and that she was tried and condemned by her tribe of Romanies.’ His photograph appeared in the Wolverhampton Express and Star putting the finishing touches to a grave plot in Hagley churchyard, as though his theory was laying Bella’s murder to rest. And in one sense, I believe it was.
Just as the Jews became scapegoats for the atrocities in Whitechapel in 1888 – and were blamed for both world wars and much else by certain elements of an unhinged Gentile society – so the gypsies were everybody’s bugbear in the 1940s. Sensibilities have changed. Today, they are the travelling people, or travellers; Roma whose status has been elevated. In Britain, as elsewhere, they are regarded as a minority with the same raft of human rights as anybody else. But it was not always like that …
In August 1621, the playwright Ben Jonson presented his Masque of the Gypsies Metamorphosed to James I as summer entertainment for the court. ‘Gaze upon them,’ the narrator says, ‘as on the offspring of Ptolemy, begotten upon several Cleopatras in their several countries.’ Jonson had no first-hand knowledge of these travellers, who had begun to drift into western Europe, probably from India, in the fifteenth century, but he bought in to the commonly held belief that they were originally Egyptian, hence ‘gypsies’ and that they possessed extraordinary skills in magic not understood by most people. Those not involved in producing spectacle for the king had a more disparaging view of them – ‘wretched, wandering wily vagabonds’. They seemed to be everywhere in late Elizabethan England, their faces painted red and yellow, their bodies, horses and carts dangling with ribbons and bells. The magic angle was one that they themselves promoted because it gave them an edge in their rare dealings with locals. A man would think twice before upsetting them in case they put the evil eye or some sort of spell on him.
From the eleventh century onwards, we have occasional reports of gypsies all over Europe, renowned as ventriloquists and fortune-tellers. The high spot of Medieval life was the local fair that might last for days; the gypsies would have been at all of them. It is likely that whole tribes were driven west by the conquests of Timur-e-Leng (Tamburlaine) in the fourteenth century and their sudden presence in the west was not appreciated. In Paris in 1427 they were refused entry to the city. Individuals were rounded up and gaoled at La Chapelle. They were cajoux, undesirables.
By Henry VIII’s reign they had reached England and Scotland, where they were known as Saracens, western Christendom’s enemies for centuries. A law of 1530 spelt out the problem that had not, even by the 1940s, completely gone away:
For as much afore this time diverse and many outlandish people calling themselves Egyptians, using no craft nor fact of merchandise, have come into this realm and gone from shire to shire … in great company and used great subtle and crafty [illegal] means to deceive the people … and have committed many and heinous felonies and robberies to the great hurt of decent people …
Those already in England were given sixteen days to leave. The fact that this did not happen tells us a great deal about the more liberal and humane attitudes of the public in comparison with government and church. Even when the gypsies tried to leave, however, port authorities at Boston, London, Hull and Newcastle were hostile to them and would not provide ships. Anyone sheltering a gypsy was liable to be fined £40 (over £25,000 today) after another parliamentary act in 1554. Any gypsy who was caught was to be summarily executed – no trial, no defence.
Yet, the ‘children of the moon’, as they were called, survived. They were reported in large numbers at the Devil’s Arse in Derbyshire and on the open fields at Blackheath in south London. The nomadic lifestyle appealed to locals stuck in a drab existence of monotony and some joined the travelling bands. Several people called themselves Egyptians but were actually just vagabonds. Elizabeth’s government, with no effective police force or even a standing army, feared the mob – ‘the many-headed monster’ – and the children of the moon were just the tip of the iceberg.
The dialect of the gypsies was a conglomeration of the various languages of Europe and, rather like the street-talk of underground groups in cities the world over, it acquired a status of its own, increasing the ‘them and us’ attitudes of the travellers and sedentary people. In the first book written about the gypsies, in 1547, Andrew Boorde wrote ‘they be light-fingered and use picking [pockets], they have little manner and evil lodging and yet they be pleasant dancers.’ There have been suggestions that the origins of the folk cult of Morris dancing (from Moorish, the gypsies in Spain) lies with the ‘Egyptians’.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century gypsies were linked inextricably with something that was to surface again in the case of Bella, an involvement with witchcraft and the black arts. Thomas Harman wrote of their ‘deep dissembling and long hiding and covering their deep deceitful practices …’ When Thomas Dekker wrote Lanthorn and Candlelight in 1608, he included the odd observation that gypsy women wore ‘rags and patched filthy mantles uppermost’ but that their undergarments ‘are handsome and in fashion’.
It was the sheer numbers that alarmed the Elizabethan and Jacobean authorities. Groups of thirty to forty were common, but some were over a hundred strong and must have caused alarm in the small villages and even towns they passed through. Dekker accused the gypsies of bloodthirstiness – ‘nothing can satisfy them but the very heartblood of those they kill’. He was actually talking about the slaughter of animals, not people. They carried long-bladed knives called skenes (as in the Scottish sgian dubh) but every man in Elizabethan England carried a knife and we cannot read anything sinister into this. Naturally, according to Dekker, the barns where gypsies slept ‘are beds of incest, whoredom and adulteries and of all other black and deadly-damned impieties’. Traditionally, in the travelling communities marriage was not for life – couples divorced by shaking hands over the carcass of a slaughtered animal and went their separate ways.
In the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, the gypsies were analysed for the first time as anything other than as a dangerous and unwelcome nuisance. Jacob Bryant decided in 1785 that they originated from India, but most of them could be found in the Balkans, especially Romania. George Borrow romanticized their existence in his two novels Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857) and produced an English-Romany dictionary, Romano Lavo-Lil, in 1874. A lover of the open air, which he called ‘the wind on the heath’, he was a friend of prize-fighters and dodgy horse-dealers and was largely shunned by the literati as a result.
Borrow was criticized by the next generation of Gypsylorists who doubted his veracity and found him altogether too quaint and ‘twee’. As the nineteenth century wore on, more people came to regard gypsies as a vanishing breed, rather as white Americans saw the plains tribes they were rounding up on to reservations at the time. Ironically, Borrow’s romanticized view of Romany led to gypsy concerts, fancy dress and parties becoming the thing to do with the ‘in’ crowd. At one concert in 1850, even before Borrow went into print, while the song We Gypsies Have a Life of Ease was receiving a rapturous reception in a Birmingham music hall, only a few miles away, genuine gypsies were being turfed out of their encampment – yet again.
Despite the work of the Gypsylorists, most people’s awareness of gypsies in the later Victorian period was newspaper accounts of trouble. Even as late as the twentieth century, it was a commonly held belief that while all gypsies were thieves, they especially stole children. They did not eat them (that custom was reserved, according to the Nazis, for the Jews) but converted them to their own way of life as a race apart. The abduction of children had its origins in the nursery, a bogeyman to frighten children into obedience or (however unlikely!) sleep – ‘Go to sleep, or the diddikois will get you.’ Technically, a didikoi (spellings vary) is only part gypsy. Social groupings among the tribes are complicated, with pure-blooded, half-breed, poshrats and didikois. The bogeyman gypsy was a frequent theme in literature and even carried on into the films of the silent era. It is highly likely that churchwarden Hodgetts of Hagley saw at least one of these as a child and believed it implicitly. Stolen by Gypsies gripped audiences in Birmingham in 1905, as did Kidnapped for Revenge eight years later. As the philologist Heinrich Grellman had written as early as 1783, why would gypsies steal children? They ‘have enough brats of their own’.
By the early twentieth century, gypsies were considered a race, sharing a common culture, manners and customs. The gypsy language, usually today called Roma, was derived from Sanskrit, an Indian language. Other travellers joined the bands, especially the Irish, whose only real link with genuine gypsies was an instinctive distrust of authority and a love of horses.
Actual crime statistics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tell a distinctive story. In a four-year period, out of 1,682 prosecutions, 216 were for theft, burglary and receiving stolen goods; 349 concerned obscenity and drunkenness; and 76 involved cruelty to women, children and horses. Only eighteen were linked with murder and (since it was still a capital offence) suicide.
The ‘gutter-scum Gypsies’, the ‘off-scourings of the lowest form of society’, as George Smith described them in the 1880s, were genuinely guilty of a whole variety of crimes in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, but none of them included murder and none carried more severe punishment that a fine or one year’s imprisonment. Drunkenness was common, as was neglect of children, and fighting (which could lead to death) relatively frequent. The point is that exactly the same pattern of misdemeanours was the norm for many elements of the working class. The grinding poverty of Victorian England, the relentless rhythm of the machines, forced men and women to drink as an escape from the downward spiral of life. It was only centuries-old racism and fear of the different that made men like churchwarden Hodgetts point a finger at the gypsies.
There had been an upsurge of foreigners drifting to Britain in the years before the First World War and they were not welcomed by British gypsies, despite claiming to be of the same ethnic heritage. Polish gypsies were reported near Birmingham in 1904, and when the Surrey police tried to break up a camp of Serbians near Esher, the travellers unleashed their six dancing bears on them and His Majesty’s Constabulary beat a hasty retreat!
The law crowded in against the gypsies, whether home-grown or newly arrived. America, supposedly welcoming everyone’s ‘huddled masses’ refused to take them, embarking as it was on a new isolationism, so that many emigrant-wannabes had to stay in Britain. The Law of Property Act 1925 made it an offence to ‘drive any carriage, wagon, cart or truck or to set up camp and light a fire’ in certain areas, thereby severely curtailing the gypsies’ freedom of movement.
They had their defenders, especially in the race-goers who liked a gypsy presence at Epsom or Goodwood. Four years after the above-named Act was passed, Oliver Locker-Lampson defended them in court and won the undying gratitude of all travellers. Locker-Lampson may have been an eccentric – he led a motorized cavalcade against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war – but he represented a new and more humane stance in the case of gypsies. The partial removal of the vagrancy law in 1935 helped their cause too and explains why there was a gypsy encampment near Hagley at all.
The biggest gypsy camp nearby was Black Patch. Officially, travellers’ links with the area, in Halesowen, Birmingham, came to an end in 1907 after the landowners evicted them and turned the area into a respectable park. Esau Smith had been elected king of the gypsies there in 1901 and his widow Henty took over the mantle as queen. The royal caravan was burned down in the ongoing trouble over the eviction and Henty put a curse on anyone who built on Black Patch. There was an ongoing dispute, however, and gypsies kept returning to the area for years afterwards, certainly during the inter-war period.
One of the most common charges against gypsies concerned poaching; we can imagine that the gypsies parked near Hagley in 1941 had little compunction about setting the odd trap in Lord Cobham’s woods. Driving without a licence (although the vast majority still drove the traditional horse-drawn vardo wagon), lighting fires too close to a road and hawking without a licence were all fairly commonplace.
There are a number of references to gypsies in the police files. Mary Lee, a possible Bella who was drifting from man to man and pursued by the lovesick Light Infantryman Heywood was probably of Romany stock, Lee being perhaps the most common of all travellers’ surnames. Another potential Bella was Ann Forrest. She lived with her husband (unnamed) in West Hagley in July 1941 and both of them worked at Spout Farm in the area. The pair were known to have frequent, violent rows; a neighbour, Mrs Lewis, heard screams and once saw ‘the female’ (presumably Ann) with bleeding neck wounds. Part of the problem was that residents who did not actually employ gypsies regarded them as a race apart, describing them almost as animals in a zoo, with terms like ‘the female’, ‘the male’ and ‘the young’. It transpired, however, that Ann Forrest was 5ft 7in tall with ‘a nice set of even teeth’ and she was found alive in April 1944.
As late as 1949, memories of travellers in the Hagley area were still coming to light. John Swindon, a library caretaker of Church Road, Smethwick, had seen a soldier and a ‘plain woman’ (probably a euphemism for gypsy) get off a bus and go into Hagley Wood on 16 June 1942. William Sherwood, of Hancox Street, Worley, told the police in September 1949 that he had seen gypsies fighting in a field called the Nimmings next to Hagley Wood. Whatever information he had led to DI Williams, DI Mobbs, Superintendent Inight and the local bobbies Skerratt and Pound visiting the wood with him on 2 October.
Jack Pound himself had visited the Nimmings in December 1942 (before Bella’s body was found) and talked to a family called ‘Smith’. The fact that the police reports have the words in speech marks indicates that they did not believe it for a moment! There was one horse-drawn wagon and two canvas tents. Three men there were employed cutting sugar beet for Felix Tate of Holliers Farm nearby. The woman with them was in her fifties.
The Smiths must have been making a nuisance of themselves elsewhere because Constable Benbow of Severn Stoke, between Pershore and Malvern, was also nosing around them. He saw no children and no signs of bad behaviour. Arkus and Wisdom Smith were polite to him, as were the women Ellen Smith, Ivy Butler and another called Davies. Benbow’s report has one cryptic, unexplained (and, today, unacceptable!) line on somebody else in their company – Bill Fletcher, ‘a Dago, who was one of the suspects in the case’. As there is no list of suspects as such in the Worcester Archive, and no other mention of Fletcher, it is difficult to know what this is all about.
The Smiths had left litter in the area, having thrown rubbish into Hagley Wood itself and they were possibly the same family who had been seen by other eyewitnesses. Flora Reece of Pen Orchard Farm, Clent, remembered them at the Nimmings. There were two women, one tall and thin, about 40, and the other in her twenties, with blonde hair and a fresh complexion. John Palmer, licensee of the George Inn, Halesowen, who might be expected to pick up more gossip than most people, remembered ‘there was some talk afterwards that the gypsy woman had been found and she had gone away to have a baby’. Was this a garbled misremembering of a newspaper cutting to the effect that Bella had once given birth? Mrs Sarah Porter, of Hayley Green, Halesowen, told police that gypsies had bought from her shop soon before the body was found. The women she saw wore shawls and one of them had a ration book in the name of Davis.
Despite the perceived prejudice of locals, the gypsies are a scrupulously clean people. A plate from which a dog has eaten will never be used again by humans. Such an item is mochadi, defiled. A similar ritual is involved in childbirth and female underclothes, but these vary slightly from one group of families to another. One custom that survived the centuries and was probably still in use in Hagley in 1941 was the burning of a caravan belonging to a deceased gypsy. The fear of ghosts, which is a widespread human condition, is particularly strong among the travelling people. Among their traditions is the wearing of holed pebbles, called adderstones, to protect against the Devil. Meeting a donkey or a woman with a squint on the road presaged death, while the moon, frogs, falling stars and white horses all prefigure health and happiness.
