‘If I were a Blackbird’ and the sillier stories

Joyce Coley came to the Hagley Wood mystery with the zeal of a local historian and was able to contact people who knew, those with an understanding of Midlands culture. The problem is that the war was a long time ago; those who lived through it still alive today were children at the time, often blissfully ignorant of events unfolding, even on their own doorstep.

Ms Coley puts flesh on some of the infuriatingly naked bones left by Donald McCormick, but, unfortunately, she raises more questions than she answers. Above all, her pamphlet Bella: An Unsolved Murder is a collection of stories that show how gullible the public is and how nonsense surrounds unsolved mysteries and only makes the chance of solution ever less likely. McCormick’s teacher and the company executive who heard screams in Hagley Wood on 16 July 1941 become the even vaguer ‘two men … walking in the woods’ without names or a date. The woman whose identity card was found near the wych elm is dismissed in a brief remark – ‘There is no further work on how her card came to be placed there’ – which begs all sorts of questions.

Coley reports another story to which we have already alluded and which is most unlikely, given the national paranoia in Britain in 1941. The Mr Basterfield who lived opposite the Rose and Crown in Hasbury, waiting for his call-up, joined the local Home Guard and found himself in a scout hut in Halesowen. Word came through that a parachute drop had been made in the area (again, we have no date) and the supposed target was the Clent Hills, to the south of Hagley Wood. Basterfield and a comrade were searching the area and noticed a car parked in a lay-by opposite a gate that led into the wood. There are no details of the car, colour or registration but there was an airman at the wheel, easily identifiable by his powder blue uniform. Next to him was a woman lying under a greatcoat (presumably also RAF blue). Basterfield tapped on the driver’s window and the airman held up a card (presumably his identity card) and the Home Guardsman told him to move on. When they returned (we are not told how much later) the car, driver and passenger had gone.

It is difficult to know where to start with this snippet. It is conceivable that the airman and his girlfriend had stopped for a bit of ‘nooky’ in the lay-by. There were airmen at Hartlebury not far away and although journeys were always suspect, short distances were possible even with petrol rationing. The Home Guardsmen seem to have been easily fobbed off with an identity card they could only have seen for seconds and do not seem to have engaged with the car’s occupants at all. How much of the woman could they see under the greatcoat? Presumably, her face betrayed no sign of fear, panic or anything untoward other than possibly embarrassment at being caught ‘in flagrante’ in the car. I have had to use the word ‘presumably’ simply because so much hard evidence is missing.

And how does this probably innocuous sighting fit with the parachute harness? We have already seen the meticulous attention paid to aliens by locals, civilian, police and the military in the period, which is why almost all the Abwehr/Lena agents were caught. What has any of this to do with Bella? Was she the woman in the car and did the airman, having already been seen by the Home Guardsmen, kill her and stuff her in the tree? We do not know from Coley what, if any, follow-up there was from the police, but the whole thing smells very strongly of red herring!

Then, we have the version of the oddly named Warwick Aston Plant; the story of the impoverished singer alluded to in Chapter 5. Joyce Coley interviewed this man when writing her book. His family kept the Crown, a genteel pub in the High Street, Brierley Hill, but Plant himself went into a career in accountancy, his company having offices in Bromsgrove and Dudley. He was still living at home with his parents in 1941 and one day, having gone home for lunch, noticed a little woman in scruffy clothes sitting alone in the pub. She had asked Plant’s mother, the landlady, if she could play the piano and sing. She had a beautiful voice and came twice a week to entertain the lunchtime guests. Her favourite song was ‘If I were a blackbird’, a haunting love song from Scotland. The woman also sang in the Mitre in Stourbridge and Plant once saw her working with a man in fields near Hagley Wood. He remembered that ‘Bella’ was the nickname her father had given her because of her beautiful voice. She lived in rented accommodation in Birmingham Street, Stourbridge and her landlord was a drunk.

‘Bella’s’ back-story is as implausible as the parachute harness. She had joined a concert party touring Europe and the party had come to England, unable to find work once war had broken out. ‘Bella’s’ shoes were very worn and Mrs Plant gave her a pair of hers, crepe-soled. One day, the singer turned up with a black eye, the work, she told the Plants, of her landlord.

Then ‘Bella’ stopped coming to the Crown. At his mother’s insistence, Warwick Plant looked for her in the Mitre, but had no luck.

In 1944, he was home on leave from the RAF and his sister showed him a copy of the Daily Sketch. There was an article in which Professor Webster, the Home Office pathologist, was asking for aid in identifying the shoes found with the body in the wych elm. With it was a photograph of the shoes, which Plant immediately recognized as the pair given to ‘Bella’ by their mother. The sister contacted the paper and the police but to no avail. Interestingly, Joyce Coley’s search for the Webster article in the Daily Sketch turned up nothing.

Once again, we have vague memories without hard facts that always bedevil unsolved murder cases. Whoever the singer in the Crown was, she did not end up in a wych elm in Hagley Wood. And the shoes that the Plant children remembered so vividly, the ones that were brown and cream, could not have been found with the body. Webster’s report is quite clear that they were blue.

When the shoe factor Mr Cogzell contacted the Forensics Department of Birmingham University he got nowhere. Cogzell was faced with a wall of red tape. Letters were unanswered; phone calls were not returned. Eventually, in some desperation, he went unannounced to the department and was given short shrift. Professor Webster was dead and his successor, Dr Griffiths, told Cogzell there was no skeleton and no shoes, even though both were regarded by Webster as prize exhibits, still capable, at least in theory, of producing answers. Joyce Coley has her own theory about this unhelpful volte-face on the part of officialdom. Someone she met had always found Griffiths polite and sociable so his attitude made no sense. ‘Had he been told not to talk?’ Coley wonders, opening the door to conspiracy theories in a case that is already infuriating in its vagueness. A more plausible explanation is that an over-officious or lackadaisical underling had failed to pass Cogzell’s requests on and his suddenly turning up at Griffiths’ door out of the blue would have annoyed anybody.

The Hagley Wood case generated a host of letters from all over the world. One of the most bizarre came from Toronto, Canada, posing a series of questions – ‘Hasn’t the answer been known to those who matter for many years?’ Unfortunately, Ms Coley provides no details here. When was the letter written? To whom was it written? And in which newspaper, if any, did it appear?

Yet again, we are in the realms of conspiracy theories, the notion that there is a secret society – or societies – who operate under the radar. They are powerful people who manipulate others and only surface occasionally to cover up mistakes – probably the finding of Bella’s body.

‘Didn’t he die a year before she was found?’

This presumably refers to Bella’s killer and is perhaps a nod in the direction of Jack Mossop who died in an asylum in 1942.

‘When the answer was found, wasn’t it allowed to rest out of kindness to those, dead and alive, who were involved for the most part unwillingly in a situation that was not of their making? Aren’t these the questions you should ask?’

Certainly, this is the attitude of the British government in the context of ‘sensitive’ material. When I wrote to Scotland Yard several years ago in connection with the Craig and Bentley murder case of 1952, I was told that the Metropolitan police could not provide any information. Neither could the curator of the Black Museum, who remained suspicious of me throughout our brief and unhelpful interview. ‘A lot of shit’s been written about this case and most of it has come our way,’ was his bottom line. Fifty-year rules, seventy-five-year rules, hundred-year rules may make life easier for those who would rather forget the past, but unfortunately that includes thieves, rapists and murderers, all of whom can rest easy in the certain knowledge that they are protected by obsolete and arcane thinking.

‘What was the connection,’ continued the Canadian contact, ‘between Hagley Wood, Germany, Canada and Holland?’ And now we are back in Donald McCormick country, a hint, a rumour, a suspicious Nazi too easily found and too ready to talk. Joyce Coley may believe she has solved the Canadian connection, and she links the two elements in her pamphlet. One of the two men who guarded the wych elm on the night of 19/20 April 1943 was Peter Douglas-Osborne. At the end of the war, he found himself stationed briefly in Holland (the Dutch connection that will never go away!) and met a group of Canadian soldiers who ‘had been inspecting the records of the German Secret Service. They were trying to find out what happened to some of our SOE personnel.’1

The Special Operations Executive was the brainchild of Winston Churchill and was divided into two sections. SO1 were the black propagandists we have met already, concocting all kinds of nonsense to confuse the Reich. SO2 were the agents, female as well as male, who were parachuted behind enemy lines to carry out espionage and sabotage, usually working with various Resistance units. The Canadians (not part of SOE) had looted a house in The Hague and were taking the documents they had found back to Canada. There is no doubt that documentation relating to the German secret service was found in those hectic and confused months following actual fighting, but a vast amount had been destroyed. All over the Reich and its occupied territories, filing cabinets were smashed and papers burned. Of the estimated 20,000 copies of the Special Search List GB (the Black Book) only two could be found in 1945. Osborne would have us believe that he and the Canadians swapped war stories on the boat crossing the Channel. He mentioned the body in the wych elm and they told him of ‘the many spies who had worked in the area’.2

What they told him, however, chimes exactly with the McCormick version we know to be false, about the agent called Clara dropped by parachute between Kidderminster and Birmingham. The whole business is as disappointing as it is suspicious.

Ms Coley has a cutting from an anonymous national newspaper referring to the Hagley Wood case of ‘more than 50 years’ ago, so it must date from the 1990s. Alongside a photograph of Douglas-Osborne, the article by John Simpson attempts to put flesh on Bella’s bones. Douglas-Osborne’s father was a special constable in the Stourbridge area in the 1940s (which might explain why Peter volunteered to guard the wych elm) and was annoyed in the 1960s when a new outbreak of graffiti prompted a conversation in the Douglas-Osborne household in which the ex-special refused not only to contribute but to allow any further mention of the subject. The implication of Simpson’s article is that Douglas-Osborne senior had somehow obtained dental records from the Luftwaffe which match the unusual dentition of the body in Hagley Wood:

[She was] a highly educated member of Hitler and Goering’s occult practices. We can suspect that she was a spy because Goering … was interested in any information concerning aircraft production. And with Longbridge works, Rolls Royce at Derby and the RAF storage at Hartlebury, Hagley was the perfect place for all round access to the aircraft production business. The records also revealed the woman had been to Heidelburg and Cambridge Universities to learn perfect English and there were no further records about her after 1940 … the mystery is certain to baffle detectives and Hagley people for years to come.3

About the only thing that makes some sense in this article is the last sentence! The Luftwaffe report surely might have come from Douglas-Osborne junior (via his Canadian buddies) not his father. The mention of Goering has echoes of Clara Bauerle, but of all the Nazi elite, the Renaissance man Goering had no interest in the occult, any more than Clara did. It is quite bizarre to believe that dental records of agents could be found in the ruins of the Reich – once again, we are in the neat situation of referring to the only really distinctive thing about the body in the wych elm – her teeth.

‘Who were the pro-Nazi sympathizers in Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stourbridge before and during the war? Who knew the Dutch girl’s man friend in Stourbridge?’ the newspaper article asks.

The Fifth Column of Nazi sympathizers which worried the authorities so much in 1939–45 was largely a myth born of paranoia. At the top of society, a number of aristocrats, including the ex-king, Edward VIII, quietly approved of Hitler without really grasping what National Socialism was all about. Hitler opposed Communism in the 1930s and that was music to the ears of the British aristocracy and gentry who saw, in Karl Marx’s insane dogma, the end of civilization. Then there were those who admired Germany’s bounce back from defeat in the First World War, making the German economy stronger than that of Britain or France. Still others applauded Hitler’s anti-Semitism. For centuries, Jews had been excluded from Britain and when they returned, they lived in ghettoes. Their sudden arrival from Eastern Europe in the 1880s for example, drove the Irish out of East London. The Right Club published books extolling Nazism – and Mussolini’s Fascisti – and urged ever-closer cooperation with Germany.

Once the war began, however, things changed. There were still Fascists like Oswald Mosley, but he was interned under the swingeing regulations of 18B. The Mitford family, with Unity as the ‘Storm Troop Maiden’, were regarded as embarrassing freaks it was best to avoid. In the face of a German invasion, a genuine reality until well into 1942, people of all social classes rallied round Churchill and the flag. Suspicious behaviour was observed and reported. Action was taken. Even John Amery, the son of a cabinet minister, was hanged for making propaganda broadcasts for the enemy – but that was in Germany and Italy, not the industrial Midlands near Hagley Wood.

In the summer of 1940, the Ministry of Information set up the Silent Column, a propaganda outfit designed to scotch rumour and defeatism. Most of the so-called Fifth Columnists were actually stupid and careless people who would no more help the Nazi cause than fly. Mr Knowall, Miss Leaky Mouth, Mr Pride in Prophecy, Miss Teacup Whisperer and Mr Glumpot sound like spoof characters made up by the Puritan John Bunyan in the seventeenth century; in fact, they were the fictional names given to the unthinking by Duff Cooper’s Ministry of Information.

Yet the Canadian correspondent to the Bugle would have us believe that there was an entire gau operating in the Birmingham/Stourbridge area, spearheaded perhaps by Bella’s British boyfriend. This brings us back, as always, to Donald McCormick and the testimony of the almost certainly fictional agent Lehrer whom Herr Rathgeb had told McCormick had a lover called Clara who had a lover in Stourbridge.

The Canadian in the letter which Joyce Coley quotes then gets to details:

Who was the Dutch girl known as Clara?

She was not Dutch, she was German. There were no female Dutch agents dropped in Britain or anywhere else during the war.

Did Clara work for the Abwehr?

According to Josef Jakobs, yes, she did, but who knows how much we can rely on his testimony? He had after all been caught and was being interrogated by MI6 (never a rosy prospect).

Did Clara drop in on her old friends in 1941?

We have no way of answering this because we do not know who Clara was supposed by the writer to be. If Clara is Jakobs’ girlfriend, then the answer is no. He told MI6 that the parachute drop never happened and we know that she was still working with a number of orchestras in Germany in 1941 and 1942.

Did Clara visit anyone in Stourbridge?

See above.

Who died insane in 1942?

According to Anna of Claverley, this was her husband Jack Mossop and we have seen already how shaky his story was and her re-telling of it.

Was Karl Dickenoff [sic] really a Canadian?

This is McCormick’s version. Hans Caesar appears to have been German and even McCormick does not suggest any connection between him and Bella.

What did he do while he was living in Edgbaston?

He carried on his trade as a jeweller as he had before the war.

What happened to the dead woman’s child and who was the father?

This is impossible to answer. Professor Webster believed that Bella had given birth at least once but clearly could tell no more from her skeleton.

There are those on both sides of the Atlantic and in both hemispheres who you could ask these questions but why?

And we are back in the land of international conspiracies.

There is an eternal justice beyond earthly laws.

Perhaps, but writing garbled rubbish like this is not going to get us any nearer to any kind of justice for Bella.