She dispelled the notion that the public was fascinated by the case of Bella because of newspaper misprints referring to the ‘witch elm’ by mistake. ‘In all those chalk writings,’ she told McCormick, ‘the word was “wych elm” spelt perfectly correctly.’ This, of course, is not true. The writer who jokingly referred to the killer as Jack the Ripper spelt it ‘witch elm’. J.H. Jones wrote ‘Wyce’ before he corrected it and Raymond Boffey managed ‘Wic Hlm’ before DI Williams told him how to spell it. These are the only three examples of handwriting in the police files (which of course, Margaret Murray had not seen). All the others are typewritten and who knows how many unconscious spelling changes happened during that process.
Margaret Murray wrote to Professor Webster ‘but he offered no encouragement in my theory’. What was the theory? The Egyptologist contended that placing a body in the hollow of a tree was associated with witchcraft. The cult of tree worship was ancient and linked with sacrifices. We have discussed this already, in Chapter 1. Dr Murray believed that witchcraft, however much it had become watered down and bastardized by the twentieth century, was a legacy of the Old Religion before Christianity. In other words, it was the polytheistic faith of the Celts. But, as we know, the Celts worshipped the oak and the mistletoe, not the elm. The Celtic priests, the Druids, held their ceremonies in sacred groves, not near single trees, and there is no record of bodies being sacrificed in this way. Afficionados of cult cinema will be familiar with Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) in which a human virgin (the unlikely Edward Woodward) is burnt alive inside a huge wicker cage to appease the gods of the harvest. Julius Caesar, the geographer Strabo and a handful of others refer to this horrific custom, but no one seems to have witnessed it. And the whole point about such sacrifices, be they human or animal, is that the victim is still alive when caged, not dead. ‘The wych elm,’ says Murray/McCormick, ‘is also significant in terms of witchcraft lore.’ No, it is not. Then, interestingly, ‘Whoever committed this murder must have known about the hollow in the tree.’ Perhaps … or was it Bella herself who knew about it?
Having dismissed the graffiti as so many hoaxes, Dr Murray asserts that Bella and Luebella are witches’ names. She had compiled lists of attendees of covens and sabbats over several centuries and had come to the conclusion that the eight most common (with variants) were: Ann, Alice, Christian, Elizabeth, Ellen, Joan, Margaret, Marion. If we add in the variants, we have twenty-two more. They are simply common female names, many of them belonging to saints. Where do Bella and Luebella come from? Variants of Elizabeth, along with Eliza, Isobel, Isabella and Betty. In her book The Witch Cult in Western Europe written in 1921, Dr Murray cites the names of 646 witches from the trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are seventy-eight Elizabeths with a number of variants and forty Isobels with a number of variants. Neither Bella nor Luebella occurs at all. This is a classic example of misinterpreting the evidence which Dr Murray warns us against in connection with ghosts.
Warming to her theme, the Egyptologist tells us that Halesowen is particularly associated with witchcraft:
On the golf course at Mucklow Hill … there is supposed to be a particular patch of ground that has the reputation of being haunted. Many people over the years have reported having had a feeling of something peculiar happening to them when they walk over it, a feeling that someone or something else is present invisibly.
Quaestor reports that, according to Anna of Claverley, the officer, the Dutch spy and the trapeze artist drove Bella down Mucklow Hill on the way to her death or burial in Hagley Wood. That said, the notion of a haunted golf course is completely at odds with Dr Murray’s contempt for the existence of ghosts in her autobiography.
Margaret Murray was not an expert in murder and I believe her interpretation of Bella’s last resting place is wrong. She was clearly of the opinion that witchcraft was alive and well in the England of 1950 as, presumably, it had been for generations. That, in itself, is a highly debatable contention, as were many of the theories in the various books that she had written.
In terms of folklore, Worcestershire seems surprisingly devoid of supernatural memories. The standing stones on the Hagley estate are not some forgotten henge, but a folly erected in the 1750s at a time when the Druids and Celts were experiencing a revival. If haunted Mucklow is widely believed locally, it has not reached the level of compendium books on the subject. Bromsgrove has the tale of Sir Ryalas who killed a huge, vicious boar nearby and he was, it is true, prompted to do so by a woman in a tree (very much alive) who turned out to be a witch. And sacrifice of a sort was once carried out in the county’s hopfields when a couple were ‘buried’ annually under hops in a crib before being ritually resurrected, symbolizing the cycle of growth. At Kidderminster, a white witch called Becky Swan was visited by a black cat at some vague point in the mid-nineteenth century. After three days, she was found burned to death in her house, the cat vanishing up the chimney as neighbours arrived.
It is difficult to find in any of this any serious folklore which might have its echoes in Hagley Wood in the 1940s.
The heyday of the witch fever was the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Reformation which began with Martin Luther in 1517 had unleashed the monster of Puritanism, creating two armed camps, Catholic and Protestant, who literally fought each other all over Europe until at least 1648. With a loss of faith and competing bias from both sides spewing forth ever-increasing bile from the pulpits, congregations became lost, confused and frightened. God was no longer in His Heaven. Frantically trying to defend itself, the Catholic church created the Inquisition and the fanatical torturers of the Jesuits, accusing innocent people of worshipping the Devil rather than God, evil rather than good. The various Protestant churches did the same.
In England, legislation began in earnest in the early reign of Elizabeth and the rest of the sixteenth century was littered with printed pamphlets, most of which carried the title ‘A true record of …’ whereas in fact almost all of it was nonsense. The law against witchcraft became ever harsher. In 1604, using witchcraft to search for treasure or lost property was punishable by death. So was injuring a person by the same means. Taking bodies out of graves and conjuring evil spirits led to the gallows too, as did ‘provoking a woman to unlawful love’ by means of potions. All this was sanctioned by a Puritan parliament obsessed with the evils of ‘popery’ and presided over by a religious bigot (James I) who knew that witches existed and were trying to kill him. The line from the new translation of the Bible which James commissioned in 1611 that probably pleased him most was ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ (Exodus 22:18).
Years before this, two sexually repressed monks, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, had written Malleus Maleficarum (the Hammer of the Witches) for Pope Innocent VIII. It contained all kinds of lurid and juicy stories about incubi and succubae and is one of the most misogynistic works ever written. As woman had brought about man’s fall through the weakness of Eve in the Garden of Eden, so women were most likely, in the fifteenth–seventeenth centuries, to worship the Devil and practise blood sacrifice.
Because the accusations of witchcraft could be made so easily and because they were so difficult to deny, we are left with the sense that nobody survived. It has echoes in the ‘witch-craze’ of the McCarthy era in post-war America and today’s cancel culture. Pointing a finger is easy and infectious. In fact, if we examine the legal cases of Essex, the most witch-haunted county of all in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of the 291 people accused of witchcraft, 151 were found not guilty. Of those found guilty, 55 were imprisoned and 74 were executed.
Wood of various trees was indeed used in witch rituals, as often for good by white witches as evil by their black sisters. This is the element of witchcraft which is linked with holistic and herbal medicine and lies vaguely on the fringes of science and genuine medicine.
Certainly, the witches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were accused of murdering people with magic, but the notion of using them as part of a sacrifice in the sense that Margaret Murray used it is almost entirely missing. There are a number of ancient texts that refer to animal sacrifice, which we know was practised regularly by most ancient civilizations. The Roman poet Seneca wrote, ‘He pours a libation of blood on the altars and burns the sacrifices entire and soaks the trench in pools of blood.’ Human sacrifices were associated with the Sabbat, the Black Mass which was an inverted parody of the Christian service. People, naked in woodlands away from the prying eyes of local villagers, danced ‘widdershins’ (in an anti-clockwise circle) or back to back. They kissed the Devil’s arse rather than the face of Christ, smeared their limbs with the hallucinogen hemlock and took part in wild orgies – Dennis Wheatley would have fitted right in! In virtually all cases, however, the sacrifice was a child, not an adult like Bella. In eighteenth-century France, a report on one such gathering read ‘Astaroth, Asmodeus [demons] I beg you to accept the sacrifice of this child which we now offer to you, so that we may receive the things we ask.’
In another account by Frenchman Nicholas Rémy from the 1590s, the witches brought their own children to be sacrificed, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Harry Wedeck, in A Treasury of Witchcraft (1961) wrote:
The Black Mass has not entirely disappeared. To this very day it is reputed to be administered among Satanic circles, in the highly cosmopolitan locales of two continents: in New York and London, in Paris and in lesser provincial cities. In the metropolitan areas the cult has its own adherents, its own carefully guarded chambers, its own secret communications. At such rituals the atmospheric aura of purposeful maleficence is heightened, among the celebrants, by the subtle use of black: black wine and black candles, while the sense of impalpable yet potent evil is intensified by the clamorous demoniac falsifications, by the acknowledgment of alien allegiance, Satanic loyalties.
As we have seen, Montague Summers and Robert Fabian claimed that such cults did exist in London in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Be that as it may, by the time Margaret Murray was giving her views to various newspapers and to Donald McCormick, a seismic change was happening in British witchcraft; it was turning into Wicca, which had a ‘feel-good’ factor wholly missing from the horror stories of earlier centuries.
The ‘high-point’ of this movement was a retired customs officer, Gerald Brosseau Gardner, who had been a devotee of Aleister Crowley and was very impressed by the scholarship of Margaret Murray. Gardner was into flagellation and regarded sex as a central part of ritual (as did Crowley). His book Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft, although probably only intended for his own disciples, became the benchmark of the occult that continued in the post-war world. Interestingly, Gardner’s rituals became watered down in later covens and that element of Wicca, as opposed to holistic medicine, was the work of Mancunian Alex Sanders who came to dominate the London occult scene in 1967.
Gardner waited until the laws against witchcraft were fully repealed in 1951 before he set up his covens, but there is considerable evidence that he was involved in witchcraft as early as 1940. In that context, he had indirect links with whatever happened in Hagley Wood the following year. Was there a coven operating in the area in wartime? We have no idea, but, contrary to Margaret Murray’s belief that covens were a survival of a wide-spaced movement found among ordinary people in rural village communities, twentieth-century witchcraft, if it exists at all in the conventional sense, is an urban, middle-class sophisticated movement. Birmingham would have been the most likely centre for anything of this sort in the 1940s, the strictures of wartime notwithstanding.
Undeterred by the realities of history and the existence of an Enlightenment and scientific revolution that has destroyed the notion of ‘things that go bump in the night’, McCormick takes one of his famous leaps of logic. He is certain that the screams heard in Hagley Wood in ‘late July or early August’ were the last sound that Bella made and that this would coincide with the ‘witches’ festival of Lughnasadh in the Celtic calendar’. This of course is from the ear-witness accounts of two unnamed men whose evidence is not in the record.
Lughnasadh had nothing to do with witchcraft. It was one of four festivals that heralded the change of seasons, but McCormick was influenced by the fact that neo-Pagan groups, by the 1960s, had taken it over as an unofficial holiday. Lughnasadh was linked to the harvest, with its concept of growth and fertility.
The feast of Lughnasadh (stolen by the Christians as Lammastide) falls on 1 August, which misses the screams heard in Hagley Wood by two weeks. The phases of the ceremony are well attested from Welsh and Irish records and folklore. It was all about happiness, dancing and music, with (as usual) a little bit of copulation. The only thing that was buried (in the ground, not in a tree) was flowers, representing the end of summer.
The links between the murder in Hagley Wood and witchcraft are non-existent. Yet, today, if you check the plethora of websites on the subject, virtually all of them focus on this aspect. Why? Because witchcraft, with its nonsense of worship of the Dark Lord, the Lord of the Gallows, with a liberal sprinkling of nudity and sex, has a universal appeal that will not allow little things like facts get in the way.
Chapter 15
The Shadow of Meon Hill
‘The modern world,’ wrote the editor of Marshall Cavendish’s Murder Casebook in 1991, ‘baulks at the idea of the supernatural, of unseen forces playing havoc with our lives but … people can still fall under the spell of the occult.’1
On the evening of 14 February 1945, the body of Charles Walton, a 74-year-old labourer, was found near a hedge in fields near Lower Quinton, Warwickshire, below the high ground called Meon Hill.
In international affairs, the war ground on. From the east, Stalin’s Red Army pushed through Pomerania, forcing the Wehrmacht back on itself, trying to hold the most vital areas. In the west, British and Canadian troops reached Emmerich on the Rhine while the Americans to the south were re-grouping for a new push. The Indian Divisions from IV Corps crossed the Irrawaddy river as the Japanese fell back to protect Mandalay. It would be days before any of this news would reach Lower Quinton, once it had been assessed by the censors and the continued shortage of newsprint meant that only the basics got to the public.
Charles Walton was not a popular man. Cantankerous and bigoted, he had largely kept to himself, living in Lower Quinton with his niece, Edith, in what, after gentrification, would be an idyllic thatched cottage. The winter had been grim, with deep snow and biting winds, but St Valentine’s Day that year was crisp and sunny and Walton had been out in the fields all day with his pitchfork and his long-handled slash-hook. Both of these weapons had been used to kill him, the pitchfork pinning him to the ground and the slash-hook still lying in the wound to his throat. His killer had carved the rough shape of a cross in his chest.
Except that he had not. Read any account of the Meon Hill murder today and the pitchfork and the cross are essential to the story, and from them, stories of witchcraft grew. Walton was certainly mutilated, but there was no cross on his chest, merely a series of cuts.
We have already quoted Graham Greene in The Ministry of Fear about single murders disappearing in the greater slaughter of war, but in fact the Meon Hill case was a sort of escapism. The generation who lived through the war, adults and children, became immured not only to the privations of rationing and the horrors of the Blitz, they accepted death in a more immediate and personal way than their fathers who had fought the First World War. With the exception of a handful of bombing raids, mostly on the coast, 1914–18 had been a war confined to France and Gallipoli. Returning soldiers were horribly wounded, damaged irreparably by gas and traumatized by shell-shock, but that was as bad as it got. The Second World War, however, had made Britain the Home Front – instant, impersonal death rained from the skies.
If the Blitz proper was over, there was now a new terror – the ‘doodlebugs’. The first V1 flying bombs were fired from the German-occupied Channel Islands on 13 June 1944. Only one reached London, killing six people, but it was the fact that the V1s had no pilots that made them so sinister. They made a whining sound, but when that stopped, suddenly, they fell, exploding as they hit the ground. V2s, widely used by the time Charles Walton died, were even more deadly.
Against that, a grisly ‘home-grown’ murder using weapons prosaically used as tools by the average country labourer, was a distraction and it fed the deep-rooted fascination that most of us have for murder. While the Warwickshire police began their enquiries, Professor James Webster, still no further forward in the Hagley Wood case, was called in to conduct a post-mortem on Walton.
Unlike Bella’s case, where the Worcestershire CID decided to go it alone, the Warwickshire force called in the Yard. This was standard procedure; the Met had wide experience of murders of all kinds, with more examples than any other city. Their fingerprint section was the most comprehensive in the world. And they sent a detective who was already a legend to the criminal fraternity – Chief Inspector Robert Fabian. His later books – Fabian of the Yard and London After Dark – were a goldmine of police procedure and thinking and he became the first real television detective, with a series of half-hour programmes, in grainy black and white, in which he prefigured virtually every British cop-show that followed. Everything from Dixon of Dock Green to Midsomer Murders owes a great deal to Bob Fabian.
But in the end, not even Scotland Yard could solve the Meon Hill murder and the killing of Charles Walton remains unsolved. The same romantic prurience which has become attached to Bella has smothered Meon Hill too. Charles Walton was a witch; he spoke to toads, the Devil’s familiars. Lower Quinton was in the heart of haunted Warwickshire. The hill called Alcock’s Arbour near Temple Grafton was called the Devil’s Bag of Nuts. The battlefield of Edge Hill, where the forces of parliament and king clashed in the first engagement of the Civil War (1642) still echoed to the tramp of marching feet. Guy’s Cliffe near Warwick was the home of the celebrated knight who had killed the monstrous Dun Cow that had ravaged the neighbourhood for years. Above all, there were the Rollright Stones, an ancient stone circle believed to be a king and his knights who were calcified by a witch’s spell. Then, there was the old saying, ‘There are enough witches in Long Compton to draw a load of hay up Long Compton Hill.’ This reflected a nineteenth-century murder in which a man had killed a woman because she had bewitched him.
‘A man’. ‘A woman’. Folklore is full of such vagueness. It is permissible in light-hearted guidebooks for tourists, but it is of no use at all in trying to solve real-life murder cases.
The Murder Casebook volume quoted above contains three murders – Charles Walton’s in Lower Quinton, Bella’s in Hagley Wood and the French case of Denise Labbé, one half of the ‘demon lovers’ convicted of the sacrificial murder of Denise’s daughter Cathy, aged 2 in 1954. The volume, typical of the series, throws all sorts of irrelevance into the mix: Saxon witchcraft; the madman artist Richard Dadd who axed his father to death in 1843; witches’ sabbats; Margaret Murray; ‘the master satanist’ Aleister Crowley; psychic detectives; and the Jonestown massacre, a mass suicide of a cult in 1978.
Such salaciousness sells. And that is precisely the problem; it does not solve crimes. Why is the Meon Hill murder so often lumped together with that in Hagley Wood? Both happened during the war, only thirty-five miles apart. Both remain unsolved. Both have undercurrents of witchcraft and the supernatural. But there the similarities end. Charles Walton was male, elderly and well known in his local community. Bella was female, young and seemingly not known to anybody. Walton’s body was left in the open, easily found; someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to hide Bella. The murder methods were totally different – bladed weapons in the case of Walton; probably suffocation for Bella. The sole reason for the cases being lumped together can be attributed to one man – Donald McCormick.
‘Charles Walton has been pinned to the ground by his own hay-fork. Across his throat a rough but unmistakeable sign of the Cross had been savagely slashed. “Witchcraft” whispered the villagers.’2
Gripping stuff. Except that it is not true. And of course, ‘Dusk was creeping slowly and mistily across the Warwickshire fields’ when the old man’s body was found. But it was not. Those who found his body were working by torchlight; it was pitch black.
By page 17 of Murder by Witchcraft, we already have the sinister Rollrights:
Rise up stick and stand still stone,
King of England thou shalt be none!
Thou and they men hoar stones shall be,
And I myself an eldern tree.
McCormick does not give the source of this creepy rhyme. Neither does he mention Bella in the context of the elder tree, but is it not there, lurking in the dark, playing with our minds? And the author rather disingenuously quotes the ‘father’ of modern Wicca, Gerald Gardner. ‘I think we must say goodbye to the witch. The cult is doomed, I am afraid, partly because of modern conditions, housing shortage, the smallness of modern families and chiefly by education. The modern child is not interested. He knows witches are all bunk.’ McCormick utterly rejects witchcraft as a motive in the case of Bella in favour of espionage (his real passion) but by quoting Gardner, he is actually keeping the nonsense alive.
I mention earlier the cartoon witch of Snow White which terrified children in the 1930s. Unaccountably, the hand-held camerawork in The Blair Witch Project (1991) had the same effect, but this time it terrified adults too. Film-makers know – and Donald McCormick knew – that audiences and readers love to be frightened. And what better way to frighten them than by lumping together two totally unconnected murders in a single volume?
Bella does not kick in in Murder By Witchcraft until Chapter 4 on page 53. As we have seen, the very first line has two mistakes. It was not ‘Sunday evening’ but midday and there were not ‘three boys’ but four. It does not exactly fill us with confidence. Neither does McCormick’s discussion of the evidence. In the middle of a chapter entitled ‘The Puzzle of Charles Walton’s Watch’, he suddenly plunges us back into the Hagley Wood case, on the grounds that his enquiries at Long Marston (a former Prisoner of War camp near Lower Quinton) had thrown up a woman (unnamed, of course) who was making her own enquiries into a Hungarian astrologer who may have been a prisoner there. This of course takes us back to Aktion Hess and again, a primeval link is made in our minds. Did a clairvoyant who knew the agent Clara end up in a camp only two and a half miles from the place where Charles Walton was killed?
