We have all been lulled into a broad acceptance that there must be something else ‘out there’, not just mankind on planet earth – the whole existence of a ‘science fiction’ genre in literature and the media is proof of that. But the same question, slightly adapted, can be raised in connection with the body in Hagley Wood – what is the truth?
It was not flying saucers that provided a potential answer, but an older, more fundamental bogeyman – witchcraft. It is difficult to find the beginnings of this in connection with the murder of Bella, but certainly even by the end of the 1940s, sporadic letters to local newspapers hinted that witchcraft may be involved. According to Quaestor, Anna of Claverley’s letter to him said, ‘The affair is now closed and involves no witches, black magic or moon night rites.’ But who had said it did? In the public mind, witches lived in woods. They cavorted under the moon in woodland clearings at their sabbats, having sex with the Devil. The very name – Hagley – had a sinister sound and although the Saxon word wych had nothing to do with a devil’s disciple (as we have seen, it meant pliant or bendable), it sounded as if it did. From such ignorant and simplistic beginnings, a whole industry can spring up – witness Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers.
The only ‘evidence’ that witchcraft was involved came from Bella’s hand, which was found by police thirteen paces from the wych elm. According to Professor Webster, these were a disarticulated jumble of bones, just like others found in the bole of the tree itself, but to the journalists of the sensation-seeking Fifties, it became a whole hand. Indeed, one of them refers to it as an entire arm. This became equated with the main de gloire, the French term for the hand of glory, from which the magic (and poisonous) plant Mandragora (mandrake) may take its name. In certain witchcraft traditions, the severed hand of a corpse had supernatural powers, especially if it was removed from a victim dangling on the gallows; the phrase ‘Lord of the Gallows’ was synonymous, some said, with the Devil. It had to be preserved carefully, using certain herbs and could then be used to open locks, discover buried treasure and render enemies powerless. If the fingers were set alight, anyone in the vicinity would fall into a trance-like sleep. So far, so much nonsense. In one of the worst examples of anti-witch hysteria, in 1591, a number of women were put on trial for the attempted murder (by spells) of James VI of Scotland, who believed in witches to the point of obsession. During the trial, one of the accused, John Fane, admitted to breaking into a church at night by using a hand of glory to force the locks. This ignores the fact that churches were supposed to be open night and day for the Godly to pray and the fact that Fane, along with his fellow accusees, had been tortured for days before they made their confessions, which was often the case in trials during the ‘witch-craze’ of the time.
The disarticulated hand found in the leaf mould of Hagley Wood belonged to Bella. She was not a felon hanged on the gallows and the hand had almost certainly been bitten off by an animal, probably a badger, before the body was dumped into the wych elm. Badgers are omnivorous and have powerful jaws. The only other woodland predator, a fox, would have been agile enough to climb the elm if it had to, but its jaws would not be strong enough to dissect a human arm in this way. In another example of a woman’s body found hidden in the wild, Joan Wolfe in Houndown Wood, her fingers had been gnawed away by rats. It is a common situation.
But the lunatic lobby would not accept the natural. Bella’s fate had to involve the supernatural. Why? To begin with, witchcraft was still a crime in Britain during the war, one of the many examples of obsolete legislation then still on the statute books. And there was still, for all the advent of science, technology and cold reason, a fascination with the macabre that was centuries old and still grips us today. Recent research, carried out by psychologists at the University of Hertfordshire, suggests that a third of us have brains that are hard-wired to accept the supernatural as natural; to them, ghosts, for example, are real. The case of Helen Duncan is one in point. The woman already had two convictions against her for obtaining money for fortune-telling and in 1944 she was charged with fraud. The case was actually tricky legally because Helen asked for payment for claiming to be able to contact the dead, as spiritualists have done for decades. In the end, how could this work if her client believed in her powers? The solution, unsatisfactory as it was, was to charge her and two others under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. This was not repealed until 1951. The queues at the Old Bailey stretched around the block and Hannen Swaffer, one of the most revered journalists of the day, spoke in her defence. She was found guilty, however, and gaoled for nine months. Nor was she alone. In July 1944, as the Allies were fighting their way towards the Rhine, 72-year-old Jane Yorke of Forest Gate, London was tried at the Old Bailey on four charges of ‘pretending to exercise or use a kind of conjuration contrary to the Witchcraft Act’. As was more usual in such cases, Yorke was fined without gaol time.
But Helen Duncan and Jane Yorke were only the tip of the ‘diabolical’ iceberg. The war poet Rupert Brooke was only one of the Edwardian literati who referred to themselves as neo-Pagans. Jehovah’s Witnesses, fortune-tellers, clairvoyants and spiritualists all came to the fore during the Second World War, sometimes because they ‘doorstepped’ people, or because what they did was to profit by the war; spiritualists like Helen Duncan were preying on a country gripped by grief and fear. As one magistrate put it – ‘to pretend to conjure up [the spirits of the dead] when it is false and a hollow lie is nothing less than a public mischief’. There was nothing like the round-up engendered in Germany by the Aktion Hess simply because no one in the corridors of British power was obsessed by the occult. As a young man before the First World War, Winston Churchill apparently visited fortune-tellers, but he had long outgrown all that by 1940.
In the public mind, there was a blurred distinction, if there was one at all, between the worlds of spiritualism and witchcraft. Between the wars, characters like Montague Summers were writing a plethora of books on witches, vampires, Satanism and black magic. Summers was a Catholic priest with an unlikely list of Christian names – Alfonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague – and he earned his living as a theatre critic, especially knowledgeable on Restoration drama. He revelled in the gory and his works on witchcraft in 1926 and 1927, were not well researched, but read brilliantly and he captured the dark world of Bohemian London where hundreds of bored socialites flocked to buy his books. The bibliography for his History of Witchcraft and Demonology runs to thirty pages and looks very scholarly. He neglects to tell us, however, that most of his sources were unprovable nonsense. ‘There were some unbridled imaginations,’ Summers wrote about these sources, ‘there was deception; there was legerdemain [sleight of hand]; there was phantasy; there was fraud.’ But his readership either ignored this line or could not distinguish which was which.
In fact, Summers was backed up from an unlikely source: the hard-bitten detective Robert Fabian. He has a chapter in his London After Dark (1954) called ‘And so to the Devil …’. It is unfortunate that he believed that witches used to be burned on Tower Hill. Burning as a punishment for witchcraft was confined to Scotland and Europe; in England, witches were hanged, but Fabian was in no doubt that in London at any rate, diabolical rites were being practised as never before. He knew of pagan temples in South Kensington, Paddington and Bloomsbury where naked ceremonies were held on a regular basis. What worried Fabian was the use of narcotics at these ceremonies, especially the influence of the newly arrived West Indian communities with their drums and voodoo.
‘The door to black magic,’ Fabian wrote, ‘is through the back offices of two or three dusty little London bookshops that specialise in volumes on the occult, diabolism, alchemy.’ There was a house in Lancaster Gate that the Met knew well, because beyond the dingy little flats at the front was a temple to Satan, complete with high altar, black candles and magical symbols painted on the walls and ceiling. Pan, Abramelin, Saint Sécaire – these were the deities worshipped during the ceremonies which involved sex (often with minors) and flagellation. All this sounds like a film set from the Hammer studios, the physical reality of one of Dennis Wheatley’s novels, but it was real and it was happening in London in the middle of the twentieth century.
Enter Dr Margaret Murray. More than anyone else, this brilliant but eccentric academic gave credence to links between the occult and Bella. An anthropologist and archaeologist, Margaret had had a long and colourful career by the time the body was found in the wych elm and she was by then 80 years old. She had worked under the archaeologist William Flinders Petrie on digs in Syria and the Valley of the Kings in Egypt years before Howard Carter put Egyptology centre stage by finding the fabulous tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. She lectured at University College London and was a tireless defender of women’s rights, immersed as she was in what was almost entirely a man’s world. A Suffragette, she had volunteered as a nurse in the First World War and suffered a minor breakdown as a result.
In the world of academe, however, she was never fully accepted. The degrees she had were acquired later, almost in a pseudo-honorary capacity, and her views were always outside the conventional. As well as works on ancient Egyptian linguistics, which had little interest for the general public, she wrote a definitive book on witchcraft, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921), at the same time that Montague Summers was putting pen to paper and writing articles for The Bystander on black magic in fashionable London. The God of the Witches followed ten years later and the quite bizarre The Divine King in England in 1954 when interest in Bella was being revived. In contrast with Summers’ slavering accounts of sabbats and orgies, Murray concentrated on the sociological and anthropological origins of the witch cult. She claimed, in a theory still held to be likely, that witchcraft was simply the Old Religion before the arrival of Christianity. The gods of prehistory, she argued, were linked to fertility and survival – the weather, the harvest, even the phases of the moon. Central to survival and fertility was the male animal – the horned god (which ran a little counter to her espousal of the feminist cause). Paintings in the Lascaux caves in France show such animals, with stags’ horns, standing upright on their hind legs. In the Roman period, such a figure is often called Cernunnos, depicted in mosaics and murals all over Europe. In time, he would metamorphose into the legendary Herne the Hunter, riding with his spectral hounds in Windsor Great Park. He was last reported as a ‘genuine’ sighting in 1962.
Because Christianity wanted to oust the Old Religion, the horned god became the Devil, complete with cloven hoofs and tail, the epitome of evil. And witchcraft, originally a mix of folklore, superstition and early attempts at medicine, became inextricably linked with the occult. Later writers had to differentiate between black magic (evil, once referred to as malifici) and white magic (good). They even invented the middle ground of grey magic, obviously a mixture of the two.
In English social history, the white witch or ‘cunning woman’ was a real character, not a Disney nightmare to scare small children watching Snow White in a spookily darkened cinema. Such people were midwives and nurses in their local village communities (perhaps, even, a village like Hagley) and they invariably helped to lay out the dead for burial. There were still white witches dotted around the country in the 1930s because real medicine was expensive before the creation of the National Health Service. Older inhabitants of Bubbenhall in Warwickshire, for example, remember ‘Friday’ Watts (actually a man) who acted in this capacity between the wars.
Margaret Murray’s The Divine King went further, claiming that all the kings of England who died bloody deaths, from William Rufus in the New Forest in 1100 to Richard III at Bosworth in 1485, were all acts of ritual sacrifice in which the king in question was murdered to appease the vengeful gods of the Old Religion.
It was the murder of the labourer Charles Walton in February 1945 that intrigued Dr Murray. She gave her opinion that this was ‘probably’ to do with witchcraft and that of Bella ‘possibly’ so. The Walton murder, in the Warwickshire village of Lower Quinton, has been linked with Bella and Hagley Wood ever since and it has effectively stifled any serious investigation of either crime. The pernicious effects of Walton’s death will be dealt with in another chapter, but to understand the way in which Margaret Murray’s views were distorted, we have to discuss the involvement of another man with a chapter to himself, Donald McCormick.
‘[Dr Murray] was no crank,’ McCormick wrote, ‘no credulous romanticist, but a sober, even sceptical analyst of the occult.’ As he says, she went on to write much more after the Hagley Wood case (which she typed herself) including her autobiography in 1963, My First Hundred Years. Despite handling a number of ancient bodies, she had never had the sense of being haunted by any of them. She relates the story of a fellow-archaeologist, Arthur Mace, who woke up in his tent in Egypt one morning with a mummy’s hand around his throat. His terrified screams brought the rest of the team running, only to discover that a recently exposed mummy had been left on a shelf over Mace’s bed and had crumbled in the night, the entire arm landing on his chest with the fingers under his chin. The younger members of the team, not to mention the general public, had been brought up with Boris Karloff’s The Mummy (1931) and various spinoffs. They almost expected something of the kind to happen.
Margaret Murray dismissed the story of the curse on the tomb of Tutankhamen (although she does not specify the pharaoh) as mass hysteria, which is precisely what it was. What McCormick does not tell us about the Egyptologist is that she had a wicked sense of humour, implying that a particular ‘haunted’ mummy caused both the sinking of the Titanic and the Empress of Ireland and, when sold to the Kaiser, caused the First World War! Was she, a little cynically perhaps, mocking the hysteria surrounding Bella’s corpse?
In discussing ghosts, Dr Murray makes an observation which fits the Hagley case perfectly. ‘It has long been the fashion to deride what you cannot understand, or to misinterpret the evidence, or even to believe evidence which is clearly false.’
According to McCormick, Dr Murray believed that witches still existed in England in the 1940s and 1950s. ‘I wouldn’t say that some of my best friends are witches, but, on the other hand, some of my casual acquaintances are.’1 In November 1951, she wrote an article on witchcraft for the Sunday Dispatch. ‘That [by having others believe in them] is how witches are made and maybe always have been made, though with the growth of motor travel and the steady penetration of remote rural areas by the outside world, there are fewer with each decade.’
McCormick claims that Dr Murray visited Hagley (when is not recorded) and got a hostile reaction from locals concerning witchcraft links with Bella. One newspaper had suggested that Hagley was ‘a village of devil worshippers’ even though Margaret had made no such claim. McCormick claimed that the occultist had compiled a detailed account of both the Hagley Wood and Meon Hill murders, but if she did, they have not survived. She died in 1963, so any comments on Hagley Wood come through the prism of McCormick; not, as we have seen, the most impeccable source.
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.
