Gardner waited until the laws against witchcraft were fully repealed in 1951 before he set up his covens, but there is considerable evidence that he was involved in witchcraft as early as 1940.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?
With the full-blown cynicism for which McCormick became famous, he ends Murder By Witchcraft with ‘As to the crime at Lower Quinton, I am convinced that witchcraft was a motive, although the murderer was neither a witch, nor a warlock. I do not pretend to have solved the crime [!] but I think I know who did it.’
If the whole sorry muddled story had ended there, we could write it off as a book for its time. For some, the 1960s was the end of civilization as we knew it. McCormick cites a tenuous link between Medieval witchcraft and ‘the LSD cult of today’. By 1968, Hammer horror films were in their heyday and they have been superseded by a whole industry devoted to hapless teenagers from America’s west coast who will persist in going unarmed and unprepared into lonely (usually haunted) cabins in the wilderness where they encounter (Shock! Horror!) a homicidal maniac with a machete. In these schlockers, nobody goes to a motel unless it is run by Norman Bates of Psycho fame. Nobody carries a gun for self-defence, despite the huge number of Americans who own them. Nobody even switches on a light in a darkened building they do not know at all.
This is, of course, good old-fashioned ‘entertainment’ and the human mind is notorious for being able to separate fact from fiction. Teenaged slasher movies are not real; the blood is fake; the victims get up again once the director yells ‘Cut!’ The reality, of course, is horrendous. Recently in the tragic shooting of a cinematographer on the set of a B-feature Western, the shock and grief is unimaginable. This time, the blood was not fake. And nobody got up just because it was a ‘wrap’.
In 2009, author Paul Newman trod McCormick’s road with his Under the Shadow on Meon Hill, again linking the Lower Quinton and Hagley Wood murders. He is absolutely right when he says:
Those drawn to the supernatural have poured a great deal of what they know into both murders and, as a result, they are now part of the Gothic-Nightmare heritage of the British Isles: half fact, half fable, standing beside films like The Wicker Man and the legends of Springheel Jack, Sawney Beane and Jack the Ripper. This disconcerting underworld has its roots deep in the national identity, the underbelly of empire, where shadows of violence, torture and oppression lurk …
As with McCormick, Newman tackles the Lower Quinton crime first, with some first-rate observations wholly missing in Murder By Witchcraft, then, on page 77 comes ‘Who Killed Bella?’ Unlike McCormick, Newman gives a credit to the infamous Bella sketch with its labels and unlikely hairstyle. He says it is a ‘police reconstruction of Bella’. This I doubt. It seems to have appeared first in an edition of the Birmingham Mail in 1968, which of course was the year of McCormick’s book. Who actually commissioned this work is unclear, but it is a wholly misleading piece of art in terms of identification and is still trotted out today by almost everybody (see Chapter 16).
In Newman’s version, we have the dialogue used by McCormick, for instance, in the police visit to the woman with the lost identity card which I demolished in Chapter 5. And we have the often-reproduced photograph of the hand of glory which of course is not Bella’s and comes from a different (usually uncredited) source altogether.
What Newman does well, apart from criticising McCormick, is to plot the direction that the Hagley Wood case has taken since the 1960s. He quotes composer Simon Holt who has written an opera Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm? which premiered at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in June 2003, ‘Bella’s macabre story has become part of local mythology in South West Birmingham. Everybody has their own angle on who or what she was.’3 The composer saw a group of lads adding to the graffiti on the base of an obelisk on Wychbury Hill. It was probably they who changed the spelling from ‘wych’ to ‘witch’, making or missing the point, depending on one’s point of view. In his opera, Holt calls one of the skeleton-finders Matty after one of these lads but immediately falls into a McCormickesque trap of misinformation. ‘… a name I would use for the boy who had been the first to discover “Bella’s” body down the tree: he would soon die after from the shock and birds’-nesting would never be the same again for the other two boys.’ The boy who died, later in the 1940s, was Frederick Payne and the cause was not shock but kidney disease. Nor was he the first to find the body; Bob Hart was. And there were not two other boys, but three. Minor points, perhaps, but important when it comes to research into murder.
In The Children’s Crusade (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) author Gary Dickson makes a distinction between history and what he calls mythistory. History is based on evidence and facts and draws conclusions from that. Mythistory is based on anecdotes, folklore and supposition. It is usually more satisfying, rather like a crime novel, in which loose ends are tied up by the final chapter and the perpetrator brought to book. This is what has happened with Bella, except that we still have no answers. She was a witch, wasn’t she? Wasn’t there something about spying? A Dutchman? A trapeze artist? The myths swirl around us partly because well-meaning, honest and talented people like Simon Holt use their fertile imaginations to weave something new out of the tangle of the old. And most members of the public do not know the difference. Because of that, I am sure that Simon Holt was right when he says, ‘Poor Bella, whoever and wherever you are – rest in peace. You have become more vivid to us in death than you possibly ever could have done in life.’4
And, in the ‘sillier stories’ folder, the shadow of haunted Meon Hill spreads further. Paul Newman quotes David Taylor, head of Parasearch, a paranormal research unit who visited the Badgers Sett pub in Hagley (called the Gypsy’s Tent in the 1940s) as a boy. In the 1970s, the ‘full monty’ of paranormal activity occurred there – cold spots, telekinesis, doors opening and closing by themselves. This was a manifestation by ‘Bella’, a former barmaid who may have ended up in a wych elm nearby. What the staff did not tell Taylor was that such manifestations long predated the body in Hagley Wood and were linked to the second Civil War, in the vague proximity of the Battle of Worcester, 1651.
