Chapter 1
The Wych Elm
I felt that I was in hell itself. All around me were great squat wych elm trees … like round-bellied devils with beards and shaggy hair.
Was it such a night as this that death visited the woods, turning, for the first time in criminal history, a tree trunk into a coffin? What happened that night? Was the wood in fact the scene of ghoulish rites … was the body brought … from some other place of execution and carried through that very undergrowth now clinging and clawing at my ankles, to its secret resting place?
I stopped suddenly for the wood had become alive … Red eyes pierced the darkness … I could imagine her clearly there in the wood. Only one feature of her physical appearance seemed absent – her face. Instead … I saw only a leering and enigmatic skull. It made me shudder as I thought of it.1
The myths kick in almost at once. Which of us has not stood in the dark tangle of a wood and heard the whispers in the trees, the sighing of the leaves? As though nature itself has recorded an unnatural horror and replays it over and over again in some ghastly time-loop. Such ideas raise the hairs on the back of the neck; they also sell newspapers. The words above were written for the Wolverhampton Express and Star by a journalist with the nom de plume Quaestor, which is at once enigmatic and false. The Latin words sounds as if the writer is a questioner, an avid seeker of the truth. In fact, a quaestor was a Roman tax official and in this context he was Wilfred Byford-Jones, a part-time columnist for the Express and Star in the early 1950s.
A wych elm is a standard English tree, the only variant native to the country. It can grow to a height of over 30 metres and has the Latin botanical name Ulmus glabra. Its bark is dark grey and its leaves irregular, broad and with a distinctive sudden point. Its flowers, a striking red-purple, appear before the leaves in early spring and grow in clusters. It is generally found in watery areas, mostly in the north and west of Britain.
And then, only a few lines into most websites on the tree, man’s obsession with the supernatural begins:
Elm wood burns like churchyard mould
E’en the very flames are cold.2
The wych elm is a tree associated with melancholy and death, perhaps because its branches can drop suddenly, without warning. An old verse ran, ‘Elm hateth man, and waiteth’. It was often used for coffins and in folklore was equated with prophetic dreams. Welsh longbowmen of the Middle Ages used elm for their weapons. The Old English wych (wice) has nothing to do with witch but means pliant or supple, referring to the springy qualities of the wood which made ideal bows. In the herbal medicine of the Medieval period, the outer bark of the wych elm was boiled down as an ointment for burns. The inner bark was ground into a compound for sore throats. In one or two modern accounts of what happened in the years before Byford-Jones walked there, the elm is confused with witch hazel, which is a different tree altogether; in fact, it is a shrub. Even botanical experts like Jacob Strutt confused the two as in his Sylva Britannica (British Woods) in 1822.
Websites will tell you that the wych elm is associated in Celtic mythology with burial mounds and the passage to the Underworld. In fact, this is just one of the legends that has grown up around the central figure in this book. As we shall see, the Celts worshipped the oak, the mistletoe, the ash, the yew and the hazel, not the elm.
The trees described above stood in the now re-landscaped grounds of Hagley Hall, Worcestershire. Today, it is difficult to find the heart of Hagley. True, we were looking for a particular spot in Hagley Wood, to the east of the village, but the reality is that the village is now strung out along the busy A456 stretching north-east towards Halesowen and the behemoth that is Birmingham. Everything in our time is geared to the car – the dual carriageways, roundabouts, traffic lights. The Hagley we wanted to find has all but disappeared in a mass of new building and housing estates. There was no sign of the school and the church, once at the centre of the community. Even the pub, the Lyttleton Arms, much altered and gentrified, stands oddly at a road junction beyond the village, like an afterthought because new road layouts have changed the lie of the land.
The story starts on Sunday, 18 April 1943, ironically on the day that the Russians announced that over 4,000 Polish soldiers found in a mass grave at Katyn were the victims of Nazi violence. They were not; the Russians themselves were responsible for the murders. None of what was happening in Eastern Europe had much effect on four boys wandering Hagley Wood that day. Some accounts today – the myths and mistakes continue – contend that there were only three of them, so for the record, they were Robert Farmer, Robert Hart, Fred Payne and Thomas Willetts. And they were not, as reconstructions claim, technically schoolboys. Two of them were fifteen and had left school the previous year, the school-leaving age at the time being fourteen. By April 1943 they were both at work, although what they did is not recorded.
Accounts differ, too, as to where the boys came from. They certainly did not live in the village of Hagley. Local historian Joyce Coley3 has them coming from Lye, a village four miles away, with its curious placenames of Lye Waste and Careless Green. Lye’s most famous son was the actor Cedric Hardwicke, but in 1943 he was on stage in New York, not coming back to Britain until the following year. According to Coley, Bob Hart lived in Pearson Street, Bob Farmer along Balds Lane and Fred Payne in Stocking Street. No address is given for Tommy Willets, the youngest lad. Other accounts have the boys hailing from Stourbridge on the edge of the Black Country with its distinctive dialect. The small town was famous for its glass-blowing industry, dominated by the Jeavons family, a parochial success story in the shadow of the Clent Hills and Kinver Edge. The boys had their dogs with them, lurchers called Trix, Jock and (unthinkable today) Nigger. If they came from Lye, they could have reached Hagley Wood in fifteen minutes or less than three-quarters of an hour with a casual stroll.
What were they doing in the Wood? Casual accounts call them poachers, but that is a twenty-first-century misreading of 1940s reality. One website today contends, ludicrously, that the lads were poaching to supplement their families’ incomes at a time of extreme rationing. The boys were actually looking for birds’ nests. It was spring, the egg-laying season and every red-blooded boy of that generation saw it as a mark of skill and courage to climb the tallest tree to reach the eggs. As a boy in the 1950s, I had a collection of twenty-five eggs, all lifted by me, ‘blown’ with the aid of a needle and kept carefully in cotton wool. We have only started to worry about such things recently.
In those more innocent days, the shock that Tommy Willets and the others had would stay with them for years; some said, all their lives. In the tangle of undergrowth stood one of those squat, round-bellied wych elms which ‘Quaestor’ described. Judging by its limited height and the ‘shaggy’ thicket of branches bristling out of its trunk, the tree was damaged and probably dying. The trunk had broken off at 3½ft from the ground. It also looked an ideal nesting site for birds – the lightly speckled blue of the thrush, the glossy white of the collared dove.
The photographs taken of this soon-to-be-notorious tree are themselves enigmatic. All versions that I have seen in newspaper accounts and subsequent books show another tree altogether. True to the sensationalism of bad provincial newspaper journalism of the time, Quaestor’s caption in the Express and Star records ‘The body was found in this repulsive tree, known as the wych elm, although its common name is witch hazel [sic] because hags of old days used hazel twigs for divining rods.’ The reason for the wrong photograph is an innocent one. By the time the media cameramen reached it, the actual tree had been cut down by the police. It had been pollarded and dozens of branches radiated out from the decaying bole in the centre.
Most accounts today have Bob Farmer climbing the wych elm alone. In fact, according to the Evening Dispatch of 29 April 1943, the boy who made this climb was actually Bob Hart. In subsequent newspaper editions and magazine articles, both Bob Farmer and Tommy Willets are credited with the find, but the Dispatch was reporting from the coroner’s court at the time and was covering a bizarre and important story that sold newspapers; surely it can be relied upon more heavily than subsequent re-imaginings. Hart had done this before, countless times. He forced his arm into the thicket of branches, peering down into the hollow bole below him. The hole was 2 feet wide at the top, tapering to 17 inches at the bottom. A skull stared back at him with sightless eyes. He poked it with a stick and it slipped to one side, severed by the years from its neck. Hart reached further and pulled it out, calling his mates to see what he had found. A fox, surely? A badger, perhaps? ‘Come here. Have a look at this.’
They did and recoiled in horror as Hart brought the skull down to ground level. A clump of reddish hair still clung to the right temple. Some teeth were missing and the front two upper incisors overlapped. And, even allowing for the often-chaotic teaching in wartime Britain, there was no mistaking this find. The skull was human. Hart used some of the rotten clothing near the skull to push it back into the hollow tree with the aid of a stick. And the boys ran. To add to the ghoulishness of the scene, some later accounts have darkness descending on Hagley Wood at that moment. In fact, according to the boys’ testimony to the coroner, it was midday. We reached Hagley Wood and the approximate site of the wych elm on April 21, seventy-nine years and three days after the boys were there. The trees were in full bud in the spring sunshine and the day was bright.
Bob Hart may have had more stomach than the others and he considered their predicament. They had discovered a body and the natural thing would be to tell the police. But they were in Hagley Wood and, technically, trespassing. Hagley Hall was – and still is – owned by the Lyttleton family, and the Palladian building which stood in the distance on that April Sunday had been built by the eccentric George, First Baron Lyttleton, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1754. His great-grandson, also George, married Mary Glynne, whose sister Catherine married William Gladstone in a joint ceremony in 1839; the future prime minister was often a guest at the Hall. Typical of the general building style of the aristocracy in the Age of Reason, Hagley’s grounds included a deer park, a castle folly, a temple of Theseus and a series of ‘ancient’ standing stones, all courtesy of the architect Sanderson Miller in the 1750s. The obelisk on top of Wychbury Hill, which he also built, still has echoes of the body in the wych elm to this day.
Today, Hagley Hall is a much-refurbished wedding venue and the old stable yard is home to a number of commercial enterprises. Its sumptuous interior reflects the glittering collection of paintings and porcelain, despite the fire that gutted the building in 1925, breaking the heart of the 9th baronet. The previous hall, which the Palladian mansion replaced in the 1750s, was no stranger to scandal and dark deeds. Two of the Gunpowder plotters who had tried to assassinate the parliament of James I in November 1605 had fled to the Hall for safety. They had been surrounded at Holbeck House but Robert Winter and Stephen Littleton had escaped and begged Stephen’s brother Humphrey for help. He sheltered them but John Fynwood, the Lyttleton’s cook, reported them and they were arrested in January 1606. Inevitably, both Halls, original and replacement, had a resident ghost!
On that April day, the Lyttletons still lived at the Hall, but there was a war on and much of the building, rather down at heel by now, had been commandeered by civil defence and served as function rooms for fundraisers for the war effort. Whether facing the officialdom of pompous men in khaki or a family that had owned the land since the days of John of Gaunt, Bob Hart knew that the deck was stacked against him. Stealing birds’ eggs was not regarded as remotely criminal in the 1940s but trespassing was definitely illegal. He and his friends would say nothing.
There, if the boys’ consciences had not got the better of them, the body in the wych elm might have stayed until it collapsed into dust. There would have been no mini-industry, no infuriating mysteries surrounding Hagley Wood. And this book would not exist. It would have been the perfect murder.
Chapter 2
There Was a War On
By the time the boys made their gruesome discovery, Britain had been fighting against Nazi Germany for three and a half years.
The unthinkable had begun in September 1939 when Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor, had refused to remove his troops from Poland despite an ultimatum from Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, and Britain consequently declared war on the Third Reich.
We have recently reassessed Chamberlain and Britain’s preparedness for war. R.J. Mitchell had designed the iconic fighter plan, the Spitfire, before the war began and the country’s industrial infrastructure and expertise meant that we were able to switch rapidly to war production, despite the grim years of austerity in the recession-hit 1930s. Even so, the ‘people’s war’ was like no other in history. The reach of long-range bombers and Hitler’s strategy combined to turn civilian Britain into the Home Front. Conventional warfare was being fought by armies, navies and air forces around the world, but death came to ordinary people from the skies. It was no longer a question, as it had been in the First World War, of women waving a tearful farewell to their menfolk as they marched away.
No one was ready for blitzkrieg, its speed and ruthlessness. Wars have always been bloody and have little to do with notions of chivalry and romance but from 1939 onwards, everybody knew that, not just the boys in khaki or blue. After Hitler’s objective of invading Britain to consolidate his megalomanic aims had failed, he unleashed his Luftwaffe on the cities, pulverising London, Hull and Plymouth. A new word entered the language – to ‘coventrate’, meaning the flattening of a city as in Coventry, in November 1940. The once-magnificent Medieval cathedral was left a smouldering ruin.
And society had to adapt to a new way of life just to cope. The families of the Hagley boys learned, like thousands of others, that catastrophe and collapse were only a careless word away. Income tax rocketed to 7s 6d in the pound; the war cost Britain £2 million a day to fight, pocket-money by today’s standards, but an unbelievable sum in the 1940s.
Propaganda became a way of life too. An army of ‘little Hitlers’ sprang up, wearing tin hats and carrying gas masks for a chemical attack that never happened. They had ARP (Air Raid Protection) painted on their helmets and shepherded terrified civilians to air-raid shelters in towns and cities. ‘Put that light out!’ they barked at careless people who had forgotten to close their curtains or lower their blinds. Posters appeared everywhere. The public were encouraged to turn their gardens into allotments and grow their own vegetables. They were urged to buy War Bonds and to donate their pots and pans to be recycled into tanks, battleships and aircraft.
‘Careless talk costs lives’, the huge posters reminded them. ‘Keep it dark’. Walls, of course, had ears and everybody was expected to be ‘Like Dad – Keep Mum’. Mum might well be driving an ambulance, working in munitions, typing the very propaganda which bombarded everybody. A few of them flew aircraft from factory to airfield. What they did not do was to train to fight, unlike their sisters in Communist Russia. Neither did they work in the concentration camps, like their Nazi counterparts. Most people expected things to return to normal after the war. It would be an Allied victory, of course, and it would herald in a brave new world. People had believed that in 1918 too – and the only meaningful result was the Second World War.
By the time the boys found the body in Hagley Wood, their families had become sickeningly used to privations. Butter and bacon were rationed from December 1939. The weekly allowance was four ounces of butter, twelve of sugar, four of bacon or ham. Meat was rationed from March 1940; tea, jam, cooking fat and cheese followed in July. Eggs? One a fortnight, unless you were ‘lucky’ enough to be in the RAF undertaking a raid over enemy territory; no flying, no egg.
The country became obsessed with food, or rather the lack of it. ‘War and Peace’ pudding from Canada was a Christmas treat throughout the 1940s. Carrot Croquette and carrot fudge were regular suggestions in newspaper recipes, even when newsprint was limited and newspapers shrank to a quarter of their peacetime length. ‘All Clear’ sandwiches and Woolton pies (named after the government minister responsible for food) were heavy on parsnips. Bread was not rationed; it had been the country’s staple diet for centuries and folk memory was long. Ration bread and riots would ensue – law and order would collapse. Even so, the ‘British loaf’ was grey, coarse and unappetising.
Children like the Hagley boys got the best of a bad lot. They had daily milk and orange juice, even if the latter had nasty little circles of cod liver oil floating on the surface! The Spam and dried egg made available under America’s lend-lease programme must have seemed heaven.
Clothes, too, were hit by wartime austerity. Out went the ridiculously wide ‘Oxford bag’ trousers of the 1930s. Turn-ups disappeared, as did pleats in skirts. Without lipstick, girls painted their lips with beetroot juice. Stockings became a thing of the past, because silk was needed for parachutes and barrage balloons. Girls coloured their legs with gravy browning and got a friend to draw a seam up the back with an eyebrow pencil.
There were queues everywhere. The word might have been French, but the idea suited the British mentality; most people were conformist and behaved themselves. The joke ran that a woman could not pass a line of people without joining the end of it. People queued for hours a day, to get what they could from harassed retailers with their coupons and to whisper furtively to them, ‘AUC?’ – Anything Under the Counter?
The wireless was indispensable. Long before the BBC became ‘woke’, it genuinely spoke for and to everybody, even if all the broadcasters were male and still wore dinner jackets for evening broadcasts. The nine o’clock news on the Home Service gave the ‘truth’ to an anxious nation, who learned little or nothing from the censored letters of their loved ones overseas. Even then, although no one outside the corridors of power knew it, morale was being strengthened by outright lies. On 10 May 1941, the worst blitz of the war – and almost the last – hit London with devastating effect. The prime minister, Winston Churchill, toured the appalling debris in Westminster the next day as the BBC calmly told their listeners that twenty-eight enemy aircraft had been shot down during the previous night’s raid; in fact, the figure was seven.
The Hagley Wood boys were too old to get much out of Children’s Hour on the radio, with the kindly voice of Derek McCullough – ‘Uncle Mac’ – speaking to the country’s little ones; ‘Hello, children, everywhere’. They probably enjoyed the antics of ITMA (It’s That Man Again) by 1943, with its national catchphrases – ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ and ‘I don’t mind if I do.’ This programme was so popular that people had said in 1940 that if Hitler had invaded between half past eight and nine o’clock, he’d meet no resistance at all. High-brow listeners could listen to the Brains Trust on a whole range of imponderables and the BBC’s biggest property during the war years was the ‘Forces Sweetheart’, Vera Lynn.
Anybody with a gramophone could still just about afford to buy a thick plastic disc spinning at 78 revolutions per minute, playing the ridiculous Yes, We Have No Bananas, the melodic A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square or (as popular in Britain was it was in Nazi Germany) Lili Marlene.
Undoubtedly, the biggest form of escapism was the cinema. Twenty-five to thirty million tickets were sold each week across Britain. Clark Gable did not give a damn about Vivienne Leigh in Gone With the Wind and there were stiff upper lips everywhere in propaganda films like Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve.
The call-up slashed workforces and emptied streets, the dreaded buff envelopes falling on doormats all over the country. Conscientious objectors, morally opposed to war, were denounced as traitors, as they had been in the First World War and foreigners, anyone with a German-sounding name, were routinely rounded up under Regulation 18B and sent to well-guarded camps up and down the land. Italian ice-cream parlours disappeared overnight.
‘I cannot offer [women] a delightful life,’ the Labour Minister Ernest Bevin said from Whitehall, ‘I want them to come forward with the spirit that they are going to suffer some inconvenience, but with a determination to help us through.’ Nursery and child-minding facilities were increased and improved, but families like the Farmers, Willets, Harts and Paynes had less than £5 a week to live on. An average man earned £3 0s 6d a week; his average wife only £1 18s.
There have been spurious comparisons recently in the age of lockdown and responses to COVID, invoking the spirit of the 1940s. The two are not really comparable, but in the sense that Boris Johnson’s government has re-introduced measures not used since the war, some similarities spring to mind. One of these was war-weariness. It was well described by Molly Lefebure, personal secretary to Keith Simpson, Medico-Legal adviser to Surrey Constabulary. She was in her early twenties at the time:
One would feel a bout coming on, endeavour to fight it off, fall victim to it, shiver and shake in its grasp, finally to emerge from it bored, depressed and listless. It was a real illness … and as the war went on, almost everybody fell victim to it … Some it made drink a lot. Others took to bed – with others – a lot. Some became hilariously gay [in the original sense] brave and hearty. Others became sardonic and bored. Some seriously depressed … A few took to prayer …
Molly Lefebure’s war was the same as everybody’s, yet radically different. With her boss, the legendary ‘CKS’ tramping over moorlands and woods to inspect murder victims, she developed a stoicism and a steely nerve that would have been beyond many of her contemporaries. There was a dramatic increase in crimes of all types. In 1939, over 300,000 cases were reported. By the war’s end, in 1945, it was 475,000. There was also a great deal of unreported crime, either through indifference or the authorities’ need to keep morale high. Simpson himself summed up the reason for the increase:
Emergency regulations, uniforms, drafting, service orders and a life of discipline cramp the freedom of many young men and during the long periods of wartime training and waiting not a few of them got bored – ‘browned off’ was the common term. Some missed their wives or girlfriends and got into trouble with local girls and camp followers … urged on by long periods of sex starvation … there was a steady flow of rapes (some with strangling and other violence), of assaults (some fatal), of abortions and infanticide … all arising from the changes in life that were thrust by service conditions on ordinary people.
Arguably, life became cheap. As Graham Greene wrote in The Ministry of Fear (1942), ‘Nobody troubled about single deaths … in the middle of a daily massacre.’ There were 135 murders in the first year of the war; 141 in the last. The bloodiest year was 1942 – 159 cases. While police forces were hopelessly stretched hunting spivs and black-market racketeers, whom most people regarded as necessary evils in a time of deprivation, killings piled up. Leading Aircraftsman Arthur Heys strangled WAAF Winnie Evans at a Suffolk aerodrome. Samuel Morgan killed 15-year-old Mary Hagan in a blockhouse in Liverpool. Harold Hill strangled and stabbed two little girls in a Buckinghamshire field, leaving his gas mask behind to ensure his capture and execution. Officer cadet Gordon Cummings mutilated and murdered four women in London; the press called him the Blackout Killer. It would not come out until after the war, but John Christie was already raping women and burying them in his garden at 10, Rillington Place.
And in Hagley, Worcestershire, somebody had stuffed a body into the hollow bole of an old wych elm.
