Like hundreds of villages all over the country, Hagley had to adapt to the sudden, bizarre and sometimes terrifying changes that the war brought. There was nothing unique or outstanding about the place that would have attracted the interest of the Luftwaffe, but Birmingham, only thirteen miles away, was a different story. It was the largest city in the country after London, expanded in the early days of the Industrial Revolution due to its position at the centre of the ‘silver cross’ of canal networks that crossed the Midlands. Over 8,000 businesses operated in its teeming streets, representing more than 1,200 trades. Above all, the city was an arsenal, as it had been in the First World War, making tanks, Bailey bridges, aircraft and components, badges and buttons, shot and shells. The letters ‘BSA’ – Birmingham Small Arms – were a byword for weapon and vehicle production. Half the country’s gold and silver goods were made there, along with cars, motorbikes, glassware and chemicals.
Under its innovative nineteenth-century mayor, Joseph Chamberlain – ‘Radical Joe’ – Corporation Street was laid out broad and straight, like Paris’s Champs Elysées. The town hall was a massive monolith with its Greek columns, the municipal bank not much smaller. Queen Elizabeth hospital, opened in 1938, was a monument to the vast block-buildings of that decade, heralding the obsession with flat roofs that would become the norm of post-war development. Libraries, a university and technological colleges, museums and institutes made Britain’s second city a centre of cultural excellence as well as serious money-making.
No wonder Herman Goering’s bombers were interested. Air raids, which killed 2,227 people, destroyed the Victorian market hall, with both cathedrals (Anglican and Catholic) taking major hits along with the art gallery and university. The population of over a million got used to the wail of the sirens, the roar of aircraft and the thud of anti-aircraft guns aimed at the night sky. The fire service was so inept in handling the first raid that its chief resigned in embarrassment, but it soon improved. By comparison with other cities, however, Birmingham got off lightly.
And the city kept working. One small factory made all the carburettors for Spitfire and Hurricane fighters; its output doubled in a fortnight in the summer of 1940. The normal working day became eleven hours a day, seven days a week.
There was an influx of women from all over the country in 1941–44. A large group was trained in from Scotland under the care of a female guide, who was their warden and friend. Reception officers got them settled in homes and church halls, but some of them missed their native hills and went home. ‘Short of a military escort,’ whinged one reception officer, ‘who can make a woman do what she doesn’t want to?’
Unwanted pregnancies rocketed during the war and nowhere more so than in Birmingham. Between 1940 and 1945, children born to married women, with husbands in the armed forces, tripled.
And to cap it all, the food in wartime Birmingham was grim. One former hotel chef wrote that he ‘despaired of Birmingham’s taste in food. He had been all over the world and catering in Birmingham was the worst in the world … the workers at the factory only wanted fish and chips, cream cakes, bread and butter and brown gravy over everything … they would not eat salads, did not like savouries.’ They did not, in short, ‘understand food’.
In Hagley, they would have heard the sirens, seen the glow of fires. There was an Ack-Ack battery at nearby Field House, complete with searchlights and watchful troops. They probably shared the view of Birmingham’s population about food. The vicar, throughout the war, was Robert Burns, MA. His letters to his parishioners have survived and they make interesting reading. We have no way of knowing whether the Hart, Farmer, Willets or Payne families attended church, but it is likely that they did, at least from time to time. Lord Cobham and the Lyttleton family from the Hall would certainly have been regulars at the church of St John the Baptist or St Kenelm’s near the Wood’s boundary. In January 1943, three months before the boys found the body, Burns was telling his parishioners, ‘The spring is at hand, pull yourself together and ask God for renewed faith and courage to hold on until, in His good time, His enemies and ours are in the dust.’ He mentioned the same ‘war-weariness’ that Molly Lefebure wrote about and warned his people against defeatism, which was, after all, a criminal offence under wartime regulations. His curate, Mr Philpott, had been called up to become a chaplain in the army and the male ranks of the choir were thinning too.
In the village itself, local women organized soldiers’ comfort groups, knitting socks, vests and blankets for troops stationed who knew where. If meeting in each other’s homes was not convenient, the school served as a useful meeting centre. The local scouts were urged to do their bit. Unbeknownst to anyone in Britain in 1943, Walter Schellenberg, Head of Amt IV of the SS’s Secret Service, had drawn up a hit list of individuals most wanted by the Third Reich who would have been rounded up and shot had Hitler invaded in 1940. The ‘Special Search List’ (Sonderfahndungsliste GB), known as the Black Book also contained institutions and organizations believed to be anti-Reich in their attitudes. Among them were General Baden Powell’s Boy Scout movement. They were probably equated in the Nazi mindset with the brainwashed kinder of the Hitler Youth movement, in which every German child over 10 was being indoctrinated in Nazi ideology. This was far from the case in Britain, but Scouts did help the government. In the First World War, they knocked on doors looking for enemy aliens – ‘Do you have a German living here?’ – and in the 1940s, they plane-spotted and reported incendiary bombs and suspicious circumstances. We do not know if any of the Hagley boys were Scouts, but the discovery of human remains was something they should certainly have reported if they were.
There was an ARP post set up in the Parish Room and the senior warden was H.W. Burns (relationship to the vicar unknown). No bombs fell on Hagley, but the nature of bombing in the Second World War was haphazard to say the least. Enemy aircraft routinely jettisoned bombs after raids to lighten their loads for their return flights and Luftwaffe pilots did not much care where they landed. In case of fires, stirrup pumps were much in demand in Hagley throughout the war.
Colonel the Viscount Cobham inspected the Halesowen Home Guard in December 1943 as he did often. Were the fathers or grandfathers of the Hagley Wood boys involved in this? We do not know. Food Production Clubs in Hagley and surrounding villages had sixty members and the school playing fields had been turned into vegetable-growing allotments by May 1942. Fundraising events were held regularly, as on Bank Holiday, 2 August 1943 – by which time the Americans had arrived and the music was by courtesy of the US Army Dance Band.
A number of Hagley’s buildings had been taken over by the government. The Station Inn, the Hall itself, the school and Hall Barn, all these were ARP posts or First Aid centres and the population had suddenly increased – and decreased – because of circumstances. A Billeting Committee had been set up in November 1940 to consider who could take in evacuees from Birmingham and even London. Concerns were raised over parochial trivia like Identity Cards for new brides. The girls must not alter names on the cards themselves, but take them to the National Register Office, presumably in Birmingham. As for the neat little holders for the cards, they could be obtained from Miss Bradley of Pendower, in Hagley’s Middlefield Lane at 6d each. And in case anyone should accuse Miss Bradley of war profiteering, all proceeds from the sales went to the Red Cross.
The huge influx of Birmingham children to Hagley in 1940–41 never quite materialized. The expectation at the start of the war was that casualties would run into the thousands daily and vast numbers of cardboard coffins were mass-produced in readiness. When Birmingham mothers discovered that the village of Hagley had no air-raid shelters but only domestic cellars, they promptly marched their children back to the city, to take their chances in the streets they knew so well.
Even so, there was something risky about outlying villages like Hagley. Various modern accounts talk of people driving out from Birmingham to escape the bombing and sheltering in the woods nearby. This may have happened but today we have a distorted view of the impact of motor transport. Few people had cars in the 1940s and travel was restricted by limits on petrol allowance (a fall from 823,000 tons in 1940 to 301,000 three years later) and by the need to dim headlights at night. At the start of the war, there were over 2 million cars on the road; by 1942 only 718,000. That said, there were a number of strangers in the village, billeted on a long-suffering local population and, by comparison with the pre-war situation, the place must have seemed impossibly busy.
Then, on Monday, 19 April 1943, a knot of trench-coated and uniformed policemen came to Hagley, almost certainly in a black Railton car, looking for a particular wych elm.
Chapter 3
The Thin Blue Line
Tommy Willetts had ‘cracked’. Bothered as he was by the sight of the skull in the wych elm, he was probably equally bothered by the knowledge that he and his mates had been trespassing. For the last four years of their lives, the country they knew had been regimented, bullied and watched like nothing else in its history. Men in uniforms were everywhere, tape stuck across windows to minimize bomb damage. Everybody carried a cardboard box containing a gas mask. Every adult (and two of the boys were adults now) had to carry identity cards and other papers and they had to produce them at the drop of a government regulation from the Ministry of Information. The underlying tensions, habits and life patterns of a largely rural village were swept aside in all this. And Tommy Willetts told his mum what they had found. She told his dad and Mr Willetts contacted the police.
Careless modern accounts claim that he rang the police, but this was unlikely; most people in the 1940s did not possess a phone. And anyway, Mr Willetts knew the local station sergeant, Charles Lambourn, well; in the way that village communities hung together in what now seems a distant age. Lambourn was probably Willetts’ age, 47, and he had enlisted in the Worcestershire Constabulary in 1919, the year in which the first ever police strike had taken place in the Met – an incident that many people believed meant that the country was going to the dogs.
In February 1942, the prime minister, Winston Churchill, had delivered one of his many morale-boosting broadcasts to the nation, singling out the police in particular for their heroic efforts. They ‘have been in it everywhere all the time. And as a working woman wrote to me … “What gentlemen they are”.’1
To honest citizens like the Willetts, the police were the avuncular ‘bobbies’ of Lawson Wood’s contemporary cartoons, wide-girthed, seemingly middle-aged and kindly. The pre-war generation remembered the ‘White Horse’ Wembley in 1923 when PC George Scorey, riding a grey, had prevented catastrophe by gently steering the crowds off the pitch. They knew that coppers cuffed kids around the ear for ‘scrumping’ apples and knew that they were perhaps none too bright, but they were a symbol of safety and solidarity at a time when both of those commodities were singularly lacking.
The 183 police forces up and down the country were stretched to breaking point, but this was their finest hour. The relationship between law enforcers and the public was brilliantly summed up by a cardboard sign slung outside a bombed London police station that read ‘Be Good; we’re still open’. It was a largely male institution; in 1939 there were only 282 women police officers; at first carrying out clerical duties and making the tea, they soon joined their male colleagues in the front line. The outbreak of war meant that chief constables of counties like Worcestershire lost the semi-autonomy they had enjoyed previously; now, it was all run by the Home Office. There were 60,000 officers in 1939, 9,000 of them army reservists or liable for call-up if under twenty-five. A Reserve was added and a Special Constabulary to offset those who had volunteered or been drafted into the armed forces.
The Police and Firemen (War Service) Act of 1939 made it impossible for officers to retire unless on medical grounds, which explains why all the named policemen in the Hagley Wood case were in their late forties or early fifties. By 1941, police numbers had soared to 92,000, an unprecedented high.
Men like Charles Henry Lambourn had to be of British birth and descent, over 20 on enlistment, but under twenty-seven. They had to be at least 5ft 9in in their bare feet, be able to read and show reasonable proficiency in dictation and simple arithmetic. They all had to undergo medicals, the police doctor checking for hernias, flat feet, poor eyesight and deafness. They had to sign a form, solemnly swearing ‘that I will, to the best of my power, cause the peace to be kept … [and to] discharge all the duties thereof faithfully according to the law’. Each constable carried in his pocket a copy of Police Laws (1939) written by Cecil Moriarty, Chief Constable of Brighton and he was expected to know it off by heart. ‘Offences against the person’, which effectively was what Sergeant Lambourn would be facing in Hagley Wood, included assault, murder, rape, abduction, prostitution and indecency. There was a separate section for offences against children. Some of this was obsolete, based on Victorian legislation (for example, employment of child chimney sweeps) which is a reminder that the Second World War, like any other moment frozen in time, is a strange mix of the present and the past.
The war put a huge additional strain on the officers of police stations like Lye. Coppers had to know the law concerning the carrying of a camera (in case it was being used for sabotage or espionage purposes). They had to be as familiar as ARP wardens with blackout regulations. They had to be up to speed on legislation pertaining to Aliens and Regulation 18B which, as we shall see, effectively rules out one suspect in the Hagley Wood case.
By now, it was Monday, 19 April and Lambourn and Willetts took Bob Hart to show them what they had found among the bluebells. In the dark bole of the wych elm, perhaps 3½ feet from the ground, they could see a skull and a bone, as well as material and what looked like a shoe. This was clearly a crime scene and Lambourn needed a higher authority. He contacted Sergeant Richard Skerratt, his old oppo from Clent police station, and he arrived with Constable Arthur John Pound, known as Jack. Because of the vagaries of online research, we know more about this man than any other policeman on the case. He was born in Abberley, Worcestershire in January 1895 and was recorded as a labourer in the census of 1911. He joined the Worcester force in 1920 by which time he had married. At the outbreak of war, he is listed at the police station in Bromsgrove Road, Hagley, but because of his age and his times, had seen more of life than many of his younger colleagues. In November 1914 he had rushed to the colours, along with thousands of the naïve generation who had been told that war was a great adventure. He enlisted in the Royal Garrison Artillery at Gosport, Hampshire, so we have physical details that are missing from the others. At the age of 19 he was 5ft 10in tall with a 35in chest. He served throughout the war as a Bombardier and was one of those unsung heroes who did his bit for king and country twice – first in the army, then in the police.
A photograph of Sergeant Skerratt has survived from his time as a constable. He is wearing the ‘bobby’ helmet designed in the nineteenth century in an attempt at self-defence and is wearing his double-breasted greatcoat, complete with whistle and chain. As a sergeant, his uniform would have been identical except for the three chevrons on his sleeve. He and the others knew very well that nothing could be touched in the Wood until the detectives were called – and that meant guarding the potential crime scene.
We are all familiar today, thanks to endless television crime series, with the blue and white tape (yellow in America) fluttering across leafy glades, usually in crime-ridden Midsomer! There was no tape in 1943 and scene of crime officers today would be horrified at the amateur handling of such places eighty years ago. Skerratt, Lambourn and Pound trampled all over potentially crucial evidence in their size elevens, as (with probably smaller feet!) did Willetts and Bob Hart. The CID in Worcester could arrive in under an hour, but there would have to be a pathologist on this one and Professor James Webster could not get there until the next day.
It is now, with the body in the wych elm untouched by anybody except Bob Hart, that discrepancies creep in. While they waited for someone to stand guard overnight, Skerratt and Lambourn took careful measurements of the tree. One account has that guard being Lieutenant Colonel Wilfred Byford-Jones, who would morph into Quaestor as a jobbing journalist after the war. As a Home Guard officer, this was the sort of work he might be called upon to undertake, but his exalted rank makes this unlikely. If he was as genuinely rattled by night-time in Hagley Wood as he later claimed in the Express and Star (see Chapter 1) he made an unlikely volunteer. Joyce Coley, writing on the case in 2007, claims that the real guard was Eric Douglas-Osborne, a Special Constable waiting for his call-up papers from the RAF, someone who will feature later in this book.
It was not until Tuesday, 20 April that the black Railton – or more probably Railtons, complete with hearse – drove off the Bromsgrove Road along the narrow Hagley Wood Lane that runs along the edge of the wood. Today there is a gate into the wood about 200 yards from the main road which is locked and blocked by a ‘keep out’ sign. There is a broken wire fence around the wood itself and it can be entered easily at any point north of the gate. Contrary to Quaestor’s hysterical journalese, Hagley Wood is a peaceful place, the elms severely thinned by comparison with 1943, and carpeted with bluebells. The Lane itself, twisting up to a car park on the Clent Hills, is clearly a rat-run for locals today, judging by the volume of traffic using it. In 1943, it would have been very quiet, although there are a number of sightings of cars parked along it in the 1940–43 period.
A body in a hollow tree must have sounded bizarre to Worcester CID. It remains the only such example of corpse disposal in British criminal history. And if we have a mental picture of the ‘boys in blue’ in the 1940s, our image of the detectives is equally strong. Unlike today’s largely anonymous police forces, who usually trot out chief constables or PR specialists used to dealing with the media, the plainclothesmen of wartime were often legendary. Inevitably, much of this focused on the Metropolitan police and especially Scotland Yard, the ‘most public institution in the world’ but there was a tradition at the time that ‘the Yard’ was called in to provincial murder cases because of its expertise and experience. For reasons which are unclear, that did not happen in Hagley Wood. And I believe that this led to someone literally getting away with murder.
Typical of the ‘type’ was Chief Constable Edmund Greeno – ‘the guv’nor’ to hundreds of subordinates and criminals alike. When the pathologist Keith Simpson’s secretary, Molly Lefebure, met him in the spring of 1942, she wrote:
More than anything he resembled a huge, steel-plated battle-cruiser, with his jaw thrust forward like a prow. He spoke little, noticed everything and was tough, not in the Hollywood style, but genuinely, naturally, quietly, appallingly so … The grim light of battle glimmered in his eyes and he started asking me questions in a rather rasping voice that sent shivers down my spine. He was on the warpath and I thought, ‘God help the poor fool he’s after.’2
Greeno’s experience as a Londoner with the Met would have been different from that of the detectives from Worcester, but there would have been similarities. Greeno would not have passed selection today – he had a gambling problem and his betting on the horses doubled his detective’s salary of £2,000 a year. When he joined the Flying Squad, known as the Sweeney or the Heavy Mob, he spent most of his time chasing armed robbers and cracking the heads of the London racecourse gangs, spearheaded by Darby Sabini, the ‘godfather’ of his day. He was rarely involved in vice although he did close down a high-class brothel in Dover Street. Inside the elegant premises, he found ‘whips and racks and spiked girdles and the biggest bed in the world, currently occupied by the Misses Mary, June, Betty and Helen’ as well as ‘a glistening six-foot Negress in thigh boots and nothing else’. In fact, only the raiding police were fully clothed and in court later, one of the accused who had written ‘incredibly filthy letters’ to the black girl, objected to being referred to by the police as ‘this man’ whereas, in fact, he was a solicitor!
During the war, Greeno caught twelve high-profile murderers, by no means all in London. Eleven-year-old Sheila Wilson was sexually assaulted and strangled in Lewisham, Kent. Mark Turner was an 81-year-old who had mistakenly befriended a deserter from the Canadian army who killed him in Halifax, Yorkshire. Fourteen-year-old Daphne Bacon had her skull shattered in a Suffolk cornfield.
But if Greeno was a celebrity in the press of the time, he was not alone. George Hatherill had been everywhere and done everything during his stint with the Belgian police in Brussels and Antwerp. He spoke several languages and was one of the ‘big five’, the Yard’s leading men, by 1943. He had attended the 1936 Olympic Games as a guest of Heinrich Himmler, the Third Reich’s top policeman and brought down one of the cleverest conmen of the war in the unlikely shape of Harry Clapham, the vicar of St Thomas’s, Lambeth. The dodgy divine was sending out nearly a million begging letters a year and had no less than ninety-one different bank accounts.
Like the men working out of Worcester, Robert Higgins had a provincial background. He came from Oakham in Rutland, the country’s smallest and best-behaved county. Scraping into the Met in terms of height and weight, he was an inspector for the Flying Squad in C Division by 1941, based in the Tottenham Court Road, centre of ‘van-dragging’ (theft from unattended vehicles). ‘Though death and horror were often all around, society had to be maintained and murderers and felons were still pursued relentlessly.’3
John du Rose – known as ‘Four Day Johnnie’ for his speed of catching crooks – joined the Met in May 1931, walking his beat in Mayfair and Soho – places crawling with prostitutes, high-class shoplifters, pickpockets and conmen. The section house he shared as a young copper was harsh. He had a bed and a locker and a long walk to the toilet. The water was invariably cold and the washbasin was a lead trough. His take-home pay before the war was £3 a week, but this was cut to £2 ‘in the interests of national economy’; these were, after all, the years of the Slump. His day was fourteen hours long with half an hour for lunch. ‘New kinds of villains were bred during the war,’ he remembered in his autobiography. ‘Looting after air raids became prevalent and the old standards of honesty began to slip. We moved into the era of the spiv and the smart alec, the get-rich-quick types.’4 What struck du Rose, as it would policemen on the Hagley Wood case, was how secretive whole communities could be, even when faced with a common enemy. Covent Garden was a ghetto of silence.
Reginald Spooner was physically the opposite of Bob Higgins. At 6ft 5in tall, he dwarfed virtually everybody he met, far too conspicuous for the undercover work he was sometimes called on to do. Colleague Iain Anderson had no idea how he did it. ‘When he went into the office [for undercover selection] he seemed about 3 inches shorter than normal; he was wearing wide trousers [Oxford bags] and he somehow bent his knees without showing it and hunched his shoulders.’5 Just before the war, he worked in the Soho-centred ‘dirty book trade’ which would become the Yard Vice Squad years later. A workaholic, as most of these detectives were, he rarely saw his family and in 1940 was central to the West London Aliens Tribunal, sorting out the complex stories of foreigners in the capital who might just be enemy agents. When France fell in May, he was seconded to Wormwood Scrubs to work with MI5 in B57, an anti-espionage and anti-sabotage unit. At the end of the war, he wrote, ‘I haven’t seen my wife in daylight since 1939.’
Against men like these, the detectives who gathered at Hagley Wood that Tuesday in April 1943 are mere shadows. That is not at all to denigrate them. They were simply modest men who got on with their jobs and did not write autobiographies. In fact, despite the existence of dozens of these, the attitude of the Home Office and the police generally was that officers should not write up their cases for public consumption and certainly should not brag about their clear-up rate. This is partly why Scotland Yard’s famous Black Museum (actually called the Police Museum) is not open to the public.
Divisional Detective Inspector Jack Henry can have won few plaudits when he published his autobiography in 1945. ‘The small and petty crimes could be left safely in the hands of the [locals]. Scotland Yard undertook the detection and apprehension of the more skilful type of crook and scientific thug.’6
How skilful and how scientific the crook and thug who stuffed someone into a hollow tree in Hagley Wood was remained to be seen, and the men to oversee it were Detective Superintendent Sidney William Inight, 47, and his leg man, the one whose signature appears more times than anybody else’s in the police files of the CID, Detective Inspector Thomas Nock Williams. Inight had joined the Worcester force in 1919, Williams nine years later. Together, they stood with the constables under the opening buds in Hagley Wood on that spring day. No doubt they wore long trench coats and trilby hats, the unofficial uniform of a plainclothesman. Perhaps at least one of them had the ubiquitous pipe.
But it was the man with them who commanded everybody’s attention, a thick-set, avuncular-looking man with receding hair who would now direct proceedings and kickstart the Hagley Wood case. He was Professor James Matthewson Webster, the Home Office Pathologist and he had some questions to ask of the bones in the tree.
Chapter 4
Old Bones
He was the greatest detective of us all; the man who solved more cases than anyone the Yard has ever produced … His word was accepted by judges and juries throughout the country, more often than not without question.1
Superintendent Robert Higgins’ view of Bernard Spilsbury is a perfect encapsulation of the adulation that attached to this man – and, by inference, his lesser-known colleagues – in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite the international obsession with crime scenes and laboratory work – think ‘CSI’ and add any placename you like – the real pathologists of today are shadowy, behind-the-scenes people. When the body was found in the wych elm, they, like senior detectives, were household names. Ironically, as technology and science has improved, the less we trust pathologists’ research. A number of high-profile cases, from the ‘babes in the wood’ murders of Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway in 1986 to the disappearance of Maddie McCann in Portugal in 2003, have collapsed or stalled because of the inconclusiveness of forensic evidence.
Not so in the days of Spilsbury. He made his name in the solution of the Crippen case in 1910, which led to Dr H.H. Crippen being hanged for the murder of his wife. The case was a sensation, involving Scotland Yard, the first use of radio communication to apprehend the fugitive Crippen, and the stoic certainties of Spilsbury in the witness box at the Old Bailey. In fact, at least one modern crime writer has expressed serious doubts about the Crippen case, believing that Mrs Crippen’s body in the basement of 63, Hilldrop Crescent, was actually that of a man.
By the 1940s, Spilsbury was not a well man. He had a stroke in May 1940, collapsing over a mortuary table, but continued to work his ludicrously long hours anyway. The Met’s traffic cops routinely ignored his parking tickets and his driving of his Armstrong Siddeley the wrong way down one-way streets. He was impossibly arrogant and treated the new generation of pathologists with contempt. ‘I find it difficult,’ he told Keith Simpson, ‘to separate fact and opinion in your report [into the Harold Loughans’ murder of Rose Robinson in November 1944]. No, don’t bother me now. I’m involved.’
‘I was dismissed,’ Simpson wrote later. ‘The “headmaster” had finished with me.’2
