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.
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.
