All the Bellas in the World
Every commentator of the Hagley Wood murder has followed Donald McCormick’s lead that the police tried to trace the 2,000 women missing in Britain between 1941 and 1943. This was within, according to McCormick, a radius of 1,000 miles from Hagley, which would have taken the enquiries well into occupied Europe – to be precise, halfway across Poland and the whole of France – which was, of course, a no-go area for any police force in wartime. Even if McCormick meant 1,000 square miles, it is still too vast an area for overstretched forces. That said, it is clear from the Worcester Archive that cooperation between constabularies was good and other forces would help if they could.
And because it was wartime, there were two conflicting elements operating, which actually made it quite difficult for a woman to ‘disappear’. One was the camaraderie, itself a product of fear, which made people group together and look out for each other. The other is the paranoia we have already noted, a natural extension of many people enjoying nothing better than to snoop – and to report certain activities to the authorities. In the recent COVID experience, equated, as we have seen, with the Second World War, it has been everybody’s delight to report on ‘Partygate’ and ‘Beergate’, catching the great and good of government out breaking their own rules.
We can see this happening in the case of Joan Wolfe that we have discussed already, a case which, unlike Bella, had a successful outcome. When Joan first ran away from home, her mother, Edith Watts, contacted the police who traced her to the army camps at Aldershot. The army brought her back. When she ran again, this time to London, Mrs Watts managed to trace her via a series of landladies. Admittedly, Joan kept up an intermittent contact with her mother through letters – as of course Bella might have done with somebody. When the runaway got to Godalming in Surrey, near to a Canadian army camp, she stayed with Kate Hayter, an old lady in nearby Thursley who looked out for her. A patrolling policeman saw her with a soldier in a Godalming park and he moved them on. Constable Timothy Halloran of the Surrey police took the pair to the station on another occasion. He quizzed her as a vulnerable person under the Children and Young Persons Act. Halloran was able to trace Joan’s mother in Tunbridge Wells but the girl did not want to know and the constable had no choice but to let the pair go (she was nineteen). She was ill two days later and booked herself in to the emergency ward of Warren Road Hospital, Guildford, where the staff looked after her. She had ignored Halloran’s advice to find quarters with the Church Army in the town.
Once out of hospital, Joan lived with her lover August Sangret in a wigwam the Meti soldier had made for her in Houndown Woods. Various guards at Witley Camp moved them on because soldiers were forbidden to ‘set up house’ with civilians. The police took Joan into custody and returned her to hospital in something akin to desperation. They could not hold her at a police station as she had committed no crime. Days later, she was living (on and off with Sangret who slipped out of his barracks) at a cricket pavilion in Thursley; the ARP warden, William Featherby, saw them there and kicked them out. Two children had seen them looking for digs in the village. True, the involvement of a number of people, including the police, failed to keep Joan Wolfe alive, but her lifestyle, in the weeks before her death in September 1942, was documented and known. Surely, a similar pattern could be found for Bella in the wych elm?
The obvious difference was that the Hagley Wood victim had no identity, but the name Bella caught the imagination of police and public alike. If that actually was her name, tracing her could not be that difficult; and three Bellas came to light.
The first was Bella Tonks. When the Hagley Wood investigation was closed in 2005, West Mercia police (as the Worcestershire force was now called) produced a detailed report (see Chapter 16). It reads ‘Bella Tonks was raised as a possibility following a media circulation’ and it says a great deal about how determined – or desperate – the police of 1943 were that the 2005 report says, ‘The name “Bella” was seemingly derived from the chalk writings on the walls throughout the West Midlands conurbation and as such the link to the enquiry was questionable.’ It was as though the Met in 1888 were looking for a man called J.T. Ripper! Bella Tonks was found, living under her maiden name (not given in 2005) in Heath Hayes, a village near Cannock nearly twenty miles away from Hagley. There are no further details, but presumably some long-suffering plod had to go door to door in the same way that Constable Pitcher had in Hasbury.
The Worcester Archive says that this Bella was a teacher at Clent School, very close to Hagley and that she was in her mid-fifties in 1943, which would make her too old for the woman in the wych elm. She was described as plump, with gold-brown hair and ‘a good set of even teeth’. She was 5ft 4in tall. On all counts, Bella Tonks could not be the woman in the tree. She was ‘very fond of the company of men’, however, and that probably rang alarm bells for investigating officers. She was believed to be living in Wednesbury, near Heath Hayes and was married with four children. This was on 4 April 1944 and she was found, very much alive, soon afterwards.
Bella Luer was an altogether better bet, if only because several of the chalk writings had the name Lubella attached. According to the 2005 closure report, she moved from London, almost certainly to escape the Blitz, to work in a factory in the Birmingham area, which has an air of frying pans and fires about it! There is a letter in the Archive from Alfred Richardson of Stamford Hill, N16, to the effect that Bella Luer was a neighbour of his. She had planned to get married but had subsequently disappeared. She lived in lodgings with Mrs Dora Harris, a 50-year-old housekeeper who received a Christmas card from Bella in 1942. This effectively ruled her out as the Hagley Wood victim, who, at 24 was just under Professor Webster’s estimation of age. She was also, however, 5ft 4–5in tall with a ‘good set of teeth, her own, not false’ and was a Jewess. Since the last line in the report of May 1944 reads ‘She lives at 10 Railway Cottages, Goring-on-Sea’ we must assume that she was still alive and that the police had drawn a blank again.
What about Bella Beech? Like Luer, she had left London when the Luftwaffe targeted her stomping ground in West Ealing. The police could find no one named Beech in the Birmingham areas where the first graffiti had been found, but James Beech, a railway porter, lived in Stourbridge. He was Bella’s twin brother and had lived for a while at Upper Dean Street. Someone else who lived nearby was Harry Trueman, who had fallen out with his wife and lived with another woman, who may have been Bella. The Worcestershire Archive is infuriatingly vague about him, probably because in May 1944, Isobel Eleanor Beech was found alive and well, working as a nurse in a hospital in Muswell Hill, London. The process of elimination of these women was all very laudatory – and probably necessary – but it cost the overstretched constabulary a vast amount of time and resources.
Nor could the police afford to concentrate just on missing Bellas. Other reports of missing persons came their way constantly in the turmoil of the war years and all of them had to be checked. In The People’s War (2000), Angus Calder estimates that there were about 60 million changes of address between 1939 and 1945 at a time when the population was only 38 million. Much of this was evidenced by the two Bellas cited above – a drift from London, but it also worked from east to west. The industrial North East, East Anglia and Kent were considered the areas most likely to be overrun by an invasion – Devon and Cornwall seemed a paradise by comparison, but of course, work was limited there. London had only 67 per cent of its population by the summer of 1943, although the industrial Midlands increased, adding to the workload of the Worcestershire constabulary. Overcrowding became a real issue and small towns like Stourbridge, even villages like Hagley, became overwhelmed. The Mass Observation unit reported that sleepy hamlets up and down the country looked like London railway stations with an ‘atmosphere of irritable bustle, impersonal pushing and hurrying’. The newcomers extended queues outside fish and chip shops; they filled up cinemas. Host towns and villages had to take essential war workers and evacuees who had been bombed out, but they did not have to like it. And in 1941–43, nobody could have foretold how much worse it would be when the Americans arrived!
Into the muddle of the Bella investigation stepped another time waster. He was Private Heywood, Christian name not recorded, of the 2nd Battalion, Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry based in Nottingham. In the Worcester Archive is a letter from the Reverend A.G. Harper who was the regiment’s padre and who was making enquiries on Heywood’s behalf. In fact, he need not have bothered because Heywood had already contacted the police using his own name and then a second time with an alias as though to shine a spotlight on the woman he was looking for. Harper’s letter describes Heywood’s missing girlfriend as being 23 but looks 18, about 5ft 2in tall with blue eyes, very long and very black hair, very white pearly teeth, none missing. She was a fruit and hop picker, last heard of at Illey Farm, Illey, Worcestershire (two miles from Hagley). The kindly padre was just doing his bit for one of his men, but one glance at the missing woman’s description, her black hair, her pearly teeth, should have had Inspector Bache throwing the letter in the bin. Instead, the police wasted their efforts following this up. The padre had been right – the girl was ‘of the “gypsy” class’. Her name was Mary Lee (a very common Romany surname) and by the time the police found her in Stow-on-the-Wold, she was living under an assumed name – Mary Wenham – and had moved on from Light Infantryman Heywood at least three times! The feeling was that Heywood knew all about this, had no concerns that Mary may be Bella and was just trying to get back with her again.
‘Sheila’ was another missing person the police were looking for and her existence came to light under rather unusual circumstances. Vivienne Cross, also known as Biddy Williams, shopped Kenneth Patten, also known as Pat Graham, over the disappearance of a Land Army girl in the summer of 1942. Again, the date should have ruled this enquiry out, but again, no stone could be left unturned. The population migration was a perfect opportunity for people to assume aliases, although the paperwork they carried, especially identity cards, was a problem for them. That said, most people who have aliases have a shady take on life and some of them have criminal records. That was certainly true of Kenneth Patten who was at the time residing at His Majesty’s Pleasure in Wandsworth Prison in London. He and the Land Girl ‘Sheila’ had been working on the Hagley estate where he used to walk Vivienne Cross’s dog. He also helped himself to somebody else’s overcoat which is why he was in Wandsworth. When police interviewed him, they found that he had no clear recollection of Hagley Wood, had been working on T.F. Parsons’ dairy farm in the area for three weeks that summer and had no idea who ‘Sheila’ was or where she had gone. Despite being a teller of tall stories, including one in which his racing-driver fiancée had been killed in a crash, leaving him heartbroken, Patten had no case to answer and the matter was dropped.
Dinah Curley was someone else with an alias and there are a number of references to her in the police files. She fills available space too in the closure file of 2005 even though the conclusion there is that it is likely that Dinah Curley, also known as O’Grady, probably never existed. PC71 Thomas Kelly of the Stockport County Borough police in Manchester was following up a missing person’s report on Dinah Curley. Mrs Mary Lavin of Stanley Street, Manchester had reported Dinah missing after an air raid. The horrific damage done by the Luftwaffe in Manchester, as elsewhere, meant that bodies were not always found or identifiable and distressed relatives and/or friends often went to their local police station in the hope of finding someone. One bizarre case happened in London in July 1942 when a woman’s body was found in a bombed Baptist church in Vauxhall Road. She was Rachel Dobkin, identified by superb forensic work on the part of the pathologist Keith Simpson. But she was not a Blitz victim – her body had been placed there by her fire-watcher husband Harry and he duly hanged for her murder.
Constable Kelly found Mrs Lavin at 40, Laurence Street, Stockport, only to discover that she had never heard of Dinah Curley and had never lived in Manchester. In May 1941, when Dinah was reported missing, Mary Lavin had been living at the same address where Constable Kelly now sat, no doubt having a cup of tea. She was single then, Mary Dowling, and all her family lived in Ireland. The most peculiar thing about all this was that whoever had lodged the missing person’s report had Mary’s identity card details, with the registration number LCIL.9/1; she showed it to Constable Kelly. The bobby’s enquiries of in-laws elicited the same response; no one knew Dinah Curley.
There is considerable confusion in the 2005 closure file over this one and nothing in the original archive to clarify it. Mary’s husband, Jack Lavin, seems to have been a dodgy character who at some point in 1942 was working as a contract labourer in St David’s, West Wales. Mary Lavin had moved in with a family called Lynch in Robert Street, Manchester in that year and when the Lynches moved to Haverfordwest, Mary went too to join Jack. The police were able to trace Mary’s movements until 30 March 1943 when she moved to Ripon, Yorkshire. By that time, the Lynches had gone to Kettering, Northamptonshire. Jack Lavin was wanted for non-payment of fines in Northamptonshire (what these were is not recorded). The identity card number is proof that Mary Lavin did in fact report Dinah Curley missing and the police were remiss in not pressuring her on this point. Perhaps the Lavins had some idea of cashing in on the disappearance of a non-existent friend in some hopelessly confused extension of the ‘bomb lark’, whereby people claimed compensation from the government for damage to property which had never happened.
Bella Lawley was also known as Kendrick and Shamwell, living in Trafalgar Road, Moseley, Birmingham. She may or may not have been engaged in prostitution in Ladywood and Bristol Road, but her sending a Christmas card to a friend in December 1942 implied that she was very much alive. The sending of the Christmas card has echoes of Bella Luer. Was this simply another alias of the same woman or a misremembering of her surname? The police files make no comment. We can assume the same for the other twenty missing persons in the police file were found alive and well too, representing, presumably, only a fraction of McCormick’s alleged 2,000. Their last known addresses are the length and breadth of the country and if they were all as dodgy as Mary Lavin and Bella Luer, the police had their work cut out. What happened to Elsie Robinson, Mary Claypole, Gwen Parish, Miss P.D. Montgomery, Helen Ormsby and so many more from the police missing persons list? We will probably never know; their names light up briefly in the course of somebody else’s murder enquiry.
But what we can be sure of is that none of them was Bella, or whatever the real name of the woman in the wych elm at Hagley Wood.
Chapter 8
Bloody Foreigners
There is a concept in the long history of murder that the killer is never a local, never ‘one of us’. How often will journalists quote a neighbour where a body has been discovered as saying ‘This sort of thing doesn’t happen around here’? But, of course, it does, as the events make transparently clear. Not in my back yard, not in my street, not in my stretch of woodland – this remains the position generally taken. The extension of that argument is that the killer cannot be a local either – it must have been a stranger.
The stranger-killer is extremely rare, yet the idea is everybody’s bogeyman. Generations of us have been so indoctrinated by television, slasher movies and home invasions, that we all have a morbid fear of the wandering lunatic intent on random slaughter. In recent years, this has been, sadly, reinforced by the perception of the danger posed by the mentally ill being badly diagnosed and released from institutions and by the rise of militant Islam, where any atrocity is accepted by some as being the will of Allah.
Nowhere is this fear of the stranger-killer more noticeable than in the Whitechapel murders of 1888. Since the area had a 95 per cent Jewish population and since most of them, from pogrom-plagued Russia and Poland, had only recently arrived, it was assumed by many that a Jew must be responsible. This was not helped by the fact that Israel Lipski, who murdered Miriam Angel in Batty Street, Whitechapel in June 1887 was one such recent arrival. He was hanged at Newgate just two months later. The surname ‘Lipski’ became a cry of contempt by anti-Semites for years afterwards. Modern studies of serial killers suggest strongly that they choose their victims from their own social class and race. There are exceptions, but the norm holds good in 95 per cent of cases. None of Jack the Ripper’s victims was Jewish, but the finding of the infamous leather apron near the body of Annie Chapman led to John Pizer being attacked by the mob. He not only wore such an apron, as we have seen, but his behaviour was odd and he was Jewish.
But fear of the stranger-killer was not confined to hatred of the Jews. Into the frame as a possible Jack suspect steps Dr William Holt, a junior surgeon at St George’s Hospital. On 11 November 1888 he approached a woman named Humphreys, who may or may not have been a prostitute. She screamed and reported that a white-eyed man with a black face had accosted her. Holt was eventually traced. He was a well-meaning (and harmless) do-gooder who prowled the area trying to do what the police, apparently, could not – catch the Whitechapel murderer. Holt was actually wearing glasses – hence the ‘white’ eyes – and he was not in black face; the rest was in Mrs Humphreys’ fevered imagination.
It would be nice to think that prejudice of this sort – and the total misunderstanding of a killer’s behaviour – would have changed for the better by the 1940s, but, if anything, it was worse. One of the casual observations in the Worcester police archives is that a witness had a ‘Dago’ name. At heart, it was institutional racism, but it was regarded as a factual statement by a society that had never heard of ‘woke’ and had other things to worry about rather than political correctness. Setting aside outright foreign invasions – by Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans – over a 4,000-year period, migration to Britain was a constant and although racial trouble broke out sporadically, most outsiders were welcomed, even if they tended to cluster together, forming ghettoes. This was particularly true of the Irish, who drifted to England’s major cities in the 1840s as a result of the failure of the potato crop at home. The Jews likewise settled in London’s East End, in effect driving the Irish out.
There is little doubt that the First World War was something of a turning point. Such was the anti-German feeling in Britain that German shops were attacked and proprietors beaten up. In October 1914, a mob of nearly 5,000 burnt down a German shop in Deptford High Street and the army had to be called in to restore order. Around the country, fifty golf clubs closed their doors to Germans and Austrians. Many hotels sacked their Teutonic staff. It did not help that the propaganda of the Great War created the myth of the German ogre, a savage monster like an enraged King Kong, complete with pickelhaube helmet and bloody fangs. There were stories of the Kaiser’s troops crucifying Allied soldiers, even though they were just as Christian as their opponents; indeed, one of their battle cries was ‘Gott mitt uns’ (God is with us).
This attitude never went away. In a country like Britain, internationally known for its generosity and sense of fair play, there were always those who not only flew the flag but detested foreigners. The comic duo Flanders and Swann, from a later generation, sang ‘The English, the English, the English are best; I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.’ Even used ironically, these lyrics are unthinkable today, but in the 1950s everyone roared with laughter and nobody thought it was remotely distasteful.
When it came to particulars, foreigners were naturally suspected to be guilty of anything. Murder, claimed xenophobes, was not the British way, ignoring the bloody history of centuries. Recent articles on the Hagley Wood murder, mostly online, have pointed the finger at many people’s bêtes noires: the Americans. Before Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese bombed the American naval base in Hawaii without the civilized courtesy of a declaration of war first, the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt provided cash and materiel under the lend-lease programme while Winston Churchill continually urged the president to join the war on the Allied side.
The alliance with the United States was part of an ongoing love-hate relationship. Traditionally, the GIs who came first as a trickle, then as a torrent, were ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. The satirical magazine Punch summed up the situation perfectly in 1942:
Dear old England’s not the same.
The dread invasion, well, it came.
But no, it’s not the beastly Hun,
The god-damn Yankee army’s come.
Britain was the same size, geographically, as Minnesota; Texas, three times as big. The guidebook given to the GIs spelt out the differences for a people who were, for all their advanced technology, surprisingly insular and isolationist. ‘The British,’ they were told, ‘are tough, strong people and good allies. Don’t be misled by the … tendency to be soft-spoken and polite … The English language didn’t spread across oceans and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these men were panty-waists.’
In June 1942, there were fewer than 60,000 American troops in the country; by the build-up to D-Day, 6 June 1944, there were 1,526,965. More than 1,100 cities, towns and villages were home to these ‘invaders’, occupying country houses, schools, aircraft hangars, Nissen and Quonset huts and bell tents. The Americans were better dressed, better equipped, better paid. In 1942, a British Tommy earned 14 shillings a week; his GI oppo got the equivalent of £3 8s 9d. This bred resentment, especially when it came to local girls. They were easily lured by handsome young men in chocolate-coloured tunics, speaking the same kind of language they heard every week at the ‘pictures’.
In terms of law and order, Parliament passed the United States of America (Visiting Forces) Act in 1942, which laid down that Americans be tried by their own military courts, not the British legal system. The Military Police, known as ‘snowdrops’ because of their white helmets, patrolled areas where their servicemen hung out and were considered over-zealous in their use of their night sticks. American servicemen found guilty of rape and murder were hanged at Shepton Mallet prison, either by Master-Sergeant John C. Woods of the US Army or Albert Pierrepoint, the British executioner.
In July 1943, four months after ‘Bella’ was found in Hagley Wood, GI John Waters shot his girlfriend, Doris Staples, who worked in a draper’s shop in Henley-on-Thames. He then turned the gun on himself. Astonishingly, his head wound was not fatal. He faced trial, was found guilty and sentenced to death. Even more astonishingly, the townspeople of Henley organized a petition begging for mercy, understanding perhaps the enormous pressures on men thousands of miles from home.
The racial tensions of the American forces sometimes spilt over into British life. In Birmingham, so close to Hagley Wood, white soldiers kicked their coloured comrades off the ‘sidewalk’, calling them ‘black trash’. A soldier of the 11th Armored Division told his dance partner, a girl from Chippenham, ‘Ma’am, we shoot niggers where I come from.’ But black soldiers were more courteous and polite when dealing with British girls. One young lady wrote, ‘I don’t mind the Yanks, but I can’t say I care much for the white chaps they’ve brought with them.’
Three men were hanged for rape during the war and they were all Americans. Privates Elijah Brimson and Willie Small attacked 16-year-old Dorothy Holmes in March 1944 after a dance at Bishop’s Cleeve, Gloucestershire. Thomas Madison ‘got fresh with’ Beatrice Reynolds at Gunnislake in Cornwall but she remembered his face too well and reported him. ‘The only thing that was cheap in Britain,’ disgruntled Americans joked, ‘were the women.’
But all this faded into the background in contrast with the thrill-killers Jones and Hulten. In his Decline of the English Murder, George Orwell wrote that this pair ‘committed their murder to the tune of V-1 and were convicted to the tune of V-2’. The terrifying pilotless rockets known as ‘doodlebugs’ were whining overhead, but a different danger lurked on the ground. Both killers used aliases. Private Karl Hulten was from Sweden, taken to America by his parents as a toddler. Cruising the bars of London, he called himself 2nd Lieutenant Ricky Allen of the 501st Airborne and most of the Britons he met, unfamiliar with American rank badges, went along with that. His partner in crime was Elizabeth Baker, from Neath, North Wales, although she styled herself as an exotic dancer called Georgina Grayson and had briefly been married to Lance Bombardier Stanley Jones. A rape victim at 13 who had ‘done time’ at an approved school, she was perfect for the folie à deux which happened on 7 October 1943. They robbed and killed a taxi-driver, George Heath, whose cleft chin led to the press name for this callous killing – ‘the Cleft Chin Murder’. He bled to death from the single shot in the back from Hulten’s gun.
Uniquely in wartime, the Hulten case came under the British courts rather than that of the American military. A presidential election while the case was pending led to the government waiving its jurisdiction. Both were found guilty of murder, which under British law they were. Graffiti appeared, even in Betty Jones’s hometown, with figures hanging from gallows. In the event, 18-year-old Jones was given life imprisonment after the intervention of the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison. Hulten, at 22, was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Pentonville on 8 March 1945. Men like Hulten gave Americans a bad name. A deserter from the army (he had been AWOL for six weeks before Heath’s murder) he claimed to have run with the Mob in Chicago, which would have been familiar to his new girlfriend and others through the Cagney/Raft/Robinson movies of the 1930s and 1940s.
So, who was the GI who killed Bella? Nobody, because there were no American troops in Britain at the time. Professor Webster was only able to pinpoint the woman’s death at some time in the summer or autumn of 1941, but the attack on Pearl Harbor did not take place until 7 December of that year, ‘a day,’ broadcast Franklin Roosevelt, ‘that will live in infamy.’ Tradition has it that the first GI to set foot on British soul was Private First Class Milburn H. Henke of the 34th Infantry. Ironically, his father was a naturalized German. In fact, there were already 500 men of his Division’s advance guard in Belfast before the photographers and media arrived. The possible link between Bella and an anonymous American are born, like much else on the Internet about this case, out of ignorance, but they may originate in another case that came under the watchful eye of Professor James Webster. There are superficial similarities between the cases. On 26 October 1944, while police enquiries were still ongoing into Hagley Wood, 33-year-old nurse Florence Porter went out with an American called Hal. They were seen drinking and laughing in the George Hotel, Lickey End, Worcestershire, and later walking towards the woman’s home. Screams were heard at 10.30 p.m. but it was a wild, wet night and nobody investigated. Florence’s body was found by two schoolboys the next morning. Her clothing was disturbed, but she had not been assaulted. Webster, working in his laboratory at the old workhouse on the Birmingham Road determined that the cause of death was seven stab wounds from a slim-bladed knife.
Descriptions of Hal – a 1st or 2nd lieutenant in full uniform – were circulated in local US camps and identity parades held. The American army used metal detectors and drained a pond nearby in search of the murder weapon. Nothing – apart from Florence’s handbag – was found.
Police had two suspects in mind, but both, according to an enquiry in 2006, had cast-iron alibis. If that consisted of the word of fellow soldiers, I am afraid I do not believe it. There are many instances in other cases of soldiers literally closing ranks to protect their own. Hal had got away with it and the Americans had failed in what was a basic test of alliance.
If not the Americans, who? Britain had a love-hate relationship with its armed forces as well as with its former colonies. Soldiers were notoriously ‘brutal and licentious’ even when so many of them were conscripts and so, really, civilians in uniform. There was an RAF base at Hartlebury, less than eight miles from Hagley. The crimes of RAF serviceman Gordon Cummins had shocked the nation the previous year and, nonsense though it was, some people believed there was no smoke without fire; all men in uniform could behave that way, their minds hardened by war and the cheapness of human life.
Hartlebury was hardly a conventional RAF station. There was no airstrip and no planes, at least not complete ones. Unit 25 was what today would be called a logistics hub. It was part of Maintenance Command, responsible for supplying all air force equipment except guns. Propellors, Rolls Royce Merlin engines and much else rolled off its conveyor belts. In 1941, Hartlebury had a workforce of 1,230. Most of the men were over fifty and there were 300 women. When Jack Lazenby DFC got there, prior to a posting to a fighting unit, he was astonished to find a football match in progress, between two female teams; such things just did not happen in wartime England!
Having said there were no Americans in the forces in 1941, there were two civilians, known as Elmer and Alabamee, stationed at Hartlebury. The whole atmosphere was very civilian. The camp guards were Air Ministry wardens, mostly ex-servicemen armed with revolvers and they did not patrol at night. The team reported to a civilian in a bowler hat for their pay and discipline was extremely relaxed. The dance hall called the Glyderome in nearby Kidderminster was popular, as of course were pubs and cinemas. Could one of the Unit 25 team have met ‘Bella’ in the town, taken her to Hagley Wood and killed her? Of course, but the fact that nothing about the woman in the wych elm gave any hint of a local identity ruled this out as a likelihood.
Billeting was another wartime convention and meant that, at any given time, there were strangers in the area whose behaviour and motivation were unknown. Some of this was military. Half a mile from Hagley Wood was the village of Pedmore, already absorbed into the outskirts of Stourbridge. Eleven of its residents were killed in various actions during the war, including Lance Corporal Alfred Sangwin in North Africa. He died of wounds days after Bella’s body was found. The largest bell in Pedmore’s St Peter’s church is inscribed ‘I to Church the living call and to the grave do summon all.’ The Welch Regiment was billeted here but information on the unit is difficult to come by.
In preparation for what might turn to war, a government committee reported on billeting in 1938. It stressed that there had to be priorities involved and it perhaps had an over-pessimistic attitude to the threat of civilian bombing. Even at its height, in cities like London, Plymouth and Hull, the Blitz did not drive everybody out. Even the children, evacuated at first, often drifted back, ‘townies’ feeling hopelessly lonely and adrift in the countryside. Evacuation areas were those most likely to feel the need for billeting. Reception areas were those that took refugees in; and neutral areas neither sent nor took evacuees.
Inevitably, most accounts of the time refer to evacuated children, their little worlds turned upside down by being thrust into a strange environment they did not know and could not understand. In some cases, mothers came with them, but neither a woman nor a child was likely to have killed Bella. There is no direct information for the Hagley area in the context of billeted adults whose homes had been destroyed, but, given that the Blitz proper did not start until September 1940 and was petering out by the early summer of 1941, numbers cannot have been that high. Author Paul Newman in Under the Shadow of Meon Hill points out the locals’ fear of foreigners – Jews, Slovacs and Poles – but in reality there were probably few, if any, of these outside Birmingham.
