A Slaying on Saint Valentine’s Day
ON SAINT VALENTINE’S DAY, 1945, as many people discussed the results of the Yalta peace-making Conference with tense interest (and perhaps more confidence than was justified by the outcome), at the foot of Meon Hill in Warwickshire an elderly jobbing farmer named Charles Walton, a native of the nearby village of Lower Quinton, was savagely slashed and pierced to death.
Mention the subject of English witchcraft, and the first particular response may be ‘Ah, yes, the Pendle Forest covens’ – they having been made famous by the colourful (and highly coloured) novel by Harrison Ainsworth, The Lancashire Witches. In fact, the cult was widely spread over the country during the 16th and 17th centuries; a long list of major trials recorded in contemporary pamphlets ranges from those of the Chelmsford Witches in 1566 to those of the Exeter Witches in 1682. Although cases associated with Warwickshire do not appear in that list, and although none of the local weird characters bore such memorable names as Old Chattox or Mother Demdike, the county was as notorious as any other for the scope of its black-magical practices – particularly in the district around Lower Quinton, a Tudor village lying between Stratford-upon-Avon and Chipping Campden (about a mile from the present-day A34).
Of Meon Hill itself, legend asserts that the Devil hurled a great clod of earth at the newly-completed Abbey at Evesham, intending to bury it, but that Saint Egwin, Bishop of Worcester from 693 until 711, happened to see the missile approaching and, using the diversionary powers of prayer, swerved it to an undamaging landing-place, where it became known as Meon Hill. It was, so a story goes, haunted on New Year’s Eves by a ghostly huntsman and his hell-hounds; but the origin of its name is disappointingly prosaic, deriving from a British river-name and probably related to the Gaulish ‘moenus’, or ‘main’.
Long Compton, a short way south-west of Lower Quinton, was renowned for its witches. As a saying had it: ‘There are enough witches in Long Compton to draw a load of hay up Long Compton Hill.’ As late as 1875, a weak-minded young man, John Hayward, murdered a woman of eighty, Ann Turner, by pinning her to the ground with a hay-fork and then inflicting a cross-shaped wound on her throat with a bill-hook. He claimed that she had bewitched him, adding that Long Compton was full of witches, sixteen more of whom he would have killed if only he had had the chance of doing so.
Close to that witch-infested village, just across the border with Oxfordshire – and thus also within easy reach of Lower Quinton – are the famous Rollright Stones. In all probability, they are the remains of a Bronze Age place of worship. Legend has it, however, that they are the remains of a king and his army, turned to stone by an apparently well-meaning witch, to prevent him from conquering the Cotswolds. The story is that the king, determined to rule all England, met a witch on the high hill on which Little Rollright stands. She told him that if he could see Long Compton after taking seven steps forward, he would achieve his purpose. Confidently, for he knew that that village was close by, he strode forward – only to find his vision obscured by a tiny mound. The witch, cackling triumphantly after the manner of her kind, turned him and his army into stone, doomed to stay in the same place and in the same uncomfortably restricted condition until he was able to ‘see’ the village. (The legend further states that ‘the man will never live who shall count the stones three times and each time find the number the same’.)
On the hilltops around Lower Quinton are other sites said to have been popular among witches. ‘In the dark ages, the Quintons were overpopulated with witches,’ one of the locals told Donald McCormick, the author of Murder by Witchcraft.1 ‘Today I reckon the population have overtaken ’em. But of course, a witch can hide in a crowd.’
It has been suggested that Shakespeare conjured up Macbeth’s ‘blasted heath’ and its alfresco residents from his memories of this haunted countryside near his Stratford home.
I have said enough, I think, to show that the ground of this part of Warwickshire was fertile for the growth of rumours regarding the unnatural death of Charles Walton.
At seventy-four, he was one of the oldest inhabitants of Lower Quinton, where he had spent all his life. A sufferer from rheumatism, he dwelt in a thatched cottage with his spinster-niece Edith Walton. He was regarded as a ‘loner’. In earlier years he had worked as a farm labourer, but as he grew old and less mobile, walking almost always with a stick, he did little more than trim hedges for local farmers, and then only when the weather was kind. Although or because his life-style was very modest, he was believed to be reasonably well off. Despite his lack of conventional sociability, he seems to have been generally regarded as a quiet and inoffensive, if at times short-tempered, old chap.
There were, however, eccentricities that caused some people to treat him with caution, even to surmise that he dabbled in wizardry. He claimed, for instance, to possess the power of communicating with birds and animals – and sometimes, if he had had one too many, went further than that, boasting that he understood animal ‘languages’. He rarely joined his neighbours in a friendly drink at either of the local pubs, but was known to imbibe cider (considered by some to be ‘witches’ tipple’), having lugged barrels of the brew home in his wheelbarrow. On the whole, though, he was reckoned to be a harmless oddity; in his small community (numbering fewer than five hundred at the time), he seemed to have no enemies.
1. John Long, London, 1968.
On the morning of that fatal Saint Valentine’s Day (a day of rituals and superstitions, which chanced in that year of 1945 to be also Ash Wednesday), Walton took advantage of the sunny weather to set off to cut hedges bordering a farm belonging to a Mr Albert Potter, on a slope of Meon Hill about a mile away, taking with him his walking-stick, his hay-fork and his bill-hook – or slash-hook. His niece Edith also left the cottage, to go to a nearby factory where she worked on a wartime job. Her uncle told her that he would return at his usual time, four o’clock (she would not be back until about six), and would, as was his custom, prepare his own tea before resting from the day’s labour.
When Edith entered the cottage that evening, she found it cold, dark – and empty. She called a neighbour, Harry Beasley, and they hurried along the dark lanes to see Mr Potter at his farmhouse, The Firs, and inform him that Charles Walton was missing. Potter appeared surprised; he told them that, around noon, he had seen Walton (or ‘someone’, he cautiously amended later) trimming hedges in a field about five hundred yards from the farmhouse. (An odd discrepancy was recorded on this point at the subsequent inquest. When asked why he thought the trimmer was Walton, Potter replied that, though he could not be sure, he was fairly certain because of the old man’s shirt-sleeves. The coroner inquired, ‘Have you been told that Walton had no shirt-sleeves?’ A short-sleeved white shirt was then produced. Potter answered, ‘I never saw the whole of him, only his shirt-sleeves,’ and the coroner left it at that.)
Potter, Beasley and Edith set off by torchlight to the field in question. As they approached an old willow tree, Potter suddenly stopped and told Edith not to come any nearer. Walton lay dead, spiked to the ground with his own hay-fork. Beasley took the distraught Edith home and then called on another neighbour, who got in touch with the police. Meanwhile, Potter was left alone with the body. His fingerprints were found afterwards on the handle of the hay-fork, but he explained this at the inquest by stating that he had tried to withdraw it from the body.
Later, Detective-Superintendent Robert Fabian, called in to head the murder investigation, described Walton’s injuries as ‘hideous … [looking] like the kind of killing the Druids might have done in ghastly ceremony at full moon’. How familiar ‘Fabian of the Yard’ was with the sacrificial rituals of the Druids is open to question, but there is no doubt that the sight was horrific.1
The manner of Walton’s death recalls, rather than Druidism, the practice of impaling a witch’s corpse to the ground to prevent it from walking … or flying.
The hay-fork had been plunged into the old man’s body with such force that the prongs penetrated several inches into the ground; two burly police officers needed all their combined strength to extract it. In addition, a jagged cross-shaped wound had been cut into the chest and neck with the slash-hook, almost separating the head from the body. Perhaps indicating the fight Walton had put up, his walking-stick, saturated in blood, lay close by.
1. Druidism was the faith of the Celtic inhabitants of Ancient Gaul; the Druids were their priests. Though the name seems to have been derived from the word dru (meaning wise man – or magician), the priests were only very slightly, if at all, connected with what might be called conventional wizardry. Celts are thought to have arrived in Britain around 500 BC, but the only reference to Druids in this country in Roman history appears to be that in the Annals of Tacitus (AD 61): describing an invasion of the island of Anglesey by the Imperial Governor Suetonius, Tacitus writes of the islanders lining the shore in an armed mass, while ‘close by stood Druids, raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses’. The Druids, firm believers in immortality, sought to placate the gods by sacrificing human beings. These were generally criminals, but when there was too great a fall in the crime-rate, use was made of innocent people. The usual method of sacrifice was to erect an enormous construction of tree-branches and twigs (‘the Wicker Man’), fill it with humans and animals, and set the thing alight. Certain trees, such as the oak and the rowan (as well as the parasitic mistletoe), were sacred to the Druids: hence the superstition of ‘touching wood’.
There was no apparent motive for the crime, and at the coroner’s inquest the expected verdict was returned: Murder by Some Person, or Persons, Unknown. Walton was known not to have carried much money around with him; his old tin watch was missing, though its chain was attached to one of the pockets of his waistcoat. No one other than Potter claimed to have seen him out of doors on the day of the murder. What at first must have seemed to be a fairly simple case began to be complicated – chiefly because the locals, shocked or frightened, were chary of giving help to the police.
There was a suggestion that one of the thousand polyglot inmates of a prisoners-of-war camp near Long Compton was responsible, and Fabian investigated that possibility. An Italian prisoner had been seen trying to dab blood from his clothing while crouched in a ditch near the scene of the murder. With the missing watch in mind, Fabian sent a detachment of Royal Engineers trained in the use of metal-detectors to the ditch. The detectors click-click-clicked the presence of metal in the ground. Tensely, the police waited. A tin watch … ? No – rabbit snares. The mystery was soon solved: the blood on the Italian’s clothes was that of a rabbit – he was guilty only of the relatively minor misdeed of unlawfully leaving the camp to indulge in a spot of poaching. (But that solution raises another mystery: considering how difficult the Germans and Italians made it for their POWs to escape, how was it that the British allowed theirs to wander out of bounds, apparently much as they pleased?)
Most of the few opinions voiced in the village were conflicting. One farmer insisted that the killer must be a local man who knew just where Walton would be that afternoon – but another was just as sure that, in such a small community, someone must know something if the culprit lived in their midst, and so it stood to reason that he must have come from outside. An informant from Birmingham declared that survivors of an ancient ‘black cult’ lived in and around Lower Quinton – but muddied the declaration by adding that the murderer was from elsewhere … and was actually a woman. In view of the violence of the crime, the idea that it was committed by a murderess may seem improbable – but feminine strength, when stimulated and inflamed by frenzied fantasies or fanaticism, can undoubtedly be awesome.
While hints of local witchery were still floating around, the police conducted inquiries regarding infrequent, even ‘one-off’, visitors to the district, taking no fewer than four thousand statements from tinkers, gypsies, tramps, travelling salesmen, and even boot-repairers in Salisbury, in an effort to find the owner of some unusually-studded boots, the prints of which were found in the vicinity of Meon Hill. All was without result.
Of growing importance during this mundane activity was The Legend of the Big Black Dog. In a countryside so rife with esoteric mysteries and hints of the supernatural, tales of ghosts, warning visions, and sinister appearances formed, as it were, a layer of melodrama beneath the surface of prosaic reality. Shortly after the murder, the body of a black dog was found hanging from the branch of a tree not far from the murder site. Superintendent Alec Spooner of the Warwickshire CID told Fabian of a local legend.
In 1885, a ploughboy reported that on nine successive evenings when returning from work, he had come upon a black dog – which, on the last occasion, turned into a headless woman. The next day, his sister, hale and hearty till then, dropped dead. The boy’s name was Charles Walton. In 1885, the murdered man was a boy – a ploughboy – aged fourteen….
Once when Fabian was on Meon Hill, a large black dog bounded past him and vanished from sight. Almost immediately, a farm-boy appeared. As he wrote later, Fabian asked him: ‘Looking for that dog, son?’
The boy went pale. ‘Dog, mister?’
‘A black dog …’
But before Fabian could say more, the boy ‘stumbled off in his heavy earth-clogged boots’.
Soon afterwards, a police-car ran over a dog; and about the same time, a dead heifer was found in a ditch. Later, when Fabian was in one of the village pubs (named – improbable though it may seem – the Gay Dog), he mentioned his encounters on Meon Hill, and was told of ‘a ghostly large dog with mad eyes’ which was supposed to haunt the district: to see it meant death to the beholder. There is no evidence as to whether or not Fabian felt any discomfort at the thought of his possibly imminent decease, but from then on he – and his colleagues – received even less encouragement from the villagers. ‘Cottage doors were shut in our faces,’ he wrote, ‘and even the most innocent witnesses seemed unable to meet our eyes. Some became ill after we spoke to them … and one night, when we had waited all day to question one man who might have aided us, I said: “I’m inquiring about the late Charles Walton …” He interrupted me gruffly: “He’s been dead and buried a month now – what are you worrying about?” Then he shut his door. So we had to leave it.’
Shortly before his death in 1978, however, Fabian told crime historian Richard Whittington-Egan that he had long been convinced that he knew the murderer, but had been unable to voice his conviction in his memoirs1 because the man was still alive and protected by the laws of libel.
According to Fabian, Albert Potter, who had died in 1964, was the only person who could have committed the crime.
Potter was the last man known to have seen Walton alive (and in the small, compact community, it seemed doubtful that any stranger could have approached the farm on Meon Hill without being noticed). In darkness alleviated only by the light of a torch, Potter was able to walk straight across the fields to the murder-site. His fingerprints were found on the handle of the hay-fork. His evidence at the inquest was both uncertain and unreliable. Firstly, there was the matter of the shirt-sleeves, which he claimed to have spotted (from a distance of more than a quarter of a mile) and by which he said he had recognised Walton, even though there were no shirt-sleeves to spot – or, at any rate, only short ones. Then he had contradicted himself when giving the order of his activities during the day – such as feeding his cattle and collecting a dead heifer (not the one I mentioned earlier) from a ditch. (The dying of two heifers in different ditches within a short while struck Fabian as being an odd coincidence – a fabricated hint of witchery?) Clearly, the coroner was not altogether happy with the answers of the chief witness. ‘You cannot help us any further, can you?’ he asked after a most frustrating interview. ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Potter, adding, with all the signs of earnest regret: ‘I wish I could.’
1. Fabian of the Yard, (Jarrold, Norwich) 1955.
Questioned as to whether he got on well with Walton, he said: ‘I never had a row with any man in this country. I just let him get on with his job, and he told me what I owed him. I always trusted him’ – which sounds like any politician’s non-answer to a direct question.
Potter seems to have been a contradictory sort of person: sullen and unforthcoming, but a church sidesman (not an extraordinarily rare combination, perhaps); an active member of the British Legion, who could be abusive and violent when drunk, as he frequently was; an unsociable and shifty man, yet of seeming rectitude; a lover of cricket (which, in many opinions, would excuse almost anything) and horse-racing (which may partly explain the fact that he was often short of money).
Apropos of that last point, Potter was in financial straits at the time of the murder. According to Walton’s niece Edith, he had borrowed ‘considerable’ sums of money from her uncle. It may be that Walton was pressing for repayments which Potter was unwilling, or unable, to make.
Considering all of the above, both Edith and Fabian were convinced of Potter’s guilt. They believed that, when confronted with Walton’s demands for repayment of the debts, he had killed him on the spur of the moment, and then embellished the crime with counterfeit presentments of witchery: cross-shaped wound in chest and neck, pinning to the ground with a hay-fork, dead heifers in ditches, a dead dog hanging from a tree….1
But the collection of pointers to Potter’s guilt was not enough – not nearly enough – to justify his arrest. ‘And so,’ Fabian wrote in 1955, ten years after the murder, ‘we had to leave it’ – with the black clouds of fear and suspicion still hovering over the village of Lower Quinton. Fabian’s last written words on the matter were these:
‘In the offices of Warwick Constabulary, the case is not yet closed.’
In 1960, interest in the case was rekindled by the discovery of an old watch in what had been Charles Walton’s garden. It was impossible to prove that the watch had belonged to him; any fingerprints would have been erased after so long a time in the soil. Even if it was indeed his watch, that could only mean that he had not had it with him on the day he died. What earthly – or, for that matter, unearthly – reason could the murderer have had for planting the thing in his victim’s garden?
1. With regard to the unnatural deaths of two far more illustrious persons, there are somewhat dubious theories that actual witchcraft underlay them but was concealed. Both Thomas à Becket and William Rufus (King William II) – so the theorists say – were leaders of covens; they were killed because of that, and the reason for their deaths falsified to conceal the unpleasant truth.
An earlier case of murder, which also gave rise to talk of witchcraft, was discovered in 1943, when some boys searching for birds’ nests found a human skull and other bones, together with rotted clothing, in the hollow trunk of a decayed wych-elm in Hagley Wood, not far from Stourbridge in Worcestershire (and about thirty miles north-west of Lower Quinton). Other bones from the skeleton, and more bits of clothing, were found near the tree. As the result of exceptionally skilful work by forensic scientists and policemen, the skeleton was proved to be that of a woman about five feet tall and of slight build, who had probably been killed some time in 1941. The fact that a piece of the clothing was stuffed in the mouth of the skull suggested death by suffocation. The woman’s identity was never established; a series of apparently-pointless messages chalked on walls in various West Midlands towns led to her being nicknamed ‘Bella’;1 among any number of theories, the most daring was that she was a Dutch-born spy. The place of ‘burial’, in an old tree, raised the spectre of Druidism, with perhaps more justification than in the Lower Quinton case. But it is surely more probable that she was a stranger to the district (an itinerant prostitute?) who was taken to the lonely spot at the foot of the Clent Hills and killed after being robbed and/or raped – and that the criminal, acting practically rather than ritually, used the hollowed wych-elm as a kind of upright coffin, a convenient hiding-place for the signs of his sins.
1. EDITOR’S NOTE. In the spring of 1991, I gave a talk on ‘the literature of crime’ at the King Edward VI College, Stourbridge, and afterwards, during the discussion period, mentioned the ‘wych-elm murder’ in Hagley Wood, just down the road. Several members of the audience remembered seeing case-associated graffiti in the neighbourhood: most often, ‘WHO PUT BELLA DOWN THE WYCH ELM? or variations on that question. Subsequently, Anne Shiner, a sixth-former at the college, sent me cuttings about the case from local papers; also notes she had made, one saying that she had spoken to a relative who recalled seeing a chalked Bella-message on a wall in Stourbridge within the past five years. And Dr Alan Keightley, the master at the college who had arranged for me to give the talk there, sent me, among other things, a copy of a paperback, Black Country Ghosts & Mysteries, by – I swear – Aristotle Tump (Bugle Publications, Stourbridge, 1987). Unfortunately, though Mr Tump devotes practically half of the book to the Hagley Wood case, practically all of those pages are squandered on accounts of his searches for persons who, he hoped, could throw light on the case – but who, speaking of those he did trace, turned out to be unilluminating.