For eighty years, we have been haunted by Bella in the wych elm. That is because we do not know who she was and without that basic information, we cannot hope to find her killer.
What do we know? For all DI Nicholls’ careful approach in 2005, not wishing to jump off the fence between murder and manslaughter, there is no doubt in my mind that Bella was murdered ‘with malice aforethought’. The fact that no one came forward to report her missing, even in the disjointed, nightmare world of the Second World War, is very telling. So is the fact that her clothing had no labels other than a code number in her shoes. The shoes were relatively expensive; the rest of her clothing was not. Despite the poor sketches in the police file, her cardigan had no sleeves; her skirt was too long for her. And that, surely leads to an obvious conclusion; Bella was wearing somebody else’s clothes. They were not the product of some European tailor/haberdasher under the yoke of Nazi oppression, the clothes worn by a spy. They were home-grown; home-made. Only the shoes told a different story.
Bella was indeed, as Superintendent Inight had said back in 1944, ‘a victim from another world’. But it was not the world of witchcraft. Or the world of wartime espionage. She was not known in the area or someone, surely, would have come forward as a relative or friend. She must have been born somewhere, been to school, held down a job. Born, yes, obviously. But school, I doubt it, at least on a regular basis. And I believe she did have a job, but it was one that was not considered respectable and was fraught with danger. When journalist Simon Askwith was working on a Bella-related article for The Independent in 2003, he met two octogenarians ‘out for a stroll, who told me that they thought she had probably been “on the game” as they put it. They laughed uneasily when I asked them if they had known her personally.’1 If Askwith was right about the ages of the couple, they would have been in their twenties during the war and might, indeed, have remembered Bella. The police, of course, considered the idea that Bella was a prostitute. The night job (although it is carried on in broad daylight too) is arguably the most dangerous in the world. The victims of Jack the Ripper and nearly all the victims of the ‘Blackout Killer’ Gordon Cummings and the creepy landlord John Christie, were prostitutes. But the police files offer little in the way of evidence in the pursuance of this line of enquiry. There are vague references to a woman who plied her trade on the Hagley Road and a letter discussing ‘women of this sort’ but there is no information on any interviews and no names or addresses. For that, and to find out who Bella really was, we have to go south from the Midlands, to the capital of prostitution as it was of the country; we have to go to London.
In 1954, when Bella had been dead for thirteen years, ex-superintendent Robert Fabian went into print with London After Dark, a fascinating glimpse of vice in the world’s second largest city. Fabian had been in charge of Scotland Yard’s Vice Squad – ‘the dirty mob’ – for years and knew all the ins and outs of the trade. At the centre of the ‘game’ was Soho, then, and for years afterwards, the heart of street prostitution and grubby little shops that flashed ‘Strip-Tease’, ‘Girls’ and ‘Books’. ‘Soho,’ wrote Fabian, ‘is not so much an area you could work out as an atmosphere that pervades part of the West End.’2 The Vice Squad had a ledger that contained the names of every known prostitute in the capital:
Their phony names and genuine names, ages, photos, descriptions, habits, weaknesses, regular cronies and haunts – even the names of their sorrowing, respectable relatives … We did a fairly sound job of checking upon the movements of the ‘regulars’ and noted when they left Town for a week-end or a brief holiday abroad. This we did in case they never came back. Being murdered is one of the risks that a prostitute takes in her trade.
I believe that one of these was Bella, but she had not gone to Hagley Wood for a weekend or a holiday. She was going home. And she was trying to escape.
In April 1936, the banner headline in the News of the World asked ‘Is There a “Jack the Strangler” At Large?’ There had been two murders of prostitutes, described coyly in the paper as of ‘uncertain virtue’, both in Soho, between 4 November 1935 and 16 March 1936. Before that, on 8/9 May 1935, the body of Dutch Leah (actually a British woman) was found in her Old Compton Street flat with her tongue slashed, perhaps, the media speculated, because ‘she knew too much’. The November murder had been of ‘French Fifi’ (actually a Russian woman).
The women were linked with the ‘Brigade of Iron’, an underworld gang of pimps and prostitutes headed by Latvian Max Kassel from Riga, whose people included charmers with the street names Coco the Animal, Mariot of the Big Eyes, Albert the Arab, Bibi the Bitter and Titi the Big-Footed. Although this group sounds like characters from a radio comedy show, like the much-later Beyond Our Ken or Round the Horne, they were real-life gangsters and their molls that make television’s Peaky Blinders look like the fiction it is. It is likely that these names were in the Vice Squad’s ledger, as well as the personal notebook that Bob Fabian carried in his pocket.
In its 23 May 1936 edition, the journal John Bull read:
Soho is the place, for its area has a worse record for blood or violence and for darker forms of vice than any other in Great Britain … Decent, hard-working, clean-living foreigners … living cheek by jowl with the scum of continental gutters … And now the mixture is getting too strong for anybody’s taste.
Kassel himself was shot dead in Little Newport Street, Soho in January but that did nothing to stamp out the increasing vice in London. Chief Inspector Frederick Sharpe, who was leading the Kassel murder case, described him as ‘a very small-time ponce who lived on the earnings of one woman’. Kassel was found in a ditch near St Albans with six bullets in his body and, at the time of his inquest, two people were awaiting trial in France over his death. Kassel had died in a fight in the London flat, but his body had been taken by car to St Albans in an attempt to distance the crime from the people involved. Another hard-bitten detective, Fabian, had nothing but contempt for pimps like Kassel:
Many men in London live upon the immoral earnings of prostitutes. The name for such men is ‘Ponces’ or ‘Johnsons’ and they are the lowest form of animal life on the criminal scale, although you might not think so to look at them, for they can – when business is good – dress quite expensively and are often surly, determined-looking types … well able to look after themselves in a fight.
He speculates on the background of the pimps, ‘Some are army deserters [especially in wartime] but more often they are born into the underworld of London and know its warrens and its devices and its strange language, as a skilled gamekeeper knows the secrets of copse and hedgerow.’
What is interesting about the murder of Kassel, Dutch Leah and the others is the press’s xenophobia. Blithely ignoring the fact that prostitution in London was centuries old, they blamed it all on foreigners, like Kassel and Dutch Leah, despite the homeliness of her birth. The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene attributed the growing problem to Europeans on London’s streets. The police themselves, charged with coping with it all, pointed to ‘marriages of convenience’ by which British men could marry foreign brides, often years younger than they were, for a simple cash transaction. Such women were then farmed out to work the streets and there were headlines that screamed about white slavery.
There was something dark, ancient and, of course, racist about all this. One of the most successful ‘illicit’ books in the pre-Victorian era was The Lustful Turk (1827) in which a series of innocent white women were ravished by the potentate of the title. They were wholly victims, the Turk the disgusting perpetrator. As both Sharpe and Fabian knew, vice was a two-way street; without willing girls, there would be no ‘white slavery’ and no Soho sex trade. When William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had been brave enough to break every taboo of the Victorian era and actually write about prostitution,3 a surprisingly high percentage of the working girls he spoke to admitted that they offered their services because they enjoyed it as well as for the money. That was something the do-gooders of the 1930s did not want to hear; neither does the ‘sex-worker’ lobby of today.
The Yard’s Vice Squad dossier lists only 102 prostitutes of foreign extraction, out of an estimated 3,000 in C Division (the West End) alone. Stefan Slater in The London Journal March 2007, discusses what amounts to a ‘moral panic’ over this European human traffic and in doing so he highlights the shady world of London’s prostitution and the fact that powerful and eminent men effectively got away with using prostitutes’ services simply because of who they were. In 1922, Sir Almeric Fitzroy, Clerk to the Privy Council, was arrested for accosting women in Hyde Park, a crime as old as Hyde Park itself. Found guilty, he appealed and unsurprisingly, the verdict was overturned. The press-reading public was outraged, not, as they would be today, by perverts in high places, but by the fact that the Met had been too heavy-handed in arresting Fitzroy in the first place. As a result, arrest rates involving prostitutes dropped from 2,291 in 1922 to a mere 650 a year later.
The writer Alec Waugh was as fascinated by Soho as Fabian and the editor of John Bull: ‘There is a glamour about the word [allegedly originally an eighteenth-century hunting cry to call foxhounds],’ he wrote in the first volume of Wonderful London in 1926. ‘It is crude and rough. It suggests mystery and squalor and romance … It has a dusky swarthiness and oriental flavour, a cringing savagery that waits its hour.’
‘Why go to Paris for a good time?’ Stephen Graham asked in 1925 in London Nights. ‘It can be arranged in London just as well.’ An estimated 87 per cent of French prostitutes (whether they were actually French or not) operated not in sleazy Soho but the ‘swanky’ apartments of Piccadilly, Mayfair and Bayswater. By the outbreak of war, local property owners were working with the police to clear them out.
On 4 November 1935, by coincidence or design the day on which French Fifi (Josephine Martin) was murdered, police arrested Fernand Modena, known as ‘Little Pascalle of Marseilles’ in the Charing Cross Road. He was charged with making a false statement to an immigration officer, but at Vine Street police station, he was found to have nine house keys in his pocket. They were to the flats of prostitutes that he ran as a professional pimp. One of them was his own wife, Martha Pirie; two others were Marie Andrews and Germaine McEvoy, whose surnames may refer to the fact that they were involved in the marriage of convenience trade. Two other women are not named, but the sixth is and unlike the others, she was British. Her name was Lavonia Stratford, she was 21 and she was from Birmingham.
I believe that Lavonia Stratford was Bella.
It would be fascinating to know Lavonia’s physical details. Was she dark haired, with snaggle teeth? Did she stand 5 feet tall in her stockinged feet? Was a photograph taken of her? Was she included in Scotland Yard’s dossier? It seems unlikely, in that the discovery of Modena’s harem had clearly come as a surprise to the Met. Would they include her in their files now? Was her name added to Bob Fabian’s little pocket book?
What stood out for me was the fact that Lavonia is singled out as being from Birmingham, whereas the others were probably brought over by Modena from France. He and they were deported once the case for procuring and soliciting was heard, but because Lavonia was British, she stayed here. The moral indignation of the public over white slavery and prostitution generally was not matched by the punishment meted out by the law. The fines for prostitution were ridiculously light in comparison with their earnings. If a prostitute solicited in the street, she could only be charged with the same penalty as a public obstruction by a barrow boy or a pavement artist. Lavonia Stratford may have paid as little as £2 which was far less than she paid Modena for his ‘protection’; it was an occupational hazard. But there would, ultimately, be a far heavier price to pay.
When I first came across Lavonia Stratford, I was struck by the name. Lavonia could, of course, be a typo or a mishearing of Lavinia, but both are highly unusual names, far more so than Bella. I looked up Stratford in the Journal of the Romany and Traveller Family History Society and there it is, listed as a fairly common ‘gypsy’ name. As for Lavonia, it too is a gypsy name and the Romany word luvvani means prostitute.
When I read the views of Churchwarden Hodgetts of Hagley on the gypsies of the 1940s, I wrote them off at first as a typical Englishman’s take on all things foreign and different. Bella, he believed, was a gypsy who had fallen foul of her tribe and had been punished by them, according to traditions that Hodgetts did not understand and her body had been buried in some arcane rite in the wych elm. I did not accept that, but in one respect, I believe Hodgetts was right – Bella was indeed from another world, the world of the travelling people. Interestingly, when Professor Caroline Wilkinson examined Professor Webster’s photographs of the Hagley Wood skull, she came to the conclusion that the dead woman was Caucasian, but with a suggestion of Indian sub-structure. And where do Roma people actually originate? India.
Let us look again at her clothes. A skirt that was too big for her – it belonged to someone else in the tribe. A slip that showed beneath it without the belt to hold it up – belonging to that same larger person. The sleeveless hand-me-down cardigan and the non-matching blue belt – not only somebody else’s but very much what a gypsy of the 1930s and 1940s would wear. There are online today a number of photographs from the period showing gypsy camps. Horses and vardo wagons are still very much in evidence and a whole range of multi-coloured, rather outlandish clothes are worn, especially by the women. Constable Pound, who had chopped down the wych elm to retrieve Bella’s body and had made enquiries into the ‘Smith’ family of gypsies in the Hagley area in 1942, also reported the stash of clothes that they left behind when they moved on. It was found 115 yards from the site of the wych elm at Christmas time 1942 (before the body was found) and included a pair of red-painted shoes and a knife. It was all filthy and ragged, as of course were Bella’s clothes in the wych elm.
But Bella’s shoes were different. They were her own, costing 13/11d and more than any traveller could afford, reflecting her very different life in London. Perhaps she could not bear to part with them.
The police report on Fernand Modena gives Lavonia’s age as twenty-one. This was in 1935, so she would have been born in 1914 and at the time of her death would have been 27, within Professor Webster’s age range for the body in the tree. It is true that he personally veered to the slightly older likelihood of 35, but that was not his first conclusion and, on his own admission, such estimates were largely informed guesswork. Can we find a Lavonia Stratford, born in 1914, in any records? Nearly. A Lavinia F. Stratford was born in London on 17 October 1914. It may be that Lavonia was a misprint when the police arrested her along with Modena and that this is the same person. If that is so, how can she be called a Birmingham woman and how can I believe she came from a gypsy community?
Because we know nothing about her parents, we cannot be sure, but I believe they hailed from the great gypsy centre of Black Patch, on the outskirts of Birmingham. This is only twelve miles from Hagley and we know it was closed down by local authorities in 1905. We also know that many families refused to move, while others left and drifted back. I believe that the Stratfords were one example of this. Like countless people before and since, they perhaps hoped that the streets of London were paved with gold, as legend said, and they drifted to the capital to make a living any way they could. They may even, as large numbers did, became sedentary for a while, adopting a more or less conventional lifestyle. Then, for whatever reason, they may have drifted back to the Midlands, if not to Black Patch Park as it was by now, then to the Hagley area generally.
A little girl like Lavonia was now effectively under the radar. She may have attended school from time to time as the family moved around, but never for long enough for any teacher or classmate to remember her and report her missing in 1941. This would also explain why there is no record of Lavonia Stratford in the 1921 census; she was 7 by this time, on the road and invisible to the authorities. Note that whenever in the Worcester Archives we have references to locals seeing gypsy camps, like that of the ‘Smiths’ at the Nimmings, children are never mentioned. The travellers kept them hidden in case the authorities came nosing around, asking too many questions. By 1931, Lavonia may still have been living with her people. She was 17 by now and would have left school, had she attended with any kind of regularity, three years earlier. Unfortunately, the figures for the 1931 census were destroyed by fire, so even when they become due in another eight years from now, we will still have no idea if she was registered then or not.
Was it now that she gave birth? Professor Webster believed that the woman in the wych elm had produced at least one child, but of course he could not be certain when. In view of what happened later, I believe that Lavonia left this baby with her tribe to be raised by them. There is no record of a birth to anyone called Lavonia Stratford, but that should not surprise us, given the ‘outsider’ status of the travelling community. Neither, more ominously, is there any record of her death.
Four years later, she was arrested for prostitution in London. Once again, was the lure of the bright lights too much to resist? We know that Marthe Watts, a French prostitute who got to London in 1937, described the grim conditions of the brothels she had worked in, in France and Spain, and they were regulated by the government! J.B. Sandbach, a Metropolitan magistrate, was talking about French prostitutes, but the lifestyle for many would have been the same and Lavonia had been arrested with a troupe of French girls. ‘Instead of lying in bed and at about midnight,’ wrote Sandbach, ‘going out for a drink before having a meal in a café, they get up early, do their own shopping and cook at home. This is not only healthier but a cheaper mode of life.’4
If Lavonia moved to London in her late teens, she might have caught the disapproving eye of Bob Fabian:
Not one of them had any more morals than a hen. What makes a girl become a prostitute? I think I can tell you – it is sheer laziness and vanity … Her love gestures are as automatic and insincere as the wide smile on the face of a tired chorus-girl. A whore is a bad apple. There is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness. I do not think that there exists in London any such person as an honest prostitute. They taint any flesh they touch.
This is tough reading but it is the honest opinion of an old-school copper who has seen too much of what organized vice does to people – and what it would do to Bella. How Lavonia met Fernand Modena and how she became part of his stable is unknown, but trying to go it alone in a strange city were danger lurked on every corner was never really an option. The girls who haunted Piccadilly, Curzon Street, Half Moon Street in Mayfair, or Gerard Street, Old Compton Street and Lisle Street in Soho had their designated pitches – and God help the wide-eyed, snaggle-toothed Romany girl who tried to muscle in. Lavonia’s relationship with Modena, potentially lethal as it may have been, was symbiotic – they needed each other.
But that relationship came to an abrupt end in November 1935 and Lavonia was suddenly on her own. If Lavonia wanted to maintain her lifestyle – and it was certainly more lucrative than selling pegs from a painted wagon – that meant one thing in 1937; the Messinas.
Despite the title of Dick Kirby’s excellent book Mayfair Mafia (Pen and Sword, 2019), the Messina family were not actually Mafia. In fact, they left their native Sicily to avoid that family obsessed gangsterhood, drifting to Malta in 1896 and arriving in London by 1934. As Kirby says, ‘the Messinas were unable to lie straight in bed’ and the culture of corruption around them spread to witnesses, lawyers and of course the girls they ran. Because the Messinas were, above all, pimps. Most of them were pretty handy with a razor, but open violence was not their stock in trade – they left that to the racecourse gangs like the Sabinis, Billy Hill and Jack ‘Spot’ Comer – they probably stayed wide of Fernand Modena in Soho because the place was already spoken for and moved their girls out to the west, Mayfair, Hyde Park, Holland Park and Bayswater.
The father was Giuseppe, a peasant with some carpentry skills. He and his wife produced five sons who were chips off the old block and a daughter, the white sheep of the family who may have embarrassed the others. The oldest son was Salvatore, who married a French prostitute with an Italian name, Maria Burratti. He adopted the name Arthur Evans, to blend in better with London society. If the real Arthur Evans, the famous archaeologist, had found out about this, he would have been very annoyed! Next came Alfredo in 1901, who married Andrée Astier, known as Colette, who had well over a dozen convictions for prostitution in her first year in the country. Alfredo called himself Alfred Martin. After him, in 1908, came Eugenio, who did a little gun-running and drug smuggling on the side. Probably a genuine psychopath, he styled himself Edward Marshall. Two years later, Attilio arrived, the only member of the family whose photograph I can find, taken as a young man. He is darkly handsome, with the tall Homburg and sharp suit fashionable among inter-war gangsters. Canelo was the youngest boy, born a year after Lavonia in 1915. He married prostitute Ida Pomirou from France and used the moniker Charles Maitland. Margherita, the youngest, was the white sheep.
Giuseppe’s wife, Maltese-born Virginia, could claim British citizenship by virtue of her place of birth and that would come in handy later. In the meantime, the Messinas with their growing brood moved to Egypt in 1904 and set up a number of brothels, made legal there in that year. They trafficked girls as young as four. With the International Civil Police Organization (later Interpol) breathing down their necks, the Messinas were kicked out of Egypt in 1932 and obtained British passports for the entire family by leaning on and/or bribing customs officials.
The law relating to prostitution was chaotic. Keeping a ‘disorderly house’ (brothel) had been illegal since 1751, but the last legislation relating to prostitution dated from 1912; even the fine of £2 for soliciting had been set in 1839 and had not changed by the time Lavonia paid hers. It was not even an offence to procure a woman for sex if she was already a working girl. The definition of a brothel was equally confusing; only if two or more women lived under the same roof could the police act – a girl on her own got away with it. The penalty for keeping a brothel, however, was steeper – £100 or a three-month prison sentence for a first offence; £250 or six months for a second. Even these sums, however, did not deter the Messinas, whose large team of girls earned them thousands in three years, especially when the war started and the Americans arrived. ‘We Messinas,’ Attilio bragged, ‘are more powerful than the British government. We do as we like in England.’
Violence between pimps was commonplace, with the girls getting in the way. Charles Balalla was shot dead in London in 1926 by ‘Mad Emile’ Berthier. Casimir Micheletti, known as ‘The Assassin’ had his club and dancing school firebombed three years later.
The Messinas tended to avoid trouble when they could, claiming to be diamond merchants and operating in the areas from Park Lane through Oxford Street to Regent Street. Under their aegis came hotels with high reputations in polite society – the Ritz, Claridge’s and the Berkeley. Robert Fabian knew the clubs well, on first-name terms (although he was always ‘Mr Fabian’) with doormen, cab-drivers, maitres d’ and hoteliers themselves. He made a point of introducing himself to new girls on his patch. ‘This is Ursula,’ one barman did the honours in a club in Frith Street. ‘She’s a Polack. Ursula, this is Mr Fabian, Chief of the Manor – you don’t give him any nonsense and he’ll treat you fair.’
Kate Meyrick was the formidable hostess of the 43 Club in Gerrard Street, as used to handling peers of the realm as the lowlife who occasionally tried to gatecrash her premises. The Big Apple was an up-and-coming black venue that would burgeon in the 1950s, with jazz and the cloying scent of ‘reefers’ (marijuana). Hell was run by Geoffrey Daybell and in Wardour Street was the Shim-Sham Club. The laws against the sale of liquor, almost as silly as the Volstead Act which brought prohibition to America, cramped the style of these clubs and barmen had to be careful with men like Fabian on the prowl. The Studio in Knightsbridge, the Esquire in Piccadilly, the Unity in Jermyn Street and the Strangers in St James, the Messinas and their girls were probably known in all of them.
Some of the Messinas’ girls merely had the job of getting themselves invited into a club where the ‘house’ would fleece the punters accordingly. There were 295 registered clubs within a mile of the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus and fifteen unregistered that the police knew about – ‘a total’ computes Fabian, ‘of 310 places, ablaze with lights and activity into London’s dawn, where music, dancing, drinks and companions await the well-filled wallet.’ That wallet got there by courtesy of Messinas’ girls, who ‘for £2 would cuddle a baboon’.
It was, in the end, all about money for girls like Lavonia Stratford; money to survive. Rates varied, especially when the ‘Mug’ (punter) wanted a special service, perhaps involving bondage or what today we might call ‘cosplay’; but the usual in the late 1930s and early 1940s was £5 a session. The session was brief – the ten-minute rule that the Messinas insisted on became widespread and was reduced still further for the benefit of the Americans after 1942 (who also paid double or triple for the privilege). On average, girls like Lavonia earned £4 an hour, far above the rate of a shop girl or factory worker. Remember, too, that employment like factory work or farming only came on the market as a result of the war itself, because of the sudden shortage of manpower. Before that, girls were employed as shop assistants, secretaries, telephonists and maids. If Lavonia’s education was as patchy as I believe it was, at least some of that work would have been beyond her.
We next come across Lavonia, still listed as Lavinia Stratford, in 1939. By now she was 25, still using her maiden name, so had not officially married. And she was still in London; her address is given as 120 Princess Court, Bayswater. This was a fashionable apartment block built eight years earlier, in the art deco style that the Thirties loved. Tellingly, she is listed as having ‘private means’. This could be that she had the private income of a respectable lady, a legacy from the family so that ‘trade’ and similar inconveniences would not bother her. Or it could mean that her income was literally a private matter, the cash she received from the ‘Mugs’, 80 per cent of which she had to give to her ‘protectors’, the Messinas. Bayswater in those days was not the upmarket part of London it is today. ‘Ladies of the night’ with their faux furs, cheap jewellery (perhaps even wedding rings) and Gibson shoes lived in the Bayswater Road.
The reason that Lavonia Stratford is listed at all in 1939 is that by now there was a war on. The government realized that with such chaotic upheaval going on, there could not be a conventional census in 1941, so they opted for a register two years earlier instead.
As it happened, Lavonia Stratford would not have appeared on a 1941 census even if it had gone ahead.
Because Lavonia Stratford would be dead.