I advise anybody who is tempted at any time to venture into Black Magic, witchcraft, shamanism – call it what you will – to remember Charles Walton and his death, which was clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite.
Detective Superintendent Robert Fabian
The harvest in the village of Lower Quinton, Warwickshire, in 1944 had been miserably poor. After years of total war every sinew was strained to produce home-grown foodstuffs so as to minimise food imports. The holds of the merchant ships were needed for armaments and men fighting Britain’s enemies overseas. The nation was mobilised as never before or since to ‘dig for victory’.
A Women’s Land Army had been recruited in 1939 to provide extra labour for the vital campaign, and schoolchildren in rural areas were often temporarily pressed into service to help bring the harvest home. There was an Italian prisoner-of-war camp at Long Marston nearby. These prisoners sometimes laboured on the land, but once Italy changed sides in October 1943, they were at liberty to roam unsupervised or travel to nearby Stratford to see Shakespeare’s plays, or films at the cinema. When the harvest came late, and the yields were poor. Some muttered that a local man was to blame, by the name of Charles Walton.
It was whispered that Walton had caught a toad, attached a tiny miniature plough to its legs – and set the creature loose to run through the local fields, blighting the crops and bringing sickness to the beasts. Some said that Walton was a ‘cunning-man’ or warlock, descended from Ann Tennant, a woman who had been murdered by one James Hayward (he was later confined to Broadmoor), in September 1875 at Long Compton, quite nearby. Hayward had accosted the 79-year-old woman and stabbed her to death with a pitchfork under the delusion that she was a witch. It was an ancient tradition, that a witch must be killed in this way. Despite Hayward’s diagnosis of insanity, rumours persisted that Tennant had indeed bewitched the lad, and that his claims of an extensive witch-coven were true. Seventy years later, the same fate was to befall her alleged descendant, Charles Walton.
Walton was said to have a strange power over animals, especially horses and fierce dogs, but also birds, which flew straight into his outstretched hand. In 1945, the affair was extraordinary, so much so that the respected Detective Superintendent Robert Fabian ‘of the Yard’ was immediately assigned to the case, the so-called ‘Witchcraft Murder’. Witchcraft was still illegal in 1945, the Fraudulent Mediums Act, the last of the laws prohibiting it was finally repealed in 1951. There is much greater tolerance of paganism in the UK today than there was during the mid-twentieth century, and many more practitioners, but in those days the idea of ritual murder in an English country hamlet seemed preposterous.
Warwickshire, however, had long traditions of witchcraft. The Rollright Stones, a group of megalithic monuments some miles from Meon Hill where Walton’s mutilated body was discovered on a farm called ‘the Firs’, where he had been cutting hedges – was said to have been created by a witch’s curse in pre-Christian times.
Meon Hill itself was haunted by a strange ‘Black Dog’ which appeared from nowhere and had no obvious owner. Fabian encountered this mysterious dog near to the murder scene, before hearing the legends. He thought it must belong to a small boy who appeared soon afterwards – but as soon as Fabian mentioned the dog, the lad fled in terror. In 1885, another boy had seen the black dog on three consecutive nights before a death in his family; the dog was a sort of psycho-pomp. On the final occasion the dog was accompanied by the apparition of a headless woman. The boy’s name was Charles Walton. Sometime after Walton’s murder, the body of a black dog was found hanging in a tree nearby. It didn’t need Scotland Yard to divine that something very queer was going on in Lower Quinton.
Almost certainly, Walton’s death was a perfectly ordinary homicide, requiring no resort to theories about Black Magic, paganism or witchcraft. But the long-standing interest in the case, and the fact that no murderer was ever apprehended – added to the disquiet which has lingered about Meon Hill and Lower Quinton ever since. This chapter seeks to analyse this gruesome case – and an equally grim unsolved murder in the neighbouring county of Worcestershire a few years before. It could well be that these murders foreshadowed an ‘unsettledness’ which has disturbed our culture in the post-war era – intimations of the resurgence of genuine spiritual forces of a quite disturbing nature.
It does seem remarkable that this infamous case remains unsolved to this day, because Walton’s employer, Alfred Potter, displayed behaviour following the homicide which clearly indicated his culpability in the matter. Potter managed the Firs on behalf of his father’s company. Labour was in short supply due to the exigencies of wartime, and Potter was in the habit of employing local casual labourers to keep the farm in order. Walton was always keen to perform such duties, for his retirement pension of only ten shillings a week was derisory, especially so as he lived with his adopted niece, Edith, and was responsible for the heating and shopping bills, as well as the rent on the house which they shared.
Potter later claimed to the police that he often paid Walton for hours which he had not worked. This was the first of many discrepancies in his account. In fact, Potter was paying Walton (and two other employees) less than he claimed back from his father’s company, pocketing the difference. Robert Fabian was aware of this, and also knew that Potter had been late in paying several employees, including Charles Walton. Following the murder, both surviving employees left Potter’s service, probably realising his guilt.
On 14 February, Ash Wednesday 1945, Edith returned home from work about 4pm and was surprised to find her uncle not at home. Walton’s habits were regular as clockwork, and so after a while she asked her neighbour Harry Beasley to assist in searching for him. They immediately went to the Firs and Alfred Potter joined them as they walked to where Potter claimed to have last seen Walton cutting hedges sometime between 12.00 and 12.30 pm.
He gave at least three separate times at which he claimed to have seen Walton, in ‘shirtsleeves’, working on the hedge-cutting as he walked home from the College Arms pub. Before long, they came upon the body of Charles Walton.
The old man had been brutally murdered. He had been beaten about the head and face with his own walking stick, and there were injuries to his hands and arms where he had tried to fend off these blows. Then his throat had been slashed open with his own slash-hook – the implement used for cutting the hedges – which had been buried in his throat with great force. Finally, a pitchfork had been thrust into his neck so powerfully that it completely pinned his body to the ground – so as to keep his spirit from arising from the earth, perhaps?
To pagans these were unmistakeable signs of the so-called ‘tripledeath’, but to the shocked general public it seemed like the work of a maniac. His pocket-watch was missing, which was invariably about his person. Strangely, this watch was discovered at his former home 15 years later, despite an extensive search at the time. His trousers had been unfastened and his flies undone. His shirt too, had been unfastened, and many people have claimed subsequently that a cross had been cut into Walton’s chest, perhaps the source of the witchcraft theory as a motive. Despite Potter’s claims to have seen him with his shirt-sleeves rolled-up, Walton was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and was found with his jacket on. Whoever did the deed was possessed of an unnatural strength and violence, at least in those terrible final moments of Walton’s life.
There are strong indications that Potter was the culprit, and it is just possible that he had some notion that Walton was indeed a witch or warlock of some kind. It transpired that Potter claimed he was on his way to remove the body of a dead heifer from a ditch just before he allegedly saw Walton working on the hedges.
If Potter believed Walton to be the cause of the heifer’s death, by casting the ‘evil eye’ on the animal, perhaps in revenge for delayed payment of wages due to him – then the ferocious brutality may be explained.
There were other persons under suspicion, however. George Higgins, Walton’s 72-year-old close friend, was working nearby.
Close friendships can turn into bitter enmity. Fabian though, thought Higgins was too elderly and frail to have inflicted such terrible injuries. Edgar Goode was a steady boyfriend of Edith, Walton’s niece. Now, intra-familial sexual abuse was not much spoken of in the 1940s. No evidence points to anything untoward about Walton’s relationship with his niece, and she passionately defended him from any accusation of his alleged relationship with witchcraft or sorcery in a 1971 TV interview on February 14, St Valentine’s Day. Edith had been looked after by Walton from the age of three.
There can be no question that Potter was the prime suspect at the time – despite his trying to shift the blame onto the ‘Fascist’ Italian prisoners-of-war nearby. Their involvement was soon discounted.
Potter even admitted that he had handled the murder weapons at the murder scene when the body was discovered, presumably to give him an alibi in case fingerprint evidence were found. No such forensic evidence was found, but faint bloodstains were subsequently discovered on the trousers he had been wearing on that day – despite careful cleaning by his wife.
But no conclusive evidence was found to charge, prosecute and convict Potter, so Fabian returned to Scotland Yard. In subsequent accounts, Fabian sensationalised the ‘mystery’ and even went so far as to allege that Walton had been abducted by a coven, then taken 12 miles distant to the ‘Whispering Knights’ – one of the monuments which together comprise the Rollright Stones – and ritually sacrificed in a ‘Druid’ ceremony on the sacred day of Ash Wednesday, when a victim’s blood was shed onto the soil to ensure a fruitful harvest. Either Fabian was himself guilty of wicked misrepresentation and sensationalism, or he really did suspect that something extraordinary was going on at Meon Hill. He claimed that the local community had greeted his enquiries with a ‘wall of silence’.
He was not alone in this intuition of hidden depths to this case. His colleague, a detective named Alec Spooner, visited the site of the murder on the anniversary for many years, in hopes of discovering ritualistic practices. The famous anthropologist and Egyptologist Margaret Murray was so sure that the locals were covering-up occult activities that she disguised herself as a visiting artist and stayed in the village for a week. She, too, felt certain that Walton’s murder was inextricably bound up with a surviving English witch-religion.
These persistent speculations have, needless to say, become a considerable nuisance to the local populace – most of whom have no living connections to these weird and violent events so long ago. Fabian’s later claims of organised paganism were so risible that the Wiccan author Gerald B. Gardner dismissed them as complete fantasy. Fabian was not averse to playing up the salacious aspects of his career, and indeed became something of a TV celebrity in the 1950s. In 1954, his London after Dark, was an exposé of the Soho vice trade, for instance.
Margaret Murray was obsessed with the idea of the persistence of paganism in a covert form in rural communities. It is true that especially when she was in her 80s when she visited the area, she was a busybody who saw what she wanted to see, a confirmation of her deepest intuitions on the matter. But although both she and Fabian projected their own experiences and prejudices onto the case, Murray’s hypothesis had something to it, perhaps, for recent archaeological evidence seems to support the idea of a surviving witch-cult in the western Midlands – which had endured since pre-Roman times. A woman’s intuition should not be lightly dismissed, especially a woman of Murray’s calibre. In 1945 she was the first to make a connection to a previous and quite local case, which she thought also bore the hallmarks of a ritualised pagan murder.
West: Tales of the Lost Lands, by Martin Wall with a foreword by Robert Plant, is published by Amberley Publishing. £20, hardback.
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