BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW: THE AFTERLIFE OF CHARLES WALTON
“The natives of Upper and
Lower Quinton and the surrounding district are of a secretive disposition and they do not take easily to strangers,” wrote Inspector Fabian in his police report in 1945. Five years later, in Fabian of the Yard, his account was more elaborate: “When Albert Webb and I walked into the village pub… silence fell like a physical blow. Cottage doors were shut in our faces, and even the most innocent witnesses seemed unable to meet our eyes.”
At the core of the Walton case is the very British notion of sophisticated ‘townies’ trying to impose their ways on the sly ‘country folk’, who always look after their own. Perhaps this is why Fabian embellished his subsequent retellings of the tale, obfuscating his failure by cloaking it in the superstitions of the backwoods community that thwarted him. He certainly nurtured a bee in his bonnet about Black Magic. By the time of London After Dark he was investigating covens in Bayswater (see FT316:31) and in his final work, Anatomy of a Crime, he looked back on the Walton case to admonish “anybody who is tempted at any time to venture into Black Magic, witchcraft, Shamanism – call it what you will – to remember Charles Walton and to think of his death, which was clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite”.
As time separated the murder still further from the Britain it was committed in, so the witchcraft elements missed by the original investigation muliplied in the minds of subsequent commentators. Walton was accused of having “blasted” the land, causing the failure of the 1944 harvest by harnessing natterjack toads to tiny ploughs and driving them across the fields. A persistent claim is that a cross was carved in either the chest or neck of his dead body, signifying that his witchcraft had been turned against him. The date of the murder has been used to support this theory: 14 February was Candlemas under the old Julian calendar, but also the Celtic festival of Imbolc that marked the beginning of Spring. The weather on this day is supposed to signify the prevailing pattern of the year ahead, so if Walton was genuinely believed to have caused the failure of the previous year’s harvest then there would be reason to sacrifice him on this day, and to do it in such a way that his blood would soak into the ground and replenish the soil’s fertility.
The problem with this idea is that Prof Webster’s post mortem makes no mention of this injury – just as in the case of Bella in the Wych Elm he does not refer to a missing hand, also seized upon as evidence of ritual murder. But the two cases cross over in the notorious tome Murder By Witchcraft by Donald McCormick, in which the author claims that it was the celebrated Egyptologist and
folklorist Professor Margaret Murray who first made both
1 these connections.
No serious scholar of Murray or of witchcraft in this country has ever been able to find any documentation to support this claim, which was made five years after her death. Perhaps its close resemblance to the plot of a 1970s folk horror movie can be traced back to the release of McCormick’s book in 1968, at the birth of what has been called the ‘Haunted Generation’, when every town had its own coven and the skies teemed with UFOs.
That said, when BBC Coventry and Warwickshire sent a journalist to take a fresh look at the story in 2014, ‘Fay’ as she is simply referred to in the
2 archived page, found a Lower Quinton not so very different from the one in Fabian’s memoirs. One by one, residents stonewalled her queries about Walton in what appeared to her to be a well-rehearsed and coordinated response – perhaps best put by the postmistress of 33 years standing, Joyce:
“No one will talk to you about it. There are none of the Walton family left here now. I have no answers to your questions.” Suitably chastened, Fay walked out of the village towards Meon Hill with the intention of finding the murder site, but admitted: “I’m afraid I lost my nerve and turned back.” She advised anyone tempted to take a similar trip to: “Please tread carefully if you choose to take this path.”
No horror writer could have put it any better.
NOTES
1 McCormick’s credibility in quoting Margaret Murray’s opinions on both cases is demolished here: www.strangehistory. net/2015/10/27/murder-mccormick-murrayand-the-witches/
2 www.bbc.co.uk/coventry/features/weirdwarwickshire/1945-witchcraft-murder.shtml
friend, 72-year-old George Higgins, might have had something to do with it. Edie told him that the pair had not seen each other since Christmas, perhaps indicative of a falling out, and, at the time of the murder, Higgins was renovating a barn only 300 yards away. But Fabian concluded that the pensioner had neither the strength nor the motive.
20
After Fabian and Webb returned to London empty-handed, new information came to light. The PC who had relieved Michael Lomasney on the night of the murder reported that Potter had returned to the Hillground soon after dawn on 15 February. Though warned off the murder site, the farmer had lingered to talk about the weather and smoke a cigarette before leaving.
This revelation brought Fabian back for yet another interview. Since he had left the village, ‘Happy’ Batchelor and another employee of The Firs had resigned; in the former’s case, possibly because he feared he had compromised himself by giving Potter an alibi. But however suspicious all this appeared, it did not advance the case.
21
Walton’s killer – or killers – had dissolved into the February fog, to be replaced by still more diaphanous phantoms, folk tales and myths. His shade seems doomed to walk Meon Hill for eternity, a black dog padding at his heels.
NOTES AND SOURCES 1 Metropolitan Police File MEPO3/2290
2 At an elevation of 636ft (194m) on the flat top of a hill conspicuous for miles around. Originally the hill was encircled by a double line of defences, the best preserved of which now lie on the southwest and southeast side. www. ourwarwickshire.org.uk/content/catalogue_her/ iron-age-hillfort-at-meon-hill
3 Edith Walton in her statement, Metropolitan Police File MEPO3/2290.
4 Alfred Potter in his statement, ibid. 5 Ibid.
6 The TV show was entitled Fabian of the Yard, named after his 1950 memoir, and ran from November 1954 to February 1956, the first ever TV police procedural series. Fabian’s second memoir, London After Dark, was published in 1954 and the final volume, Anatomy of a Crime, in 1970.
7 Metropolitan Police File MEPO3/2290. 8 Ibid
9 Robert Fabian Fabian of the Yard, Naldrett Press, 1950.
10 Metropolitan Police File MEPO3/2290. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid.
13 Warwickshire Painted By Fredrick Whitehead Described By Clive Holland (A and C Black, 1906). In his fascinating overview of the Walton case, Devin McKinney notes that in the later reprint of this book, the passage on the Evil Eye killing was removed. See http://thefaceatthewindow.
blogspot.com/2006/02/black-dogs-on-meon-hill. html.
14 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald.
15 In his 1995 overview of the case’s 50th anniversary, Adrian Pengelly says that the watch was retrieved from an outhouse behind Walton’s cottage in 1960 by a workman, who opened the case to find a small piece of coloured glass inside. “Walton was known to have carried this around with him, never letting it out of his possession,” Pengelly writes. “The general consensus of opinion amongst the villagers was that this was a piece of witch glass… The odd thing abut this find was that the police had searched the building shortly after the crime and found nothing, so it appears that the killer must have returned at some point later to deposit the watch.” He gives no sources for this story. See: www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/charles.htm
16 Fabian, op. cit. 17 Metropolitan Police File MEPO3/2290. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.
✒ CATHI UNSWORTH is a crime writer. Her most recent novel is That Old Black Magic (Serpent’s Tail, 2018), and her fictional take on the Walton murder, “Black Dog”, is published as part of the Invisible Blood short story compendium, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and published by Titan Books on 23 July.