What of the other members of the New Forest Coven? Aidan Kelly produced a highly speculative and fantastical list of possible members that included Sylvia Royals (aka Dolores North and Madeline Montalban); George Watson McGregor, the chief druid of the Ancient Order of Druids; Father J. S. M. Ward; Christine Hartley, a member of Dion Fortune’s Fraternity of the Inner Light; her magical colleague and partner, Colonel Charles “Kim” Seymour; Mrs. Mabel Besant-Scott from the Rosicrucian Theatre; and the novelist Louis Wilkinson (1991: 31–32).
The evidence provided by Kelly to support his claims that these people belonged to the coven is flimsy and circumstantial. It largely rests on the fact that all of them, except for Hartley and Seymour, either knew Gardner (North, McGregor Reid, Ward, and Besant-Scott) or knew of the New Forest Coven (Wilkinson). As we shall see later, Gardner was a friend of Madeline Montalban, but he told Doreen Valiente he first met her during the war when she was in the Royal Navy, which would have been after he was initiated (Valiente 1989: 49–50). Gardner was also a member of the Druid Order, and it is a fact that a sword owned by Dorothy Clutterbuck was used by the druids at their summer solstice ceremony at Stonehenge (Ibid., 40). The wording of the reference is ambiguous as, while the sword was allegedly owned by Old Dorothy, it was taken by Gardner to the druid ceremony in the 1950s after she had died. In that case it would have been McGregor Reid’s son, Robert, who was the chief druid then as he succeeded to the title after his father’s death in 1946.
This famous sword is still in existence and is owned by the North London coven that is the direct descendant of the one founded at Brickett Wood by Gardner in the late 1940s. The design of the sword comes directly from a description given in the Key of Solomon, a grimoire that both Gardner and the New Forest Coven were familiar with. According to the story told to Philip Heselton by the leaders of the modern coven, the sword had belonged to Dafo, and not to Dorothy Clutterbuck (2003: 90). The sword has a hilt of brass and horn and the blade, according to Heselton, probably came from a nineteenth-century officer’s weapon. It has a guard composed of two crescent moons and it is engraved with magical Hebrew names and Wiccan symbols. Coincidentally, when I knew her in the 1960s, Madeline Montalban owned an almost identical sword, and she used it in cursing rituals.
The most unlikely members of the New Forest Coven named by Aidan Kelly are Christine Hartley and Colonel Seymour. Both were, like many occultists of the time, sympathetic to paganism, and Seymour wrote some very evocative and inspiring essays on what he called the Old Religion. I met Christine Hartley in the 1970s and she sponsored my induction into an Egyptian lodge of Co-Masonry that she belonged to in London. Christine was a liberal Catholic, an unorthodox Christian offshoot of the Theosophical Society, and had her own private chapel in her country house in Hampshire, where a liberal Catholic priest used to celebrate Mass. This priest, who also held Anglican orders, had expressed to me an interest in being initiated into Wicca, although nothing came of it. Some years later he knew Maxine Sanders, the so-called “Queen of the Witches,” when she became interested in the liberal Catholic Church.
When we first met, Christine Hartley knew of my own involvement in the Craft and she was sympathetic to witchcraft. She hinted in one of our conversations around the log fire in the sitting room of her country house that she had also been involved in the past. I have since learned that in the 1960s or 1970s she attended a meeting organized by some ex-members of Robert Cochrane’s coven (pers. comm. from Alan Richardson). Despite these contacts, there is no evidence or reason to believe that she knew Gerald Gardner, or that she was ever a member of the New Forest Coven. As Christine knew I was a Gardnerian initiate, she would have surely mentioned it during our conversations.
While still speculative, Philip Heselton claims to have identified several local people who he thinks might have belonged to the New Forest Coven. Apart from Woodford-Grimes and Clutterbuck, he has identified a family from nearby Southampton called the Masons, who also belonged to the Crotona Fellowship and the Rosicrucian Theatre. This family was Susie Mary Mason, her brother Ernest “Ernie” William Mason, and their sister Rosetta. A friend of Ernie Mason told Heselton that the whole family were witches and “mind control people,” but had given up witchcraft because the rituals were too serious (2000: 101–102).
Ernie Mason was an amateur astronomer, photographer, and chemist who Heselton says fitted the typical image of an eccentric inventor. He also enjoyed mental exercises and he had been taught these by George Sullivan. This would explain the odd comment by his friend that the family were “mind control people.” A large room in the house shared by Ernie and Susan Mason in Southampton was converted into a Rosicrucian temple and Heselton has printed a photograph of Ernie Mason taken in 1935 wearing a ritualistic hooded robe (2000: 109).
Another possible candidate for membership in the coven, as identified by Heselton, was a well-known children’s writer named Katherine Oldmeadow. She also lived in the village of Highcliffe, in a house about a quarter of a mile from Dorothy Clutterbuck’s home. From 1919 to 1958 Oldmeadow wrote thirty fictional books for children as well as a factual book called The Folklore of Herbs (1946). It was rumored that her extensive knowledge of herbs had been gained by studying with the New Forest gypsies. As with Dorothy Clutterbuck’s diaries, many of Oldmeadow’s books contained what Heselton calls “a rich awareness of nature,” and the enchanted landscape of the English countryside (2002). They also have frequent references to nature spirits, fairies, witches, and classical gods like Pan and Mercury. Rituals involving dancing barefooted, and the use of knives, wands, candles, and crystals are also mentioned.
In her nonfiction book on herbal lore, Oldmeadow specifically refers to the existence of white and black witches, and comments that the modern witch “still holds queer beliefs …” (Heselton 2003: 48–51). In one of her children’s books she describes white witches as “wise old women” who “know all about herbs that heal” (Ibid., 61). Of course it is possible, as Professor Hutton has pointed out, that the classical pagan and folkloric references in Katherine Oldmeadow’s novels merely reflected an early-twentieth-century interest in such subjects and had nothing to do with the actual practice of witchcraft. The fact that she was living in the same village as Gerald Gardner and in the alleged vicinity of a practicing witch coven is, however, rather coincidental.
Doreen Valiente identified another possible member of the New Forest Coven in her personal copy of Bracelin’s biography, Gerald Gardner: Witch. Beside a reference in the text to Old Dorothy and the local New Forest people Valiente had written the two words “Mother Sabine.” Philip Heselton claims to have identified this person as Rosamund Isabella Charlotte Sabine, who coincidentally lived in the same road in Highcliffe as Edith Woodford-Grimes. Her husband was also a member of the local Home Guard unit during World War II, and would have known Gardner, who was also a leading member. Heselton says that in 1905 Rosamund Sabine applied to join a surviving offshoot of the magical group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This was the Order of the Red Rose and the Cross of Gold run by Arthur Edward Waite (Heselton, November 2002). The name of the Order is a clear reference to Rosicrucian symbolism (Ibid.).
In a letter, Gerald Gardner wrote to his then business partner Cecil Williamson in December 1953, he told him that Old Mother Sabine had recently died. He says she left a “nice little cabinet full of draws [sic]” that contained dried herbs and a 1684 copy of Nicholas Culpeper’s famous herbal. The evidence is that, like Katherine Old-meadow, Sabine had a serious interest in herbalism. Her involvement with a Rosicrucian Order associated with the Golden Dawn would also suggest she may have been a member of George Sullivan’s Order of Twelve and/or the Crotona Fellowship (Heselton, 2003: 78).
While he was living in London, Gardner had volunteered to be an air-raid warden and had helped to dig trenches for bomb shelters in Hyde Park. From his past experiences in the Planters’ Rifle Corp in Malaya and later in
a private militia in Liverpool during World War I, Gardner became convinced that an armed civilian organization was needed to defend the country from a German invasion. In early 1940 he wrote to the Daily Mail newspaper, saying that in such an event the civilian population should be trained to use delaying tactics. He claimed that, under the terms of the Magna Carta, every freeborn Englishman had the right to take up arms and defend himself and his household from attack.
This patriotic letter aimed at his fellow countrymen and politicians was answered in May 1940 when the secretary of state for war, Anthony Eden, made a radio broadcast asking for volunteers who knew how to use firearms to report to their local police station. Thousands eagerly answered the call to arms and the Local Defence Volunteers, later called the Home Guard and known popularly and affectionately as “Dad’s Army,” was formed. The background to its formation was the widespread public panic about fifth columnists, spies, and saboteurs, and rumors of enemy paratroopers, some allegedly disguised as nuns, landing in the English countryside at night. With France about to fall to the Nazis, the British government knew that Britain could be next.
The job of the LDV, or Home Guard, was to support the police by setting up road blocks, checking identity cards, and guarding important installations such as power stations that might be a target for sabotage. In the event of a German invasion they would have fought street by street with regular Army units in a rearguard action. A special elite force was also recruited from Home Guard members with past military experience. Their task was to form an underground resistance movement if Britain had been occupied by the Nazis. Caches of weapons were hidden at secret locations in the countryside, and underground bunkers stocked with food and ammunition were built to accommodate the resistance fighters.
Gerald Gardner was an ideal recruit to the Home Guard because of his past experience in private militias and his expertise with weapons. He applied to join the local Highcliffe unit, not without some difficulty as he was already an air-raid warden and was told civil defence personnel could not join. In its early days as the LDV, the Home Guards had no uniforms and wore ordinary civilian clothes with just armbands to identify themselves. Firearms were also scarce, so they had to arm themselves with privately owned shotguns, old pistols, and rifles owned as souvenirs left over from World War I, and improvised weapons such as bayonets or kitchen knives tied to broom handles.
Gardner decided he would arm his air-raid wardens with coshes, swords, and pikes from his private collection of medieval weapons. He took to carrying, ironically, a German Luger machine-pistol and a revolver owned by his wife, Donna. When a new commander took over the Highcliffe Home Guard unit, Gardner persuaded him that he could take on technical staff without headquarters’ permission. He was duly enrolled as the unit’s armourer, with the rank of lance-corporal, and the other wardens were also allowed to join if they wanted to. They did their usual job during German bombing raids and then became Home Guards in the periods of “all clear” (Bracelin 1960: 145–148).
After the fall of France in June 1940, it was widely believed that within a few weeks the Germans would launch Operation Sealion—the invasion of Britain. In fact, invasion barges full of Nazi stormtroopers were ready at French ports to be sent across the Channel to the beaches of southern England. The only obstacle in the way of a full-scale invasion during the summer of 1940 was the Royal Air Force. Plans were ready for the Luftwaffe to destroy British planes on the ground by bombing airfields and shooting them out of the sky over southeastern England. This campaign culminated in the famous Battle of Britain in early September, which was a turning point in the war. When the Luftwaffe was defeated by “the Few,” Hitler decided to abandon his invasion plans and turn eastward to the Soviet Union instead.
Evidently the New Forest Coven decided that something had to be done on a magical level to stop the expected German invasion. Philip Heselton has claimed that the Mason family instigated this action. As alleged hereditary witches, they had a strong family tradition that their ancestors had carried out magical rituals to stop the proposed French invasion in Napoleonic times, and even earlier had worked against the Spanish Armada in 1588. (Heselton 2000). Certainly the Mason family had ancestors who lived in the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth in the nineteenth century.
Heselton says that Gardner told his friend Ross Nichols that, in August 1805, witches in Sussex had worked weather magic to stop Napoleon’s fleet from leaving the French port of Bologne. They had allegedly called up a southwesterly wind that had prevented the invasion being launched. Gardner also said that members of the New Forest Coven had told him their great-grandparents had projected the idea into Napoleon’s mind that he could not invade England. It is true that the invasion force was prepared to sail, but a combination of bad weather and poor communications resulted in its cancellation. A similar ritual was supposed to have been performed by the witches to stop the Spanish Armada by sending the thought: “You cannot land. Go on, go on.” Again the invasion was foiled by a combination of a great storm that wrecked the fleet and the bravery of Sir Francis Drake’s sailors with their secret weapon of fire-ships (August 2000).
A description of the 1940 ritual, called “Operation Cone of Power,” is given in the Bracelin biography (1960). It allegedly took place at Lammas (August 1) or possibly as early as May Eve. Gardner told Doreen Valiente that in fact several rituals were performed over the summer. She speculated that these were held at the full moons in May, June, and July, and at Lammas (1989: 45). Gardner told one of his other initiates, Patricia Crowther, that the ritual took place on Lammas Eve because the moon was in its last days, or waning, and the purpose of the ritual was a banishing. He told Bracelin that several covens were involved and that Old Dorothy had called up “covens right and left, although by witch law they should not be known to each other” (Bracelin 1960: 152). It is not clear if these other covens were also located in the New Forest or came from farther afield. If this is true, however, then it does indicate that the New Forest witches were not the only witches in southern England at the time.
There were seventeen people present at the ritual, including air-raid wardens and members of the Home Guard. Gardner said, “We were taken at night to a place in the forest where the Great Circle was erected.” Heselton has speculated that this may have been near the Rufus Stone, a memorial erected to King William II, who was killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest in 1100 CE. Dr. Margaret Murray claimed William Rufus was secretly the leader of the witch cult. His death was allegedly a ritual sacrifice as he took the role of the divine king who dies so his blood can fertilize the land. An alternative site for the ritual could have been The Naked Man, the withered remains of an old oak tree at Wilverley Post, near Lyndhurst. Local folklore said it was a witches’ meeting place and Gardner told Doreen Valiente it was used as an assembly point by the New Forest Coven where the members met up before going to their working site deeper in the forest.
Gardner also told Valiente that the circle had been marked out with brushwood and the witches were stationed around it to “whip up the dancers.” A fire was lit in the circle with candles in lanterns positioned in the direction where the object of the rite (i.e., Hitler) was supposed to be. The witches then danced around the circle until they felt enough power had been raised. Dancing began in a deosil (clockwise) direction and ended in a widdershins (anti-clockwise) direction to banish the power. The witches formed a line, linked hands, and rushed inward towards the fire, shouting or chanting what they wanted to achieve. The Great Cone of Power was directed in the general direction of Germany, Hitler, and the German High Command. The command was projected telepathically: “You cannot cross the sea. You cannot cross the sea. You cannot come. You cannot come.”
Gardner said that the witches kept this up until they were exhausted, or somebody blacked out from the exertion. This was seen as a sign that the spell had worked and only then was the ritual brought to its traditional close.
He added that during the rite, “Mighty forces were used, of which I may not speak,” but it is known that the life force of the participants was utilized. This apparently caused lethal effects as Gardner reported that his asthma (which had been cured since he had returned from the Far East) returned and was to remain with him for the rest of his life. He also said, “Many of us died a few days after we did this.” He quotes the Elders of the coven, saying, “We feel we have stopped him [Hitler]. We must not kill too many of our people. Keep them until we need them” (Bracelin 1960: 52). This may have been an exaggeration on Gardner’s part as he always had a flair for the melodramatic.
Philip Heselton has speculated that the editor of the local newspaper, who coincidentally died in August 1940, may have been one of these sacrifices. He was interested in witchcraft, was supportive of the Rosicrucian Theatre, favorably reviewed Gardner’s novel A Goddess Arrives, and lived just around the corner from him. The blacksmith in Highcliffe died in August, as well, and Heselton believes he may have also been one of the participants in the ritual (August 2000). Traditionally blacksmiths were often regarded in folklore as wizards and magicians.
Nobody will ever know if the Lammas ritual prevented the Germans invading Britain, but not everyone accepted the story as factual. One of Gardner’s later initiates and the High Priestess of the Brickett Wood after his death, Lois Bourne (Pearson) dismissed it to me as “just one of Gerald’s fairy tales” (pers. comm.). However Eleanor Bone claimed that Edith Woodford-Grimes had told her that she had been present at the Lammas ritual in the New Forest with both Gardner and Dorothy Clutterbuck (Rabinovitch and Lewis 2002: 24).
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