The Name Chalked on the Wall: Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?

2026-09-02 · People Without a Name · 8 min read

On the afternoon of 18 April 1943, four boys climbed a fence into Hagley Wood, on the Worcestershire estate of Lord Cobham, and went looking for birds' nests. Wartime England had a shorter word for that: poaching. The wood lies under Wychbury Hill, a few miles from Stourbridge, and it is thick with old growth. One tree in particular had grown strangely. It was a wych elm, cut back long ago, so that its trunk had split into a bowl of shoots around a hollow core. It was the sort of tree a fifteen year old climbs without thinking about it.

Bob Farmer climbed it. He reached down into the hollow expecting eggs and his hand closed on something round. He lifted it out into the light. It was a human skull, with hair still attached to the bone and teeth still set in the jaw.

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