Something amazing: A Shropshire businessman falling out of the sky and Mystery at Witchend

The latest Secret Shropshire programme on BBC Sounds is intriguing:

In 1937 Max Wenner fell to his death from a plane in one of aviation's greatest mysteries. Wenner was a wealthy landowner and pilot living at Batchcott Hall outside Picklescott in the foothills of the Long Mynd.

Wenner's frequent flights to Germany in the 1930s and visits from high profile Nazis like Joachim von Ribbentrop led to speculation that Wenner may be leading a double life. In January 1937 his body was found in woodland near Genk, in Belgium.

He had fallen out of a passenger plane but no could explain why. Almost ninety years later, the mystery continues to intrgue journalists in the UK, and on the continent.

Johnty O'Donnell visited Batchcott Hall to investigate the mysterious Max Wenner, the man who fell from the sky.

So there were rumours of a nest of Nazi spies in a big house in the shadow of the Long Mynd? Could this story have been an inspiration for Malcolm Saville's first Lone Pine book Mystery at Witchend? 

Wenner's death must still have been the talk of the district when Saville visited Shropshire during the war. Even the name Batchcott echoes the Hatchholt of his book, and I once drew parallels between Mystery at Witchend and the wartime propaganda film Went the Day Well?

While I was writing this the Trivia Desk phoned to point out that Max Wenner was the great uncle of the Blue Peter presenter Christopher Wenner, who later became a crusading documentary maker under the name Max Stahl.

Return to Malcolm Saville's The Neglected Mountain

In 2012 Miranda's Island listed the ingredients of the classic children's adventure story:

I mean the kind of rural holiday location where children get to sleep in barns, camp out on islands and cycle, walk or even hitch-hike long miles through country lanes, relieved by picnics packed up by friendly adults who know when to back off and when to interfere. 

Optional but highly desirable elements are caves, horses, dogs (actually, I’m not sure the dog is optional, I think it’s essential) and the frisson of danger provided by a treasure hunt or an odd character lurking around, clearly up to something fishy.

And then came to the right conclusion:

The Famous Five come to mind, and still have their following. But I think a strong contender for that place in the collective juvenile consciousness would be the Lone Pine novels by Malcolm Saville. The Lone Pine Club is a group of around eight children, the bonds between them forged on exactly the kind of holidays described above. 

Similar to the Arthur Ransome novels, the precise line-up of characters varies according to location, but the heart of their adventures might truly be said to be the remote Shropshire countryside between Shrewsbury in the north and Ludlow in the south, and specifically the country around the mountains of the Long Mynd and the Stiperstones.

"The Neglected Mountain" is what Jenny calls the Stiperstones in the story to give the book its title.

Miranda of Miranda's Island had reread the book before writing her post:

My husband claimed it was "throbbing with UST [unresolved sexual tension]"  and certainly Saville doesn’t ignore the - ahem - emotional development of fifteen and sixteen year olds. 

There are two boy/girl pairings - David, very much the leader of the group, and Petronella (known as Peter), an independent local girl who loves to ride her pony around the country lanes when she’s not away "at boarding school in Shrewsbury", a statement that neatly conveys the all-important 1950s identifier of social class.

Jenny, from a village post office/general store and Tom, who works on a farm, make up the second couple. It is implicit, though never openly stated, that Jenny has something of a crush on David, but he’s out of her league, and she pairs off comfortably with Tom.

Peter's school fees are paid by her Uncle Micah, though how he has derived such wealth from farming the unpromising country around the Stiperstones is never made clear, but I shall look for signs of Jenny's crush on David next time I read one of the early Lone Pine stories.

Miranda goes on:

Why do these adventures continue to be appealing? I think it’s because the issues that tend to worry adults now – premature sexualisation, social diversity and the degree of freedom it is appropriate to offer older children – are addressed quite differently. That is not to say they are ignored. Far from it. Here is Saville on the subject of gypsies:

The gypsies and Mr Cantor respected each other. The detective knew how honest and trustworthy they were. Gypsies are often accused of many things unjustly, but in their wanderings they pick up a lot of information: and when Miranda handed the detective a cup of tea she knew at once that there were questions he wanted to ask them.

Laid on with a trowel perhaps, but you would never, I think, find such a passage in an Enid Blyton adventure.

The Miranda's Island post makes equally interesting observations on adventures and the development of character, and on children and the adult world.

It ends by praising the Girls Gone By reprints of the Lone Pine stories. These paperbacks are now becoming collectable in their own right, by they do have the full text of the original hardbacks. The Armada paperbacks that many young readers relied upon in the Sixties and Seventies were quite heavily edited - and not well edited, in Saville's own judgement.

Saville hardbacks with their dust wrappers fetch silly prices, and I don't suppose it's as easy to find battered hardbacks without them at reasonable prices as it was when I acquired most of my collection of his work. So a second-hand Girls Gone By edition may be your best bet if you want to read the books as Saville wrote them.

Finally, I hope Miranda is still with us and well. The last post on her blog was written in 2022 when she was obviously seriously ill. I am reminded of my post on disappearances from the net.

Shropshire Wildlife Trust aims to buy site between Long Mynd and Stiperstones to help curlews and other birds

Nestled between the craggy outcrops of the Stiperstones ridge, and the imposing plateau of the Long Mynd, is a piece of land, 50 hectares in size. It neighbours the ancient Portway, and descends gradually to meet the rolling fields of the lowlands. 

Meadow pipits and skylarks flutter and parachute above, whilst a shy brown hare creeps through the grasses below, ears flat along its back, all as an unmistakable ‘cuckoo’ call drifts by on an upland breeze.

This is Betchcott Hill, a promising site, containing pockets of valuable habitat, and home to some specialist species, not least a breeding pair of curlew. But it is sadly in poor ecological condition, and in need of considered restoration and land management. And that is exactly what Shropshire Wildlife Trust is planning to do to...

The Shropshire Wildlife Trust is raising money to buy this valuable site. You can donate via its website.

Tom Freeland, the trust's head of nature reserves, told BBC News:

"Skylark and snipe, cuckoos and lapwing."

"I think the most exciting and probably the bird that needs the most protection is the curlew, a real icon of the Shropshire Hills. ...

"We know that they have bred on site, we know that they attempted to raise chicks on this site last year, we know they didn’t successfully do so."

"They are struggling as a species, they need that longish grass that they can safely raise their chicks in."

Mystery at Witchend is Went the Day Well? and Seven White Gates is A Matter of Life and Death

Malcolm Saville wrote his first two Lone Pine books while the second world war was raging. He somehow found time to work on them while holding down a day job in publishing and fire-watching by night. 

And there are elements to those books that put me in mind of the most interesting British wartime propaganda films. I even wonder if one thing Saville sought to do in writing the first book, Mystery at Witchend, was to warn children that they should be alert to the existence of fifth columnists and Nazi spies 

If the point of Went the Day Well? was to remind its audience that everywhere, even a village as remote and insignificant as Bramley End, was in danger from Nazi infiltrators, then Mystery at Witchend said the same thing about the even remoter countryside of the Shropshire hills.

So Dickie has to accept that even the dashing RAF pilot he and Mary helped find his way on the Long Mynd was a Nazi - "one of the worst".

And Mary makes an observation that could come from Went the Day Well?:

"And there was something else, Dickie. Did you notice what I noticed? Did you hear."

He looked puzzled for a moment.

"Wasn't anything to hear, was there?"

Then they stared at each other without speaking, and Dickie's second shoe dropped to the floor.

"Of course," he went on. "Of course there was something to hear. They were all talking all the time."

"Course they were," said Mary slowly. "But they weren't speaking English."

If Mystery at Witchend is about the risk of a German invasion, then Seven White Gates is about Anglo-American relations. You will find this theme in A Canterbury Tale and, above all, in A Matter of Life and Death.

When David Niven appears before a Heavenly court to plead to be allowed to stay on earth with his new American love, counsel for the prosecution is Abraham Farlan, who hates the British for making him the first casualty of the American Revolutionary War. 

Niven wins his case, and his and Hunter's love becomes a metaphor for relations between the two nations.

In Seven White Gates the metaphorical relationship is that of an estranged father and son. When Peter goes to stay at White Gates farm under the Stiperstones, she finds it presided over by the daunting figure of Uncle Micah, who speaks like someone out of the Old Testament and soothes his broken heart with midnight rambles to the Devil's Chair.

He is followed on one of these by the twins, who become trapped in old mine workings. They are rescued by some American soldiers on a training exercise, and their officer proves surprisingly knowledgeable about the area and inquisitive about the farm.

Mary realises he must be Uncle Micah's son Charles, who left for America after a terrible row with his father. And she duly brings them together at the end of the book.

I don't think you can carry on with the filmic comparisons after Seven White Gates. The Lone Pine stories becoming more formulaic and concern themselves with finding buried treasure or rounding up criminals.

But the first two of those stories display themes that you will also find in British films of the period.

The 10 best Shropshire hills

Just a little Shropshire hill porn while I plan my holidays.

"Malcolm Saville made me an archaeologist"

Thank you to the reader who sent me the link to an account of a talk given at the Hay Winter Festival by the archaeologist Miranda Aldhouse-Green:

In the question and answer session, she was asked what her inspiration for becoming an archaeologist was, and she talked about the books of Malcolm Saville, especially Lone Pine Five, set around the Long Mynd in Shropshire (in fact, set so securely round the Long Mynd that a fan of the books used to lead walks to places that were mentioned in the text). One of the characters finds a Roman spoon in a cave, and that was the moment she decided she wanted to be an archaeologist.

I think that would have delighted the great man.

The account of Lone Pine Five here is a little garbled, in that Jenny finds the spoon, not in a cave, but in an auction in the yard of the 'Rose and Crown' at Bishop's Castle, which sounds like the real-life Three Tuns there.

A drone's-eye view of the Stiperstones ridge

Time for some Shropshire hill porn. This is the ridge of the Stiperstones, where the stony surface makes for hard walking - it's like North Cornwall without the sea. The Long Mynd, a hill that runs parallel to the Stiperstones a few miles to the east, is grassy and altogether easier to negotiate.

The video picks out the various outcrops along the ridge. It's hard to avoid the disappointment one character feels in Mystery at Witchend, the first of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine stories, when viewing them from the Mynd:

Dickie couldn't admit that the black rocks crowning the highest part of the ridge looked like a Chair. They didn't - not really.

The only thing to add is that the Stiperstones are best avoided on the winter solstice, when all the ghosts of Shropshire meet there.