Sally Gwenarby
1 Wendy Willowbank
​
Who is Wendy Willowbank?
Well…in her own words here she is:
For a start my full name is Wendy Scheherezade Willowbank. (Don’t ask! In some ways, my businesswoman mother is seriously odd.)
I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore. That old Abba song fits me like a cardigan. “If I tell a joke, you’ve probably heard it before..” And you would have if I’d ever knowingly told a joke.
How’s it go?
“But I have a talent, a wonderful thing: everyone listens when I start to sing...”
And that’s where it goes completely off-beam, because if I start to sing people leave the room. I have the singing voice of a crow.
I am a self-declared bore. I can’t think myself into light conversations; I cannot master the easy smile; I cannot wriggle my suety self into any semblance of relaxed, open body language. The ability to seem interested in social noodling eludes me. None of that might matter so much if I didn’t also have small, close-together eyes, a pointy nose, pasty white skin, a thick waist and chunky thighs.
Not obese, just chunky! And frizzy hair -that’s the final bloody kick in the teeth, innit? (But nice teeth! straight, well taken-care-of). And it’s frizzy hair that grows and fills out until it resembles a large, discarded gob of wire wool. It’s dark brown in colour.
“Chestnut”, I call it, mining a thin seam of positive attributes.
At the time of my “Sally Gwenarby” adventure…
Ok, so rightly I ought to call it my “Hazel Bayleaf” adventure really, as she’s the real true friend life long friend I got out of it, while Sally was..
I think I’ll struggle to say what Sally was, and what she was to me. I could start with something about her being and the most intense, most physuically intense, out-of-body sexual experience I have ever and will ever have. There you go, self-contrasdictory, so I give up on describing Sally.
Where was I, oh yeah, at the time of my Sally/ Hazel adventure I was 30 years old and of average height. Still overweight though not obese, and with little in the way of shape. And having lacked girl friends at a crucial stage I’ve never developed the shopping and style habit, so I tend to wear jeans, sweaters and flat shoes: I dress defensively. I’ve been getting into smocks recently -they have good pockets!
I am a very good geologist. I love rocks. I have few friends and no love life.
Probably those three facts are connected.
2 Hazel Bayleaf
​
In 1969, Clive Cedric Bayleaf, the founder of the WÇ£rlogia movement, was 69 years old and physically and mentally unwell. His wife and his lover both described him later as having been in a state of spiritual fixation. His lover, Jocelyn Maunder, revealed she was pregnant, at the age of 39. On Midsummer’s Eve of 1970, as Jocelyn was due to give birth, Bayleaf walked out of his front door, never to be seen alive again. His wife, Candice Collingwood, then 44, was told on the ‘phone that Jocelyn had given birth to twins. Shortly after, Candice found she was pregnant too. Bayleaf was the father in both cases.
Jocelyn died shortly after giving birth.
In 1971, Candice gave birth to Hazel, who was born with facial deformities and diagnosed with Treacher Collins syndrome. Candice believed the deformities to be a judgement on her for her pagan past and, racked with guilt, as well as isolated socially, converted to Christianity. She also adopted Jocelyn’s twins: Eleanor and Rosalind Maunder.
At the age of four, the reaction of other children and their parents told Hazel she was different. Her mother was protective of her, but Hazel grew isolated. But she was strong-willed and intelligent and would not let herself be bullied or patronised. She once severely beat a girl who tried and was left alone after that, and resigned herself to isolation, learning kid’s culture by overhearing rather than interacting.
When still young she looked in her mother’s room and found her old witchcraft paraphernalia, and explicit photos of pagan rites. By this time her mother was a committed member of the local church, and Hazel initially found support there too. She stayed in the church community until the age of 9 but then began to question how Jesus could have let her be born like she was, and why Eve had had to be blamed for ever for the existence of sin. She confronted her mother who told her that she believed that Hazel’s deformities were a result of her sin of having been a witch. She revealed to Hazel that she had not only been a witch but a high priestess of Clive Cedric Bayleaf.
Enraged by being pigeonholed as a mere repository of someone else’s ‘sin’, Hazel overnight lost her faith and was never fully reconciled with her mother until near the end of her life.
Hazel remained in Windcastle in the house she had been brought up in and took on the house when her mother went into a retirement home. She got a job as a telephonist for a local health centre, a job that required no face-to-face contact.
Throughout her lonely, defiant childhood and youth, one friend remained constant; Giles Nevatte, a countryman who had known her mother before Hazel was born.
Hazel remained cheerful, impious and self-confident, content with a few loose acquaintances other than Giles. She had fallen out with her half-sisters, who had embraced their mothers’ paganism. Hazel had rejected that along with Christianity. Her friendship with Giles sustained her and she never dropped her emotional guard, refusing to risk being hurt.
Until a post-doc researcher from Aberrheidol, called Wendy Willowbank came looking for her, with a link to her father…
Clive Cedric Bayleaf and WÇ£rlogia
Clive Cedric Bayleaf (1900–1970) Sometimes called “Weland” ; an English warlock and anthropologist and archaeologist. Founder of the WÇ£rlogia movement and also of the Order of the Silver Grail
Carried out extensive research on the spiritual background of the South Downs.
Index entry from The Moon’s Silver Shadow – A history of
WÇ£rlogia. Houseman, Roland. Hexwood Press, 1991, Oxford.
So who was Clive Cedric Bayleaf?
Born into an upper-middle class family in Winchester in the October of 1900, Bayleaf attended Winchester College and Oxford where he read history and classics. He was called up in 1917, and joined the Royal Flying Corps as an observer, and spent some time over the western front photographing enemy positions where he conceived a fascinations with maps. He also was shot down and had to get back to British lines alone, badly injured in the leg. He subsequently had a permanent limp.
He went back to flying but was suffering from a mild form of shell-shock, and was put onto clerical work. While on leave in early 1918, and walking the South Downs he visited a small chapel dedicated to St. Hubert, and experienced a religious conversion. After the war he obtained a job with the Ordnance Survey and spent a lot of time flying, as a mapper/photographer. He had fallen in love with the South Downs and walked and mapped obsessively on his own account. He was also becoming fascinated with the pagan underlay of Sussex, Hants and Wiltshire history.
Restless, and feeling there was a whole world of culture he was missing, he left the OS in 1930 and got a contract mapping in the Caribbean on the British territory of Holbourne Island, at the behest of the Hawkins family who owned the island at that time. It was there that he first learned about voodoo and its blended African and Christian roots. He attended many ceremonies, took drugs, and was initiated into the voodoo cult. Renouncing his Christianity and declaring himself a witch, he ‘went native’ for two years, living among the locals, “honing his craft” as he later put it.
In 1934 he returned to England, settling down on the outskirts of Winchester where he joined a local pagan group which gathered on the crown of St. Cath’s Hill. He spent five years intensively studying the history of witchcraft while working as a schoolmaster in a private school nearby. Some of the boys in the school were inculcated into the occult group. Bayleaf was sacked as a result. He then worked then as a house painter while writing books on the pagan religions. He became a proselytiser for witchcraft at a time when it was fairly unfashionable. Sub groups of the original St. Cath’s Hill coven -which he had now mutated with his own philosopy -a mix of paganism, voodoo and Diana worship- were set up across the South of England.
In WW2 he rejoined the RAF in a ground occupation, again related to mapping. He made the rank of flight Lieutenant. While he was still serving he was also attending witchcraft groups in the area surrounding the air bases he was billetted at. He struck up a relationship with two young WAAFs: Candice Collingwood and Jocelyn Maunder. All three attended cult events and, by their own admission within the circles they moved in, were in an active sexual relationship with each other.
After the war Bayleaf and his two ‘priesteses’ practised and developed an occult religion that evolved into the Order of the Silver Grail which practised a newly created form of withcraft which Bayleaf called WÇ£rlogia. Named after the Anglo-Saxon term for the male witch, its practises and philosophy distilled all that he had learned and developed since his time in the Caribbean. The rituals structures of WÇ£rlogia were set down in a secret, handwritten text called The Rede of the Shadow, the only edition of which is now in the hands of Bayleaf’s family. An ever-widening spread of covens followed his practises -across Britain and spreading to America and Australia. He earned money through several books on the subject of WÇ£rlogia -oddly, he also continued as a housepainter which he said he found to be ‘therapeutic and an occasion for deep thought’.
He withdrew from active membership of the Silver Grail in 1965 after disagreements with others in the central committee. By then he was 65 and felt in old, and unwell. He had contracted mild malaria in the caribbean, and his leg had never recovered from his WW1 adventure. He was in and out of hospital through 1969 early 1970, and when free was constantly writing or walking. His then wide -Candice Collingwood, one of the original priestesses- described him as being in a state of spiritual fixation. There were fears for his sanity; he seemed to be wracked with doubts and demons.
Then, on the day before midsummer 1970, he disappeared, forever. It was a cause celebre in the press with many old followers suggesting he had been transported to the spirit world while other, less charitable, suggested Hades. No trace of him has ever been found and it was suspected by the police that he died wandering deep in the beechwoods of the South Downs, thus returning to his beloved chalk soil.
Excerpts from. Bayleaf: Father of English Waerlogia by Constance Firbank-Walsh, Constance Haddo & Oliver, 1975, Boscastle.
Bibliography:
1947 Towards a new English paganism
1952 English witchcraft and the post-war settlements
1954 WÇ£rlogia articles of a new faith (manifesto)
1954 The Rede of the Shadow (book of ritualistic instructions for WÇ£rlogian covens)
1957-68 The WÇ£rlogian (Articles and ed.)
So, that was what Constance Firbank-Walsh made of him…
But is it the whole truth?
To be fair we need to contextualise the author and the time. Constance was a lifelong member of the Order of the Silver Grail, and was a Bayleavian during the conflict with the Alanians (more below). She had a close relationship both with Candice and Bayleaf himself, though she never got on with Jocelyn and never forgave her defection in the 60s. there is also evidence from other members at the time that she resented Jocelyn for her ‘triangular’ relationship with Bayleaf and Candice. The consensus was that her disapproval of the melange was partly jealousy. Roland Houseman dug deeper in the 90s[1]. as a result we have a few more details..
​