BILL LOVE – TRADITIONAL WITCH

Mike Howard

I first came across Bill Love, who passed to spirit in his eighties at his home in
Folkestone, Kent last December, when he had an article published in the
monthly astrological magazine Prediction. This was in February 2002 and it
was written to mark the 50 th anniversary of the repeal in 1951 of the old 18 th
century Witchcraft Act. Last year I was put in touch with Love directly when
he sent me for my advice and opinion the manuscript of a book on witchcraft
he had written and was hoping to get published. This still unpublished book
contained a lot of recycled Wiccan and neo-pagan material, but more
interestingly also an account of his induction into a traditional witch covine in
Essex in the 1950s.

Bill Love had first come into contact with the Craft in 1942 while studying
physics at St Andrew’s University in Scotland. There he met a fellow student
who claimed to belong to a traditional family group in Fife. Love also
attended a series of talks held at an old farmhouse in the countryside outside
the famous golfing town. The people who ran them had an extensive library
that included a full set of the first edition of thirteen volumes of Sir James
Frazer’s The Golden Bough and a copy of Dr Margaret Alice Murray’s The God
of the Witches. This sparked his early interest in ancient pagan religions and
historical witchcraft

Later, in 1955, Love was actually introduced to Dr Murray by their mutual

friend Gerald B. Gardner. They met in her private room at University College
London where she had formerly been the professor of anthropology and
Egyptology. Love claims that Dr Murray, who was 92 at the time and lived to
be 100, and who he described as a “sprightly old lady”, was keen that
witchcraft should survive in the modern age and be perpetuated. However,
prophetically, she was also concerned that its true essence would be lost in the
wake of new covens being formed following the publication a year earlier of
Gardner’s book Witchcraft Today by Rider & Co.

According to Bill Love, Gardner told him he had been help in compiling his
Wiccan ‘Book of Shadows’ by Aleister Crowley and an occultist and
Cabbalistic magician called Ivar McKay, who is not generally known. Love
claimed it was McKay, a high-ranking Freemason, who gave Gardner the idea
of using three degrees of initiation for his new and idiosyncratic version of
witchcraft. McKay, like many occultists of his generation, had worked in
military intelligence during the Second World War with the rank of major.
After the war he owned and ran an antique shop off Kensington High Street
in West London.

Coincidentally, I also knew Ivar McKay in the 1970s when we were both
members of the British Unidentified Flying Object Research Association
(BUFORA). This held its meetings at Kensington Public Library, where later
Arthurian writers and ‘Celtic shamans’ John and Caitlin Matthews worked as
librarians when they were still in their Wicca stage. They lived in a bedsitter
nearby and attended Wiccan moots at the Hoop and Ball public house.
According to Bill Love, in the 1950s Major McKay also ran a magical lodge
known as the Church of the Ancient Dawn, which was broadly based on the
old Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It is possible McKay had once been
an initiate of one of the surviving GD groups.

In the 1950s Bill Love became involved in the Wiccan scene in London. He
knew Michael Juste, the then owner of the Atlantis occult bookshop in
Museum Street near the British Museum who held rituals of his mysterious
Order of Hidden Masters in a temple in the basement. It was in the bookshop
that Love had first met Gardner, at the time living in a flat in Holland Park
opposite Hyde Park while his witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man was
closed for the winter. As a result of meeting Gardner, Love attended some of
the famous soirees held at the Cosmos café in Finchley Road, North-West
London attended by occultists, witches, magicians and philosophers.

That is where Bill Love met Jack Bracelin, an ex-policeman in the British
protectorate of Palestine, who was then Gardner’s right-hand man and the
High Priest of the Brickett Wood Coven in Hertfordshire. In fact it was Love
who introduced Bracelin to a philosophy student and ballet dancer called
Rosemary Ellis who subsequently became his wife. She was an ex-convent girl
and Bracelin shocked his fellow witches by getting married to her in a Roman
Catholic church as well as having a Wiccan handfasting at the Brickett Wood
covenstead. Bracelin was later to give up witchcraft and he became a
Methodist. His son still retains an interest in the supernatural as he organises
ghost tours for tourists around Ludlow in Shropshire.

Bill Love recalls how one day a panicked Bracelin came into the café
brandishing a lengthy letter he had received from Gerald Gardner’s arch-
enemy, rival and nemesis Charles Cardell, the leader with his Welsh ‘sister’
Mary of the traditional Coven of Atho in Surrey. Apparently the letter listed
all the names and the movements for a week of the members of the Brickett
Wood Coven. Cardell had not obtained this detailed information by using his
magical powers or psychic abilities. Instead he had hired a private detective to
secretly spy on the coven!
As well as his interest in Wicca in 1953 Bill Love had been inducted into a
traditional covine in Essex. This came about in rather bizarre circumstances. It
was after he had left the Royal Air Force and was undergoing the abortive
training to be a Roman Catholic priest at St Mary’s University College in
Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Middlesex. One of his teachers gave a talk on
medieval witchcraft and this rekindled Love’s interest in the subject.
Afterwards he talked to the man about his lecture. It was suggested that Love
might like to attend a discussion group on world religions ran by some people
the teacher knew in Chipping Ongar, Essex.

Bill Love took his teacher’s advice and at the discussion group met a woman
who said she was also interested in witchcraft. In fact she confided him that
she and her husband were the High Priestess and High Priest of a local witch
coven. This had been meeting since the 1930s and the couple, called Sheila
and Ray, had only recently moved down to Essex from their native
Northumbria. Love was invited to join and when the husband retired he took
over as the coven’s High Priest. The group worshipped both a god and
goddess called the Lord and Lady, although beyond them both was an
unknown, nameless Supreme Creator. There were five stages of initiation into
the Craft based on the elemental forces of fire, earth, air, water and spirit.
These were symbolised by the magical sign of the pentagram.

Subsequently Bill Love contacted another woman who was the member of an
‘old’ covine that met in a remote village outside the former smuggler’s haunt
of Rye in East Sussex. Although there was no connection between her group
and the Essex one Love found they shared the same organisation and
identical rites, even though they had originated at either ends of the country.
When he met Gerald Gardner in 1955 Love was surprised to find that the
version of witchcraft that he was publicly promoting was very different from
that of the Essex and Sussex covines. However Gardner did seem to have
some knowledge of the practices of the Essex group. Interestingly Love
formed the opinion that the rites and beliefs of the old man’s parent covine in
the New Forest had been more akin to his own experiences of the Craft in its
traditional form then what Gardner was now practising and promoting as the
public face of modern witchcraft.

Copyright © M.A.Howard 2012.