The Big scandal

The Magic Mushroom Farm held a dark secret

Girls picking the produce at the
Mushroom Farm in the 1930s.

SCANDAL rocked the village of Wethersfield and made headlines in the national press just as war was breaking out in 1939. The story starts innocently enough. In 1935 Frederick William Seymour a London nurseryman received an offer to build and manage a mushroom farm at Wethersfield. Not surprisingly Mr Seymour accepted, since his starting salary was to be about £600 rising to about £2,000 - about £100,000 per annum today. In order to grow mushrooms you must have manure and soil and mycelium and provide a hot steamy environment. This meant building huts in which these conditions could be met. Some people in Wethersfield who can remember the first mushroom huts going up. Bob Lawrence, one of the carpenters who worked on them recalled: "They were all made out of 4in x 2in studwork. Shiplap weatherboard outside, inside they were lined with 8ft x 4ft boards of asbestos sheeting."
In 1935 Phyllis Seymour was the mushroom farm manager's small daughter. In old age she described how the farm used thousands of tons of manure that came in not only from farms but also from all the racing stables at nearby Newmarket. The manure was handled by a crew of farm labourers and a charge hand. After a time the wives of the men

doing this job began complaining at the increase in the appetite of their husbands. Her father had to switch round the crews. Phyllis Seymour remembers life on the farm just as war was breaking out. "A group of young girls belonging to the Women's Land Army were sent as pickers and packers. They were housed, and had their own kitchen, above the large packing shed.

"They had to cope with a ton of mushrooms per day which were graded for size and packed in 1lb baskets lined with dark blue paper and then transported by pantechnicon up to Covent Garden in London. My father's ambition was to double the output of the farm to two tons per day. "The men clocked in very early in the morning and worked until 5pm with a break for lunch which they brought with them. Young boys from local villages, leaving school at about 14 to 15 years were paid three pence an hour; farm labourers, some of whom could not even sign their name on a pay sheet, earned nine pence per hour. The lorry drivers fetching the manure and soil, which had to be weighed and recorded at the entrance because it was paid for by the ton, received 10pence per hour. The charge hands received one shilling an hour."

To speed up production, prefabricated
wooden panels, rather than individual
planks were used to build the later huts

Mixing light manure from racing
stables with heavier farm manure.

Mushrooms growing on long beds
on the hut floor. Later tiered beds
were used to increase production.

next...the bosses do all right

Click pictures to enlarge