This is the way the money goes...

IF the workers were doing quite nicely out of Mushroom Growers, Ltd. the directors and others were doing even better. Too well as it turned out and this is where scandal mars the story and the magic of  the Mushroom Farm, in which people, many of them far from well off villagers, had rushed to buy shares, began to wear thin. The men who ran the Mushroom Farm were Leonard Charles Alfred Parkin and Clifford Whiteley Collinson and they lived in style. About 1935. Mr Parkin took over the little cottage in the fields that later became Tattersalls. They bought barns and pulled them down just to get the old timbers out of them to extend their homes. Large amounts of money were spent at the Mushroom Farm but there was an awful lot spent up at Tattersalls. They laid out gardens, a long drive was built up to the isolated house, which was greatly enlarged.

Two hundred tons of rock was brought up from Wales to make a rockery and gardeners were taken on. The Parkins' two children had model railways which filled the whole room and the seat of the toilet for the business room was mother-of-pearl. The other partner, Collinson, lived at a house called Tinkers Cross and a lot of money was being spent there too. A house was provided for Mr Testy the engineer who looked after the generators and the miles of underground steam pipes that heated the mushroom houses. 
The company offices, which are now Mushroom Farm House, were lavish. The brick walls were all lined with cork all the floors were cork with a red tile top to it.Certainly the man who built the farm and worked on the partners' homes, Joe Dee, did well out of the project. From being a little local builder with a horse and cart and about three men in less than six months Joe had a fleet of lorries. Meanwhile the farm was certainly growing mushrooms, though not enough. 

The mushrooms went up to London every day in big lorries with roll up sheets at the back. The lorry backs were open so that people could see the piles of baskets. But sometimes only the back few rows of baskets in the lorry had any mushrooms in them. This skullduggery was to impress the shareholders who, as a public relations exercise, were invited to see the huts in which they had shares. They were given star treatment with uniformed doormen welcoming them as they drove into the arch beneath the Mushroom Farm offices. 

Lou Rollinson remembered: "When you invested your money in it the first dividend was a wonderful payment, far above what you could get anywhere else, people were really pleased then. "But then a couple of weeks later they followed it up with a letter saying that your investment wasn't enough to cover the cost of the paperwork so you could either put more money into it or get out. People sold this and that to put more money into it because the farm looked to be doing so well."