| You
can push your luck only so far...
BUT the bubble
had to burst and the beginning of the end came when Miss Agnes Rankin
Hutchinson Greig of Roydon claimed that she had been induced to invest
in the company by fraud.
Through
the activities of James Petter and Maurice Singer, the court heard,
the public had been persuaded
to invest £687,000 in Mushroom Growers Ltd and M G Farm Ltd. Only £27,000
it was said in
court was raised from the sale of mushrooms.
These sums were in 1939. We would probably be talking between
£30 and £40 million in investment today.
Miss
Greig wanted repayment of £2,200 she had paid for 20 leases of mushroom
units, less the £300 14s
5d she had received in respect of alleged profits and interest. Whether
she ever got the £1,899 5s 7d that Mr Justice Morton in the Chancery
Division
|
The fully completed mushroom farm,
the growing huts surrounding the long manure shed and the generating
plant |
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| decreed
she should be repaid is not known.
But very soon, in October 1939, Messrs
Parkin, 33, described as a farmer and Collinson, 58, as an author of travel
books, together with a 52-year-old salesman with the inappropriate name
of James Fortune –
whose mis-fortune was to be a fall-guy for the share salesman Petter –
were up on a charge of
conspiracy to defraud shareholders. They pleaded not guilty. Singer had
fled to Canada, with the £65,000 he was said to have netted. Petter, too,
was "abroad" when
it came to the trial.
THE
full sorry saga of the Mushroom Farm that lost its magic is recorded
in the Halstead Gazette and
Times
of Friday, January 26, 1940. Cross-examined by Mr G B McClure for
the prosecution, Parkin agreed that, taking the farm as a whole,
there never had been a trading profit.
Mr McClure: Do you agree now that Petter was a share-pusher?
Parkin:
Yes.
The final
chapter was recorded in the Halstead Gazette on February 2nd
1940: "The
trial of the three defendants in the Mushroom Farm conspiracy case was
concluded before the Recorder, Sir Gerald Dodson at the Central Criminal
Court on Thursday. Two of the men were found guilty
and sentenced.
"Parkin
and Collinson were both found guilty of conspiracy and fraud. Parkin
was sentenced to four years'
penal servitude, Collinson to three years. Fortune was found not
guilty on the whole indictment and discharged. The jury, on which there
were two
women, were about one and a quarter hours considering their verdict."
A sad end
to what could have been a very different story, for the techniques used
by the Wethersfield mushroom
growers later became a model for growers throughout Europe |
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