saleroom.com

FERNHURST in the 1940s proved to be a popular talk for members of the village archive society, who bought in photos and records, plus news cuttings about the development of an ICI Plant Protection HQ, later Zeneca, then Syngenta.

Fernhurst Society director Christine Maynard talked about the wartime evacuees, houses with no running water or electricity, rationing, home-grown everything, the canning machine, the WRVS, Fernhurst poaching patrol, and also ‘Ropes’, a house coveted by German foreign minister Ribbentrop, that was used as a hostel for the less well-behaved with the phone number Fernhurst 4.