Bludy Beershop, Bill Stickers, Red Biddy: with their unlikely pseudonyms, the members of ‘Ferguson’s Gang’ raised a fortune for the National Trust – and rescued many landmarks from oblivion. But who were they?
Hanging from a drawing pin in Shalford Mill, in a tiny room just a couple of metres above its mighty water wheel and the tumbling River Tillingbourne, is a brown paper bandit’s mask. It is almost invisible in the shadows of the hefty 18th-century beams, and its aura of intrigue seems at odds with this chocolate box National Trust site, tucked at the end of a quaint, daffodil-dotted lane in deepest Surrey. Yet the mask is part of the reason this beautiful building stands today.
It is a relic from a theatrical arsenal worn by Ferguson’s Gang: a clandestine society active from the late 1920s to the postwar years. Far from their criminal-sounding name, they were actually a bunch of well-to-do guerrilla conservationists, who conspired to save England’s history for posterity for the National Trust. What’s more, they were young women.
