Forget Wimbledon, the Euros or even the Tokyo Olympics. The hardest-fought contest this summer has surely been among the gooseberry growers of Britain.
Records have been smashed and victories have been celebrated (with fish and chip suppers) even as allegations of sabotage have ripped through one of the oldest gooseberry societies.
In fact, over the past few days, gooseberries have rarely been out of the news.
And we’re not talking the teeny, hard, hairy green bullets you find in supermarkets, but vast, lush, competition-level berries in shades of pink, yellow and white — as well as the usual green.
Terry Price (pictured), 76, reigning champion and president of the more than 130-year-old Goostrey Gooseberry Society in Cheshire found some of his prize trees have been poisoned
This lot are the size of eggs, weighing up to 50g (though they are usually measured in ‘pennyweights and grains’), bursting with juice and are the result of thousands of hours of pruning, feeding, watering, netting, penning and protecting from every type of weather — all in preparation for one competition.
Which means that, when things go wrong, people can get a bit worked up.
And that’s just what happened to poor old Terry Price, 76, reigning champion and president of the more than 130-year-old Goostrey Gooseberry Society in Cheshire.
Three months ago, he discovered some of his prize trees (never bushes) had apparently been poisoned.
Within ten days of him noticing them looking ‘sickly’, they were dead and his hopes of securing another win in the annual Goostrey competition were in tatters, along with his faith in mankind.
‘They have been tampered with, there’s no doubt about that,’ he said. ‘I’m sure whoever is responsible knows what they were doing.’
For while Terry, a former butcher and postman, has dozens of gooseberry trees, it was his best specimens — in his ‘championship pen’ — that were targeted.
Pictured: Terry Price examines at his undersized gooseberries in the 2021 Goostrey Gooseberry Society annual awards
So he sent a few dead branches to a laboratory for testing and was told they’d been sprayed with a destructive chemical formulation not available over the counter.
And then he lashed out a bit, insisting darkly that he had a ‘good idea’ whodunnit and that he was sure the ‘truth would out’.
Yet with no clues, no muddy footprints, no trampled fences, no CCTV footage and no one acting suspiciously in the pub, even Miss Marple might struggle to get to the bottom of it all.
But it is little wonder Terry is so upset. For nearly half a century he has dedicated tens of thousands of hours to his beloved trees and has triumphed at Goostrey a record 11 times.
Last year, he romped home with a 50g monster, pocketing the cup, a special commemorative plate with a picture of a gooseberry on it (hand-thrown by a master potter) and a £20 gardening voucher.
So this year, after the sudden death of his champion trees, his best offering — at just 28g — was, frankly, embarrassing.
Pictured: Terry Price watching his champion gooseberry being weighed in 2020
When it comes to competition gooseberries, we’re not talking the teeny, hard, hairy green bullets you find in supermarkets, but vast, lush, competition-level berries in shades of pink, yellow and white — as well as the usual green
As one fellow member puts it: ‘You always start the official weigh-off with the premium berry from last year’s winner and, well, Terry had a really teeny one!’
Instead, the winner of the much-coveted best-in-show, or ‘First Premier (heaviest) Berry’, went to Chris Jones, 69, an ex-lorry driver and Goostrey veteran who has been competing for over 35 years.
He won with an Edith Cavell premier berry of 28 pennyweights and 8 grains (44g) and already holds the world record for the heaviest green berry ever shown in the UK. (In 2002, he won with a berry weighing nearly 59g).
But this was Chris’s first Goostrey victory for 16 years and he was ‘extremely emotional’, because his brother had died overnight in South Africa. But ‘the show must go on’,
