More on the Mormon picture mystery

A picture we published of a religious group arriving at Broome railway station, near Craven Arms, has prompted a bit of a debate over exactly who they were.

The caption, and also the recollections of some readers, points to them being Mormons.

However Mrs Olive Fish, from Market Drayton, says they are undenominational Christians attending an annual Christian convention held on the grounds of nearby Rowton Manor which was owned by the Rollings family - it is incidentally a consensus among all our contributors that they were heading to Rowton Manor.

Mrs Fish remembered attending one of the conventions as a child in the 1950s.

Our latest correspondent, who has asked not to be named, is another notch for the Mormon side of the debate.

"In 1952 I was a young man of 15 and was just starting my first job, that was working as a farm labourer on a farm about a mile from the Broome station, and the man I worked for was a Mormon, and he lived in the farmhouse with his sister," he writes.

"I can remember after the sheds were all emptied - cattle turned out to the fields and so on - we would have to clean them out then scrub them all clean and in the summertime men and women would come to the farm in great numbers, all dressed just like the people in your picture.

"The sheds would have all camp beds put in them. Some would have chicken wire to make the bases. They were extremely well-mannered and polite people, but myself and another workhand on the farm would see very little of them as we would be sent over to the other end of the farm to work as far away as they could send us.

"My workmate told me they would baptise people in the pool in one of the fields, but I never saw this for myself."