1977: Year of the Mushroom Cult
A further note on Liberty Caps in 1970s Britain
You may have noticed in my previous article that the year 1977 was largely missing from the British magic mushroom story. In one respect this was because there were far less reported court cases in newspapers. With what appeared to be a clarification of the law the year before, there was little the police and courts could do, and liberty caps were generally caught up in cannabis busts.
Then, in 1978, the police and newspapers rapidly refocused on mushroom use. Many more cannabis-adjacent cases of mushroom possession were reported, drug police chiefs widely commented and advice about liberty caps was privately spread to local forces by the Metropolitan police, and out to the population via the news media. Why should this sudden shift have happened though? The answer, I suggest here, was that it was partly a response to a mushroom-using ‘cult’ being reported in 1977—a fact that has just come to light in my research.
Runcorn is an industrial town and cargo port in Cheshire, north-west England. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the urban area grew quickly with the establishment of a new town, which was used in part to aid slum clearances in nearby Liverpool. Much of the local countryside and farmland was swallowed up as villages became connected. The rapid pace of change undoubtedly disorientated many people. In the midst of this urbanization, a mushroom cult appeared.
The local newspaper, the Runcorn Guardian, was on hand to sensationally report not only the cult’s existence, but incredibly the effects of the mushroom itself too.[1] Journalists Peter Walker and Alan Rimmer made contact with ‘Deep Throat’, a man whose identity was so secret that even they only knew him by a pseudonym (which they still did not report). ‘Softly-spoken’, Deep Throat had ‘traced the biblical origins of the mushrooms and its mystical properties’. He was, as they say, expanding the lore.
Seven years earlier scholar John M Allegro had infamously written The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which claimed through an etymological argument that Christianity began life as a fertility cult that used the fly agaric mushroom in its rites. While Allegro’s work was sensationally reported, it was received incredulously by fellow scholars. His ideas, however, had obviously filtered down and become part of mushroom mythos.
Deep Throat was spinning his own Psilocybe-based version, which unfortunately the article does not go into in any depth about. It is of course not unusual for traditions and legends to quickly emerge in these contexts—this is something we touched upon in the last article. What I suggest here is that in light of the rapid urbanization of the Runcorn area during this period, such mythologizing must have functioned as a very grounding act: the fruits of a disappearing but sacred countryside.
Towards the end of October 1977, Deep Throat took the journalists mushroom picking in fields near Runcorn, and he then acted as a trip guide for the intrepid Peter Walker. Psychonaut scientists had long been using themselves as test subjects, and the odd journalist had taken a similar route as reportage. Famously, for example, the MP Christopher Mayhew had taken mescaline in 1955 for the BBC. While Mayhew had been in the hands of medical professionals, Walker went local.
Alan Rimmer observed and reported. He wrote that Walker had a ‘good trip’. It began at around 6pm when Walker gobbled up about 60 liberty caps, which he ate raw, in order to explore the ‘twilight world of the “fungus freaks”. Before the hour was up he was ‘no longer in the real world’. He asked ‘Brian’ for a drink—there was no-one called Brian present. Later, asked how he felt, he replied ‘Fine, great’. His pulse rose and fell and he noticed his veins glowing. By nine, he was coming down.
When asked to describe his trip, while in the midst of ‘recovering’, Walker thought for a long while, and said that he couldn’t, adding that he would never try them again. ‘I had to listen carefully to the “deep throat” of the mushroom cult hours after the trip to get some insight into what I had experienced.’ Yet the ‘worst part’, he said, was afterwards reading Rimmer’s report describing his fluctuating pulse and occasional panics about random phenomena.
Walker concluded that magic mushrooms could be deadly and no-one should take them. Yet, this reads quite incongruously against the trip report itself, which described him hearing the laughter of children and feeling great, with only moments of discomfort (really quite similar to experiences of everyday life). Fear is the tenor of the article’s framing; not the trip.
Indeed, Walker believed Deep Throat himself never misled him about what he went through. From identification and picking to tripping and integration, Deep Throat’s facilitation of Walker was clearly delineated and admirably conducted. This is among the earliest recorded examples of a guided mushroom experience in Britain—and seemingly, a skilled one.
This remarkable story has largely remained a local oddity. However, it potentially had far-reaching effects. Two weeks later, the newspaper described how Rimmer and Walker were warned by a Runcorn-based Special Branch officer that the Director of Prosecutions might be taking up a case against them. The Home Office, I assume contacted by the paper after the threat, told them that any processing of the mushrooms would be counted as a criminal offense. While no case was brought, this might explain why there was renewed legal and police emphasis on mushrooms the following year.[2]
Two other events in 1977 also likely contributed to this renewed focus. Firstly, the publication of A Guide to British Psilocybin Mushrooms (1977) by Richard Cooper; a 32 page pamphlet which, although it has its faults, is generally quite reliable and quickly went through several reprints over the following few years. This meant word-of-mouth was no longer the only way to learn about magic mushrooms in Britain and led to a rise in liberty cap pickers around the country.
Secondly, there was another court case. Unemployed squatter Michael Clear (aged 25) of Rectory Gardens, Clapham, was charged under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act for possession of cannabis and mushrooms. The magistrate could find no law on the mushroom so dismissed that element of it. ‘I have never heard of these mushrooms before’, he said. ‘There is no legal decision about this at all. I am told they grow in Hyde Park; I am going to dismiss the charge and if they want to make legal history someone can appeal against my decision to see what the position is.’[3]
This is odd considering there had been several so-called ‘test cases’. Moreover, the article also states that the previous month (November) a man was apparently given a suspended sentence for having two mushrooms. I have not been able to trace exactly what this case was, and whether the mushrooms in question were dried or fresh, but it appears that there was a successful prosecution. This is all especially weird considering the Home Office response to the Runcorn Guardian journalists. The law was perhaps less settled than they liked to imagine.
Indeed, quoting from a leaflet provided by the police laboratory, Mr Harmsworth, in the Clear case, said the mushrooms grew freely in the United Kingdom, particularly in the wetter western-districts. The leaflet read: ‘Legal advice should be taken in respect of any possible charges relating to these mushrooms, as the legal position is unresolved at the moment.’ Given the apparent continued ambiguity over the law, along with the proliferation of mushroom use, not only among young people, but now even the news media, a new police strategy might have appeared necessary.
Many thanks to those of you who have been in contact about your own magic mushroom experiences in Britain during the late 1970s, which I’ve read with interest (anyone else who would like to share their memories can get hold of me here). A pattern has certainly emerged making 1976 a crucial year, a critical mass perhaps, for liberty cap picking. Precisely how these ideas spread and through what circles remains to be explored.
Robert Dickins is the author of Cobweb of Trips: A Literary History of Psychedelics (2024).
[1] Runcorn Guardian: 28 October 1977: 1, 3
[2] Runcorn Guardian: 11 November: 7
[3] ‘Magistrate baffled over drug in mushroom’ in The Times: December 29 1977. 2