Ted Etheridge, landlord of The Prince of Wales, at Hagley, near Stourbridge, has been growing his prized pumpkins since March and was hoping to hand them out to customers’ children for Halloween.

He intended to turn the rest into pumpkin soup at a bonfire night planned for next week. But thieves all but cleared his pumpkin patch behind the pub on the Stourbridge Road during a night-time raid on Thursday.

The thieves left just four of the 50 pumpkins behind.

He said: “I came down in the morning to put the rubbish out as usual and noticed all of my pumpkins had gone.

“I have been growing them since March.

“It is a lot of hard work down the drain as I have had to look after them through all of the hot weather,” he added.

“The cooks in my restaurant are not too happy either as they used to use the pumpkin leaves in some of the Thai dishes on our menu.

“These pumpkins were grown from hybrid seeds from Thailand and weighed between about 300 and 500 pound each, so there must have been a few blokes to carry them away.

“Someone must have been very quiet as I live on the premises and neither myself nor my wife heard a thing.”

He added: “A lot of the pumpkins had been earmarked for local schoolchildren.

“Some of them had even already been down with their parents and put their names on the ones they wanted.”

Mr Etheridge said he was determined not to let the thieves stop him growing pumpkins in the future though.

The Prince of Wales is a favourite among a string of celebrity customers including crooner Tony Christie and former Coronation Street star Johnny Briggs.

Mr Etheridge, who used to run The Station Inn at Hagley, has made a number of celebrity friends from his extensive charity work which he has been carrying out since the 1970s.

By Ben Lammas