Kitabı oku: «The Sugar Girls - Gladys’s Story: Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle’s East End»

Duncan Barrett & Nuala Calvi
The Sugar Girls: Gladys’s Story

Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle’s East End

Dedication

For Margaret Denby

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Map

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Pictures

About the Authors

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

Heading east out of the City of London, just past Poplar and the Isle of Dogs, you’ll find the artificial peninsula of Silvertown: a narrow strip of land two and a half miles long, sandwiched between the Royal Docks and the broad sweep of the Thames.

By the mid-twentieth century this area was home to a score of factories, from British Oil & Cake Mills at one end to Henley’s Cable Works at the other. The factories were a major employer, both for people living in the rows of slum houses in Silvertown and those in the surrounding areas north of the docks: Canning Town, Custom House and Plaistow. While the thriving docks provided work for the men in the local community, the factories offered employment for women as well.

When working-class girls left school there were a limited number of options available to them: dressmaking, service, clerical work perhaps, and, for the vast majority, a job in a factory. With the near full employment that followed the Second World War, most young people could simply take themselves along to a factory of their choice, ask for work and be hired on the spot. If they found they didn’t like it there, they could walk out at lunchtime and be taken on somewhere else before tea.

Among the most sought-after factories to work at were the two operated by Tate & Lyle, the Plaistow Wharf and Thames refineries, at either end of the Sugar Mile (so called because, in addition to the sugar and syrup they produced, Keiller’s jam factory was also located there). Tate & Lyle offered the best wages, generous bonuses three times a year, and a social life that was unrivalled in the neighbourhood thanks to the Tate Institute, a subsidised bar and entertainment hall. Unsurprisingly, the company inspired fierce loyalty among its employees – many young men and women working there in the post-war years were the fourth generation of their families to do so.

There were plenty of positions for young ‘sugar girls’, thanks to the many female-dominated departments: the great sugar-packing operation known as the Hesser Floor, the Blue Room where the sheets of paper were printed for the sugar bags, and the can-making and syrup-filling floors where the tins of Lyle’s Golden Syrup were put together and filled. The jobs could be heavy, exhausting and repetitive, but for the women who undertook them the rewards outweighed the hardships. Most stayed until they married or fell pregnant (the rules varied between departments as to when they were forced to leave). Nearly all of them looked back on their time at the factories as a kind of golden era in their lives – of independence, friendship and romance, before the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood took over.

Originally the two refineries had been run by rival companies. Henry Tate, a Liverpool grocer turned sugar magnate, put up his London factory in 1878, when much of Silvertown was still marshland. His great business adversary was Abram Lyle, who opened his own sugar and syrup factory a mile upstream five years later. Lyle was a pious Scot whose ruddy cheeks belied his commitment to teetotalism: he once declared he would rather see a son of his carried home dead than drunk.

For many decades the two firms competed in sugar production, but with an important unspoken agreement: the Lyles would not encroach on Tate’s trademark cubed sugar, while the Tates would not produce a single drop of the golden syrup the Lyles had invented. But a cold war developed between them, and when the Lyles heard rumours that the Tates were about to launch a syrup onto the market, they hastily knocked together a cube plant in response. Leaking word of its existence was enough to ensure that it never had to be used.

The families were scrupulous in keeping up professional boundaries – although the senior Tates and Lyles took the same train from Fenchurch Street Station every morning, they made sure to sit in separate carriages, and never acknowledged each other.

By the end of the First World War it was clear that the competition was actually hurting both companies, but neither had a clear upper hand: the Lyles had the edge in profitability, but the Tates’ output was not to be rivalled. A merger was the obvious way forward. Negotiations began, and for three years Ernest Tate and Charles Lyle tore their hair out in frustration as proposal after proposal was rejected by their respective boards. A deal was finally agreed in 1921.

The new Tate & Lyle company retained both London factories – Tate’s Thames Refinery in the heart of Silvertown and Lyle’s Plaistow Wharf Refinery a mile upriver. The management of the two factories, however, remained in the hands of the respective families. The original Tate and Lyle, Henry and Abram, were both long dead by now, and had never known the fate of their companies. In fact, they had never even met.

The old rivalry didn’t die out completely, though, and from 1937 onwards it was played out in a more friendly fashion, on the company’s new shared sports ground. There, the workers from ‘Tates-es’ and ‘Lyles-es’ (as the two factories continued to be known by the locals) would compete against each other in football and cricket.

The Second World War brought great changes to both refineries, as their workforces became female-dominated for the first time. As men were called up, the management were forced to blur the strict distinctions between ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ jobs, with female workers tackling even the most physically demanding and high-status roles, including that of the panmen who boiled up the sugar liquor. The women were thrilled to see their wages go up when they took on such new jobs, but they were still only paid 75 per cent of what their male counterparts had earned.

After the war the men reclaimed their old roles, but a shift had taken place and the crucial part that the sugar girls played in the company’s success could no longer be ignored. In 1948 a mixed-sex canteen was built at the Plaistow Wharf Refinery, and for the first time the women were able to eat alongside their male colleagues.

Today, after the closure of the docks and almost all of the local factories, much of Silvertown has the feeling of a ghost town. It is overshadowed by the planes taking off and landing at City Airport – whose runway cuts between the Royal Albert and King George V docks – and the looming concrete viaducts of the Docklands Light Railway. Many of the old Victorian terraces have been replaced by blocks of council flats, and the pubs, shops and cafés that once lined the North Woolwich Road opposite the Plaistow Wharf Refinery are all gone. The close-knit neighbourhoods, and the way of life that once thrived there, have vanished and can never be recovered.

Tate & Lyle is unusual in having retained its Silvertown factories, although from the late 1960s much of the Plaistow Wharf Refinery was demolished as its sugar refining activities were wound down. Many loyal workers took redundancy rather than accept a transfer downriver to the Thames Refinery. Even there, the company now employs only a small fraction of its former workforce, and the jobs once done by the sugar girls are all performed by machines.

Tate & Lyle has long since stopped being a family firm, and in 2010 it was bought by an American sugar giant. However, the legacy of its original founders lives on. In 2006 the iconic Lyle’s Golden Syrup tins were officially recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest brand in Britain. Meanwhile, the philanthropic work of the Tate family is remembered in the libraries and art galleries that bear its name.

But the contribution of the sugar girls, those ordinary young women who played such a central role during Tate & Lyle’s East End heyday, is not widely recognised, and their lives have not generally been recorded. Until now.

Map

1

While the Second World War was a time of misfortune for many in the East End, Gladys Taylor’s family seemed to have something of a lucky streak. Although their house had received a direct hit on the first night of the Blitz, seven-year-old Gladys, her four brothers, baby sister and parents had survived – emerging blinking from their Anderson shelter just a few feet away, completely unscathed.

They had just been admitted to the local rest centre, in the basement of South Hallsville School in Canning Town, when they were intercepted by Gladys’s Aunt Jane. ‘Don’t even bother staying here, the place is packed to bursting,’ she advised them. ‘We can hitch a ride to Kent instead, and go hopping till things quieten down.’

Soon the whole family was huddled in the back of a lorry, relieved to be getting out of harm’s way. They began to curse their decision, however, when a German fighter plane swooped and began machine-gunning the vehicle as it was going over Shooter’s Hill. They passed the rest of the night cowering underneath the lorry, wishing they hadn’t listened to Aunt Jane, before finally making it safely to the hop fields in the morning. But little did they know how fortunate they had been.

While the Taylors spent the next two days hop-picking, the 600 people at South Hallsville School continued to wait for the coaches that were due to pick them up and take them to the countryside. Sunday and Monday went by, and still the vehicles hadn’t arrived. They were offered no explanations, just endless cups of tea. A rumour went round that the drivers had mixed up Canning Town with Camden Town in North London and gone to the wrong place.

As darkness fell again on Monday night, so too did the bombs. One made a direct hit on the school, demolishing half the building and causing many tons of masonry to collapse onto the people huddled below. Hundreds of terrified men, women and children lost their lives, in one of the worst civilian tragedies of the Second World War.

Five days later, when the Taylors returned to London to pick through the wreckage of their home, neighbours’ mouths gaped at the sight of them. Their names had been on the list of those declared dead, and if not for Aunt Jane they too would have ended their days in the wreckage of Hallsville.

Some attributed the Taylors’ luck to the fact that Gladys’s mother Rose was from a well-known gypsy family, the Barnards. A tiny Romany woman with long, plaited hair rolled into enormous coils on either side of her head, Rose had been expected to marry inside the gypsy community. But after a childhood spent roaming the fields of Kent and Sussex in a caravan, she had been determined to give her own children a more settled existence.

To that end she married a young man from Tidal Basin, near the Royal Victoria Dock, moving into a flat on Crown Street right next door to his parents. The neighbourhood was full of sailors who had married and settled down there – many of them black men who had taken up with local white girls, lending the road the nickname Draughtboard Alley.

Rose may have wanted a settled life, but her new husband Amos, a red-headed and rebellious seaman, had other ideas. Perhaps she should have heeded the warning lying in his parents’ garden – Amos’s uniform, helmet and gun, which had been hastily buried there when he deserted from the Army and ran off to sea during the First World War.

After fathering three sons with Rose, Amos did a second disappearing act, going AWOL from the family for 18 months without a word. When Rose could bear his silence no longer, she threw off her pinny and marched up to the shipping office, demanding that her husband be traced. The errant father was discovered to be working as a professional footballer in New Zealand, and duly returned with his tail between his legs.

The arrival on the scene of Gladys, with a shock of red hair just like her father’s, prompted the final showdown between Rose and Amos, whose seafaring could no longer be tolerated now that there were six mouths to feed. 19 Crown Street trembled to the sounds of the almighty row, which ended in his service book being ripped up and thrown onto the fire. Amos accepted his fate, and a job in the docks – where he would wistfully sing the dirty sea ditties of his youth. But he never quite forgave his daughter for thwarting his ambition.