Duncan Barrett's Blog, page 4
April 6, 2012
More radio for the Sugar Girls
Yesterday it was BBC Radio 4′s Woman's Hour, and this morning the Sugar Girls were being beamed out around the world to the 50 million listeners of the World Service. The piece was recorded earlier this week at Tate & Lyle's Plaistow Wharf Refinery and went out as part of the World Update programme at a quarter to 11 today.
You can listen to it by clicking the button below:
BBC journalist Emma Wallis spoke to former Blue Room girls Gladys Hudgell and Eva Rodwell about their memories of the factory. Plaistow Wharf has changed a lot since the days when they worked there, in the 1940s and 1950s, but they managed to find their old building, and Eva recalled her husband playing Mario Lanza's 'Be My Love' to her through one of the doorways we passed by.
It was a moving experience for the two former Sugar Girls, and though they were sad to see how few people work at the factory these days (fewer than fifty, compared to 1,500 in their day), they were pleased to have the chance to chat with the men and women who work there today. We wrote a blog about the tour, which you can read here.
And if you want to hear more from Gladys and Eva, here is a bonus recording made by Graham, the producer of the Robert Elms show for BBC London, which they went on last week.
listen to 'Original 'Sugar Girls'Gladys & Eva chat to Graham about life in a 1950′s London Sugar Refinery.' on Audioboo
April 5, 2012
Listen to the Sugar Girls on Woman’s Hour!
The Sugar Girls took to the airwaves today, appearing on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 with the lovely Jenni Murray. If you missed the broadcast, you can listen to it here:
Gladys Hudgell and Eva Rodwell, who worked at Tate & Lyle’s Plaistow Wharf Refinery as teenagers, joined co-author Nuala Calvi to talk about factory life in the East End during the 1940s and 1950s. Here’s a picture of everyone inside the studio (taken from the control room by Woman’s Hour runner Sophie!).
Jenni got to the bottom of Gladys’s reputation as a troublemaker, always getting told off by labour manageress Miss Smith for her pranks and bad behaviour – which included terrorising her supervisor with the mice she found in the scrap paper. Gladys was nearly sacked many times, but kept her job because she was the star of the factory athletics team. Girls from the Plaistow Wharf Refinery, run by the Lyles, always did their best to beat the Thames Refinery, run by the Tates, in the annual inter-refinery sports day.
Here is Gladys collecting the Inter-Refinery Shield from movie star Derrick De Marney.
We also talked about the recent surge of interest in the East End, with the successful TV adaptation of Call The Midwife, and why it’s important that the stories of people like Gladys and Eva are told. While the Tates are famous thanks to the art galleries they funded with their sugar empire, and the Lyle name lives on in Lyle’s Golden Syrup, until now the lives of the thousands of young girls who worked in the company’s East End factories and made the founding families their fortunes have not been recorded and their contribution not widely recognised.
Find out more about Gladys, Eva and the other women who made Tate & Lyle one of Britain’s most famous brands in The Sugar Girls, published by Collins. Click here
to buy the book for just £3.77 with free delivery.
<img src=”http://wms.assoc-amazon.co.uk/2007082...″ alt=”" /><br />
Listen to the Sugar Girls on Woman's Hour!
The Sugar Girls took to the airwaves today, appearing on Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 with the lovely Jenni Murray. If you missed the broadcast, you can listen to it here:
Gladys Hudgell and Eva Rodwell, who worked at Tate & Lyle's Plaistow Wharf Refinery as teenagers, joined co-author Nuala Calvi to talk about factory life in the East End during the 1940s and 1950s. Here's a picture of everyone inside the studio (taken from the control room by Woman's Hour runner Sophie!).
Jenni got to the bottom of Gladys's reputation as a troublemaker, always getting told off by labour manageress Miss Smith for her pranks and bad behaviour – which included terrorising her supervisor with the mice she found in the scrap paper. Gladys was nearly sacked many times, but kept her job because she was the star of the factory athletics team. Girls from the Plaistow Wharf Refinery, run by the Lyles, always did their best to beat the Thames Refinery, run by the Tates, in the annual inter-refinery sports day.
Here is Gladys collecting the Inter-Refinery Shield from movie star Derrick De Marney.
We also talked about the recent surge of interest in the East End, with the successful TV adaptation of Call The Midwife, and why it's important that the stories of people like Gladys and Eva are told. While the Tates are famous thanks to the art galleries they funded with their sugar empire, and the Lyle name lives on in Lyle's Golden Syrup, until now the lives of the thousands of young girls who worked in the company's East End factories and made the founding families their fortunes have not been recorded and their contribution not widely recognised.
Find out more about Gladys, Eva and the other women who made Tate & Lyle one of Britain's most famous brands in The Sugar Girls, published by Collins. Click here to buy the book for just £3.77 with free delivery.
<img src="http://wms.assoc-amazon.co.uk/2007082...″ alt="" /><br />
April 4, 2012
The sugar girls go back to the factory
Earlier this week, we took sugar girls Gladys and Eva on a tour of the Plaistow Wharf Refinery, where they used to print the sugar bags over sixty years ago. The BBC World Service were there to find out what they made of the experience, and to learn more about what it was like at Tate & Lyle in the 1940s and 1950s.
Here are Gladys and Eva standing outside what they call 'the new building'. A sign above the door reveals its age – it was built in 1951 and it is now one of the oldest parts of the factory site, but our two sugar girls remember it being built. Their department, the Blue Room, used to be on the top floor of the building and had a view of the piles of rotting carcasses at Knight's soap factory next door, which would be crawling with giant rats!
Joining us from the World Service was Emma Wallis, who spoke to Gladys and Eva about their memories of the factory, as well as interviewing Tate & Lyle's Community Affairs Manager, Ken Wilson.
After the interviews, Ken was kind enough to take us all inside the working factory – once we'd been suited up in white coats, reflective jackets, safety goggles, hairnets and earplugs.
When we were good to go, Ken led us inside.
Unfortuantely, the sugar bags are no longer printed at Plaistow Wharf, but Gladys and Eva were still fascinated to be back on the factory floor. These days the factory only deals in Lyle's Golden Syrup, not Tate & Lyle sugar, so it was the can-making and syrup-filling departments that we visited. Here are Gladys and Eva all kitted up in the can-making department. They couldn't believe everything we had to wear – in their day, it was just dungarees, a checked blouse and a turban – and there were no health and safety forms to sign on the way in!
Many of the machines that process the golden syrup tins are in fact the same ones that were used as far back as the 1940s and 1950s. This machine was first installed in 1948, and you can see it in the old photograph below.
For the BBC, capturing the authentic sounds of the various rattling and rumbling machines was crucial, so Emma spent a lot of time holding her microphone up to them as the syrup tins whizzed down the chutes.
Although Gladys spent most of her time in the bag printing department at the factory, she started off at Tate & Lyle with a brief spell in the can-making, so she was able to tell Emma a little of how it was there in the old days.
She also had the chance to compare notes with one of the current 'sugar girls' (they don't use that term anymore!) who now works there.
With Ken as our guide, we followed the progress of the syrup tins, from flat sheets of metal, to curved cylinders with no top or bottom, through the finishing and filling process until they were sealed and packed up ready for distribution.
Ken even gave us a tin of syrup each to take home with us – and these were no ordinary tins: as you can see if you look closely at the pictures, the tradition Lyle's branding has been replaced with a special jubilee design.
For Gladys and Eva, coming back to the factory where they spent some of the happiest days of their lives was a moving experience. As we walked past one doorway, Eva recalled her future husband wooing her from the room within by playing romantic music as she walked past. Gladys, meanwhile, was shocked at how hard it was to find somewhere she was allowed to smoke onsite – in the olden days, any toilet cubicle would do!
Overall, it was a fascinating experience for all of us. If you want to hear the interviews, they will be broadcast on World Update, between 10 and 11am on Good Friday, at 198 long wave.
April 3, 2012
Am-dram at Tate & Lyle
This wonderful photo comes to us courtesy of Pat Griffiths, who worked in the laboratory at the Thames Refinery from 1945 to 1954. Pat was very involved with Tate & Lyle's amateur dramatics scene and in the photo you can see a production of J.B. Priestley's Dangerous Corner at the Thames Refinery. Pat is playing the mother, and the maid is played by a man in drag, Albert (aka 'Soupy') Edwards.
Soupy was a real character at the factory in the many years he worked there, and would often turn up to work in an old bowler hat. In later years, he was manager of the Tate Institute, and he and his family lived in a house attached to the building. Soupy regularly dragged up as a dame for the Tate & Lyle pantomimes.
Here is another picture, this time of Pat at work in the laboratory.
Pat grew up in Custom House, so would walk into work every day over the Connaught Bridge that divided the Victoria and Albert Docks. Unfortunately this meant that she often arrived late at Tate & Lyle, since the bridge would be raised to let tall ships through.
As well as the amateur dramatics, Pat made full use of the range of social activities that Tate & Lyle offered – she went on company outings to the Proms, went rambling in the countryside, played snooker and even tried the Tate & Lyle rifle range. She remembers Tate & Lyle as a 'very good firm to work for' and the 'friendly atmosphere' in the laboratories.
April 1, 2012
The Sugar Girls' Blitz spirit
At our book launch this week, Colin Lyle, a manager at Tate & Lyle's Plaistow Wharf refinery until 1982 and son of former refinery director Philip Lyle, read a remarkable letter written by his father to a friend in America on May 20, 1941.
Colin Lyle reads his father's letter
The letter describes the incredible Blitz spirit of the Sugar Girls – here is an extract from it:
"Before Sept 1940 there was little happening. A little bit of "Blitz" was starting but it all really kicked off with Saturday night, Sept. 7th 1940. I was down at Wylye [in Wiltshire, where the family lived] that night but heard the phone early the following morning that Silvertown (an island bound by the Thames on one side and the Victoria and Albert Docks on the other) was practically ablaze from end to end and as our two London factories are both in Silvertown I motored up to town as soon as I could get away and arrived at one of our factories (Plaistow Wharf) at 4pm to find it intact. There I had to leave my car and walk to the other factory (Thames Refinery) as the road was impassable.
"Nearly all the factories on the way along were burnt out or blazing fiercely and halfway along I found the roadway full of molten tar which made passage difficult, but I got through and ultimately found our second factory was also practically intact though both its neighbours were burnt out and still blazing. We had one shed containing about a million old jute raw sugar bags blazing hard but had no difficulty in preventing it extending. Many barges lying in the river were ablaze and it was an extraordinary sight. The factories on either side of ours were very inflammable and as their bosses would never take much ARP precaution our people had always feared getting damage through their catching alight. Their delight when both neighbours were completely gutted and no longer a potential menace to us was most amusing.
"The worst part of the great Silvertown raid and subsequent raids in the same district was the destruction of working class house property. Hundreds of rows of little houses were blown up and rendered untenable and we were soon faced with the problem of housing our people. Many got their families away to the north of London but could not travel daily from there with any ease. We organised regular daily services of private charabancs from these districts to bring our men in, but gradually this changed and we started large-scale dormitories in the factories where the men slept during the week and went home at the weekend. We have today in London, out of about 5,000 employees, over 500 men and about 50 girls living all week in our dormitories. This meant not only big increases in sanitary accommodation but new canteens, recreation rooms, laundries etc., etc., all of which had to be improvised at short notice. But it all works very well and we have lost few employees in spite of it all. They are just too marvellous. Don't seem to mind anything now – though we had our little grumbles at first – but it is quite extraordinary how one can get used to things and so quickly.
"When the daytime Blitz was getting going, we all started "spotters" on the roof with the idea that – instead of ceasing work throughout the factory when the "alert" sounded, we could go on working till immediate danger overhead was signalled – as we were losing so much time. In our factory this worked fine with the men but the girls wouldn't play and insisted on stopping work as soon as the alert sounded in spite of the spotters and we were much puzzled but ultimately discovered that the girls were quite prepared to work through, provided they were allowed to have their own female spotters on the roof with the men! We at once started our girl spotter along with the men on the roof and there was no more trouble!
WW2 damage to the yard at Plaistow Wharf
"One night recently they were sowing magnetic mines in the Thames and the Docks – a very small target – so most of them fell in East and West Ham and thereabouts – large numbers of them – each weighing over a ton. They come down on parachutes about 25 feet in diameter made of silk – dyed green and coarse open work stuff like aertex cellular. A ring on the bomb is connected to the parachute by 24 cords of green silk very loosely woven like extra soft dressing gown cords. We have had three of these fall on our factories in Silvertown. Two of them luckily failed to go off owing to the parachute catching on a high building on the way down which prevented them hitting the ground hard enough. The bombs were about 2'3" diameter and 8 to 9 feet long! One went off in our factory and the effect is indescribable. Luckily it fell on the edge of the first floor of a very strong modern steel building and just bent the beams and made a mess without doing any vital damage but the blast was terrific and we had every window and every door blown in the whole factory – but we soon got going again. Within 30 yards of this big blast – in a strong steel building – we had 40 girls sleeping. Beyond minor shock there were no casualties at all and an hour later all the girls were back again in the same dormitory where they spent the rest of the night quite happily! That gives you some idea of the wonderful spirit of these people – they are just marvellous – and the girls who are sleeping in the factory are the ones whose homes have already been smashed up!"
March 31, 2012
Tea, cake and sweet memories: the Sugar Girls book launch
We were thrilled to see 100 former Sugar Girls and their guests at our tea party and book launch at the Hub in Canning Town this week.
As well as Gladys Hudgell, Lilian Clark and Ethel Colquhoun – three of the main women from the book – lots of people we interviewed last year came along, and it was great to catch up with everyone again. As we said in our speeches, without all of you who contributed your memories, we could never have written The Sugar Girls.
Here you can see Lilian with her friend Flo, and Gladys and Ethel – who met for the first time at the launch and have now swapped numbers.
A big thank you to Adam The Pastry Guy for his beautiful Sugar Girls fairy cakes (complete with Tate & Lyle sugar cubes!), to the Hub for the free tea and coffee and to Vivian from The Newham Bookshop for bringing copies of the book along for us to sign.
We had a very special guest speaker: Colin Lyle, who worked as a manager at his family's firm from 1948 to 1982. Colin read out a fascinating account of life at the Plaistow Wharf refinery during the Blitz, written in the Forties by his father, factory director Philip Lyle. He got a very warm welcome from all the former Tate & Lyle workers, one of whom told him afterwards that he was "a legend".
Ken Wilson from Tate & Lyle also gave an interesting account of his family's long connection with the company, working first at Plaistow Wharf and then at the Thames refinery, and reminded everyone how tribal workers from the two factories were (and still are, in some cases).
Here are many of the Sugar Girls we interviewed, posing for a photo for the Newham Recorder.
Thanks too to Jess Thompson, who helped put together the wonderful photography exhibition in the foyer of the Hub, which will remain up for the next four weeks. Here you can see Gladys and Eva showing Ethel and Lilian a photograph of the reunion she organised in 1985.
The exhibition also includes a memory wall, for sugar girls and boys past and present to share their experiences of the factory with each other – and it soon acquired many offerings.
The pictures for the exhibition come from the Tate & Lyle archive and from the women we interviewed, and capture the unforgettable experience of being a Sugar Girl.
Thanks to our editor Iain MacGregor and Stella Norris at The Hub for sending us their pictures of the event.
March 25, 2012
The Sugar Girls in today's Sunday Express
Today's edition of the Sunday Express features an article by Nuala about The Sugar Girls. Here is a picture of the piece in the paper. Alternatively, you can read it online at the Express Website.
To whet your appetite, here are the first few paragraphs:
ASK ANY 14-year-old to get up at 4.30am and work shifts in a factory, six days a week, with just half an hour for lunch and two toilet breaks a day and they will tell you in no uncertain terms where to stick it. By stark contrast, for the young East End women who left school as teenagers in the Forties and Fifties, getting a job at one of Tate & Lyle's sugar and syrup factories was regarded as a dream come true.
The area's past might be linked in the popular imagination with gangsters, criminals and prostitutes (or the grim squalor of Call The Midwife) but in reality its backbone was the honest, hard-working families who powered what was once London's industrial heartland.
Parents brought up their children to contribute to the family income and as soon as they were old enough they were packed off to get a job at one of the scores of factories that lined the Thames in Silvertown.
Of all the local factories it was at Tate & Lyle's two refineries that you could get the best wages: bonuses three times a year and, most importantly, the chance to become a "Sugar Girl".
March 23, 2012
Our first review!
We are very excited that today marks the first official review of The Sugar Girls – and it's been made 'Book of the Week' in the Daily Mail. Here's some of what Bel Mooney had to say about the book:
What were the 'good old days'? Were they when people left school knowing there would be a steady job down the road, felt contented with little, made their own entertainment, had raucous fun on a seaside day out and valued companionship more than money?
Or should we use the phrase with heavy irony – thinking of grinding poverty, limited expectations and lives broken by arduous work? Should we think heartwarming or heartbreaking?
The Sugar Girls leaves you with that question hovering. This vivid and richly readable account of women's lives in and around the Tate & Lyle East London works in the Forties and Fifties is written as popular social history, played for entertainment.
If it doesn't become a TV series to rival Call The Midwife, I'll take my tea with ten sugars.
You can read the full review here. To order a copy of The Sugar Girls, click here. Or if you prefer an ebook version, here is the link for to order on Kindle.
<img src="http://wms.assoc-amazon.co.uk/2007082...″ alt="" /><br />
March 22, 2012
Book talk at the Bishopsgate Institute
On Monday evening, The Sugar Girls was unveiled to the public for the first time, in a pre-launch event hosted by the Raphael Samuel History Centre at the Bishopsgate Institute in London. We were very excited that over sixty people had turned up to find out about the book, and to buy advance copies. Among the audience were London walking-tour guides, representatives from the Feminist Library and academic historians, as well as interested members of the public.
We were especially pleased that a couple of guests made the journey to London just to come to the event. John Bentley, a former electrical engineer at Tate & Lyle (1953-1992) who we spoke to on the phone last week, came along and brought his beauty pageant fold-out with him – it turned out that the image we put up on our blog before was just one panel, and in fact it folds out to many times that size! Meanwhile, Ron Noon, of the Love Lane Lives website, had made the journey all the way from Liverpool, hoping to forge a connection between the sugar girls of the East End and those in Merseyside.
We were delighted to be sharing the event with Jerry White, the wonderful historian of London, and Melanie McGrath, whose books Silvertown
and Hopping
were a great inspiration to us in writing The Sugar Girls. Jerry spoke about the impact of the First World War on the East End, and how it would have affected the lives of the mothers of the characters in our book. Melanie spoke about sugar, and its capacity to evoke nostalgic memories – and she even brought sweets for the whole audience to munch on!
As well as speaking about The Sugar Girls, we showed some pictures that we had been sent, both by our interviewees and by Tate & Lyle. A handful of these are below.
To see more great images, come along to The Hub, 123 Star Lane, Canning Town, from next Thursday, when an exhibition will be opening to tie in with the official launch of the book at 11am. Free tea, coffee and cakes will be provided, and many former sugar girls will be there!
