Duncan Barrett's Blog, page 6

Fancy a job at Tate & Lyle, circa 1960?

We just received this wonderful advert, published by Tate & Lyle in the County Borough of East Ham Official Guide (1960). The photocopy was sent to us by Katy Pettit at the Raphael Samuel History Centre, who spotted it in the British Library.

In the East End of the 1950s and 1960s, working as a sugar girl at one of Tate & Lyle's two East End sugar factories was considered to be quite glamorous. Many girls, on leaving school at 14 or 15, begged their parents to let them join the company.

Tate & Lyle offered the best wages, generous bonuses and an unrivalled social life for young women – thanks in part to the Tate Institute, a bar and recreation hall just across the road from the Thames Refinery.

The company were keen to recruit girls to come and work as sugar packers – and in the other female-dominated departments: the bag-printing, can-making and syrup-filling – and would send ambassadors out to local schools to talk up the prospects of a job there.

Girls at Tate & Lyle were proud of the uniforms they were given, although often they would modify them in the interests of fashion – hemming in the legs of the trousers to make them more figure-hugging, and stuffing their tubans with socks and knickers so that they towered high above their heads. Such practices were frowned on by the factory management, but the girls persisted – to them, a job as a sugar girl was something to be proud of, and it was important that they look the part.

Call The Midwife

Tonight's Call The Midwife will be the final installment in the current series – and after only six episodes, it has become a weekly fixture that will be much missed. The BBC have confirmed a second series is in the pipeline, but how will we all cope in the meantime?

For us, watching Jennifer Worth's gripping true-life stories come to life on screen has been particularly exciting. Her trilogy of memoirs about her time as a midwife in the East End was our inspiration in writing The Sugar Girls. Our aim was to capture a lost way of life, just as Jennifer Worth had done – in her case, that of poor expectant mothers and their families in 1950s Poplar, in ours the lives of factory workers a little further down the river in Silvertown. Call The Midwife was our touchstone as we wrote – and we kept a chapter of it pinned up on the wall at all times for inspiration.

We first heard that the BBC were producing a TV version from an actor friend, Robin Browne, who had been called to audition for a role in it. We were incredibly excited, although at the same time nervous about how the adaption would pan out. Would they capture the heart-stopping drama of the books, which are very upsetting and hard to read in places (not to mention pretty gory!) or would the stories end up being watered down for a cosy Sunday night audience?

When Robin revealed that he had got the part – you can see him in tonight's episode as the Chairman of a panel investigating one of the nuns for theft – we were anxious to hear all that he could tell us about the production. 'Top quality British drama,' was his unambiguous verdict – and from what he had seen on set he confidently predicted that the show would be a hit.

Tuning in to the first episode five weeks ago was a slightly uncanny experience – the adaptation felt so true to the books that there was an odd sort of déjà vu in watching it. It soon became clear, though, that Heidi Thomas – the screenwriter behind such previous hits as Cranford and the recent revival of Upstairs Downstairs – had pulled off an incredible feat. Not only had she captured the world of the books so exactly, but she had managed to marry up the two halves of the stories – the grim, gritty world of the poor East Enders, with the blood and gore of so many terrifying birthing scenes, and the lighter, more comedic world of Nonatus House, where the eccentric band of nuns and nurses have their own escapades. Much as we loved Jennifer Worth's memoirs, it always felt like they were alternating back and forth between one story of nail-biting drama, and another of light comedy. But somehow, the BBC adaptation makes the two feel interrelated, bridging the gap between the two halves of the story, and allowing the viewer to care as much for the nuns and nurses as they do for the mothers.

Not only that, but by playing up elements only hinted at in the books, the writers have fleshed out Worth's own character, Jenny Lee. Although Jennifer Worth herself died just before filming began on the series, she had been in close contact with the Heidi Thomas – who promised her, for example, that she would always script Vanessa Redgrave's heartbreaking authorial voiceovers herself – so presumably some of the extra details were sanctioned by the original author, and even based on things that happened in reality.

Elsewhere, the writers have made changes for dramatic reasons, and with powerful results – such as the scene in which Jenny tracks down the poor prostitute Mary, whose baby had been taken away from her in a previous episode, and who had resorted to stealing someone else's bby as a result. In the book of Call The Midwife, this is presented almost as an aside – something Jennifer Worth found out about later in life – but the TV adaptation dramatizes it fully, with Jenny and Mary face to face as the baby is discovered.

Of course, despite its astonishingly high viewing figures, Call The Midwife does have a few detractors. In fact some of the former factory workers who we interviewed for The Sugar Girls were quite unhappy about the way the East End of the 1950s is represented in the show. Although the people in their neighbourhoods were poor, they told us, the strong sense of community and neighbourly goodwill in those days prevented anyone from really going under – and yet the drama of the TV show rests in part on families struggling to find the means to live, to eat and to clothe themselves, and living in desperate circumstances.

Some readers also objected to Jennifer Worth's original books – feeling that as a 'posh' outsider merely visiting the East End, she never quite embraced her patients as equals, as much as she obviously felt pity for them. The TV adaption has brilliantly dramatized the struggle the young girl feels at dealing with one patient's squalid living conditions – and her desire, despite her natural kindness, to get as far away from him as possible.

Perhaps it is true that both the books and, by extension, the adaptation offer a somewhat sensational glimpse of the worst aspects of life in 1950s Poplar, rather than showing the balanced whole. The stories that Jennifer Worth recorded in her memoirs are so heart-stopping, so gripping and tragic and yet at the same time so life-affirming, that perhaps we need to remind ourselves that she is recalling the most shocking or dramatic examples of her time as a midwife, rather than the mundane and everyday cases when everything went according to plan.

And what incredible stories they are. Watching them play out week after week, millions of people across the nation are reaching for their tissues. And the saddest thing of all is when we recall that these are not just scenarios dreamed up by a writer with her finger on our heartstrings, but true stories based on the account of someone who was actually there. With this in mind, some of the most moving tales are more than just upsetting – they are almost unbearable. But it is a testament to the skill of Heidi Thomas and the other writers – as well as to the excellent cast of actors, and everyone else involved – that the show manages to be not just a tear-jerker but uplifting as well. Out of true events more grim and miserable than one would expect to see on a cosy Sunday night in front of the TV, they have conjured something truly remarkable – and it's hard to see how we'll manage without it throughout the long wait for the next series to arrive.

National Nostalgia Day

Today is National Nostalgia Day, the brainchild of the Flexible Thinking Forum, who are encouraging everyone to 'make people appreciate things past, but also consider if they can be restored, reused, adapted in some way to make the world of today better.'

When we were interviewing former Tate & Lyle workers for The Sugar Girls, many of them expressed regret at the ways in which things have changed during their lifetimes. We were struck by one couple in particular, who despite growing up in Silvertown – a poor neighbourhood that at the time was technically classed as a 'slum' – told us, half a century later and now living comfortably in Essex, that they would go back to how things used to be in an instant.

In the areas where our sugar girls grew up – Silvertown, Custom House, Canning Town and Plaistow – many generations of the same family could often be found in the same street, and everyone knew their neighbours, so doors were left unlocked, or with a key hanging from a piece of string just inside the letterbox for anyone to let themselves in.

Although many families struggled to make ends meet, such was the sense of community that no-one was allowed to go hungry – neighbours would share what little they had, knowing that if things changed their generosity would be reciprocated. Those families which were better off would donate their old clothes to those who couldn't afford to buy them. Street parties were common, so neighbours soon got to know each other, and their children had playmates on their doorstep.

Sadly, these communities have now been shattered. Lots of the old Victorian houses have been knocked down as part of slum-clearance programmes, and in Silvertown many were flattened for the building of City Airport. When new high-rise blocks were constructed to take their place, little thought was given to keeping communities – or even extended families – together. Residents might have been excited by the prospect of a new flat with all the mod-cons, but would soon realise that their old friends had been scattered many miles away.

Many of the women we spoke to, who are now mostly in their seventies and eighties, deeply regret the loss of a sense of community. Most don't know their neighbours any more, and they feel like they are surrounded by strangers. In Silvertown, the closure of the docks and most of the factories has torn the heart out of the local neighbourhoods – the streets which once teemed with busy workers dropping into shops, cafes and pubs are now mostly desolately empty.

Fortunately, little pockets of the old sense of community survive in Newham, thanks to the many wonderful lunch clubs and social centres for older people. These were our main source for tracking down old sugar girls to interview for our book – we found them playing darts and bowls, learning line-dancing, and enjoying games of Bingo, as well as just having a chat with friends old and new. Most of these women have lost their husbands, and the opportunity to get out of the house and socialise means the world to them. Some have even made new best friends at the clubs, such as a pair of women, Lilian and Flo, who must have crossed paths a thousand times throughout their lives (both worked for Tate & Lyle), but who only met each other in their seventies. Now both widowed, the two women are inseparable.

National Nostalgia Day encourages us to think about what can be restored or recovered from the past, but in the rush to save money in the current financial climate it is equally important that we don't lose sight of the value of what does remain. For many of the women we interviewed, the social clubs they attend every week are a lifeline in the face of a lonely world – and one that should be defended at all costs.

Some of the fantastic social clubs in Newham:

The Royal Docks Learning and Activity Centre in Silvertown

The Ascension Centre in Custom House

The Kitchen Table Cafe in East Ham

The Hub in Canning Town

The Trinity Centre in Canning Town

The Place in Canning Town

Love and Romance at the factories

Since it's Valentine's Day, we thought we'd share some stories of love and romance at Tate & Lyle's East End factories in the 1950s.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, for a workplace employing thousands of young men and women – some of them school-leavers of just fourteen or fifteen – there was a lot of flirting, and sometimes more, going on behind the factory gates.

Many sugar girls met their husbands on the factory floor. In the Blue Room, where the sugar bags were printed, a pretty girl by the name of Maisie was forever being teased by a bloke on the waste-paper called Alex.  Alex would walk behind her swinging his hips in imitation of her sexy walk – but behind the teasing, real love was beginning to blossom and before long the two co-workers were married.

Not all young men were as lucky in love, however.  The boys on the lorry bank, where sugar was loaded into trucks for delivery, would spend their time wolf-whistling at the girls walking past on their way to their departments, hoping to catch their attention. On one occasion it worked for a lucky pair, and the two girls they had been keen on agreed to go on a double date to the pictures.  But once there, the constant pawing and moving in for kisses and cuddles became a bit much for the young girls.  They told the boys they were just nipping out to the loo, and then quickly bolted, laughing at their lucky escape.  The next day, as they walked past the bank, the whistles had been replaced by jeers, but the girls walked past nochalantly, with two fingers held up to their chins.

The canteen was a good place to meet young men from other departments, and once a sugar girl had her eye set on one, she could prove very hard to dissuade.  A girl called Barbara caught sight of a dashing young man one lunchtime and was determined to make an impression.  'You can't,' her friends told her, pointing to the ring on his finger. 'He's already engaged to be married.'  But the man's fiancée didn't work at the factory, so in Barbara's eyes didn't stand a chance. Before long she had wangled her way into a mixed-doubles tennis match the man was organising at the company sports field. Barbara had never hit a ball in her life before, but her cheeky attitude soon won over her new tennis partner, and before long he had broken off the engagement and got married to her instead – with a wedding cake courtesy of the Tate & Lyle chef.

Some workers even conducted full-blown affairs at the factory.  On the Hesser Floor, one couple were known to sneak up a ladder to a loft for secret love-making sessions in their lunch break.  A pair of young men saw them going up there one day and promptly removed the ladder, leaving the two love-birds red-faced as they begged to be let down again. Elsewhere, a man called Dave who looked after one of the storerooms found it was the perfect place to entertain his many girlfriends – and even loaned it out to one of the foremen, who was conducting an affair with a colleague at the factory.  It may have been just a storeroom, but Dave made sure that it felt special for those who were romanced there , putting down a layer of sugar bags on the floor to make a bed.

With such tales going the rounds on the factory gossip network, it's no surprise that Tate & Lyle soon earned the nickname 'the knocking shop' among the local population of Silvertown – much to then annoyance of the sugar girls. Many encounters were more innocent, however, and romantic love was alive and well at the factories. One sugar girl was ecstatic to find that her boyfriend, who worked for a building contractor, had been called in to help build a new department.  Every time she got a ten-minute break from her machines, she would spend it at the window, waving down to him from the top floor of her building.  'I feel like Juliet on her balcony,' she told her friends.

You can read more about all these stories, and many more like them, in The Sugar Girls, available to pre-order on Amazon (just click here).

Sugar Girls book talk with Melanie McGrath and Jerry White

We are very excited that Melanie McGrath, author of the wonderful Silvertown and Hopping, and the brilliant Jerry White, historian of London, will be joining us at the Bishopsgate Institute on 19 March to speak about The Sugar Girls and life in the East End in the 1940s and 1950s. You can reserve tickets on the number below. Hope to see you there!

Come to The Sugar Girls book launch in Canning Town – free tea & cake!

The fantastic Hub arts and community centre in Canning Town has kindly agreed to host a coffee morning and book launch for The Sugar Girls on Wednesday March 28th from 11am-1pm.

Come along and find out about the book, hear about the experiences of women who worked in Tate & Lyle's Silvertown factories, and see photographs of factory life in the 1940s and 1950s. Free tea, coffee and cake will be on offer thanks to the brilliant Hub cafe, and everyone is welcome.

We'll also be inviting all the former 'sugar girls' who told us their stories for the book, so if you or your family worked at Tate & Lyle why not join us and see if you recognise anyone. We'd love to meet you and hear your memories of factory life too.

The Hub is at 123 Star Lane, Canning Town, E16 4PZ, close to Canning Town station (telephone: 020 7473 5249). As well as exhibitions and events it runs lots of activities such as free fish and chips on the last Friday of the month, women's health groups and Newham Good Neighbours scheme for older people.

We had a great lunch there this week with three former sugar girls, Gladys, Betty and Eva, whose stories feature in the book and who will be joining us on the 28th. Now in their seventies and eighties, they worked at the Plaistow Wharf refinery from 1945 onwards, printing the famous Tate & Lyle sugar bags in the so-called Blue Room.

The department was known as the Beauty Shop because the girls who worked there liked to take in their dungarees and stuff their turbans full of stockings to make them look higher and more fashionable. Here's a picture of Gladys and Betty on a work beano in the late 1940s. Don't they look smart?

 

Tracking down former Sugar Girls

Today we were contacted by two people whose relatives worked at Tate & Lyle. Both were trying to track down anyone who might have known them. Unfortunately, neither of these women's names came up in the interviews we conducted for The Sugar Girls, but we are putting their details out here in the hopes that someone might remember them.

Gladys Cooper (nee Young) lived on Albert Road. She worked for Tate & Lyle for many years, before retiring around 1983/4. When she died not long after, her funeral procession went past the factories and workers stood there to pay their respects. Gladys was married to George Cooper, and had a son, Dennis.

The second woman was Bella Duggan (nee Belcher), a forelady on the Hesser Floor.

If you have any memories or information on either of these women, do get in touch using the Contact form. If you are trying to trace a relative who worked for Tate & Lyle, or to find people who may have known them, do get in touch and we will be happy to put up their details. It's also worth posting on the Newham Story forums, and checking out Friends Reunited.

Happy searching!

The Great Flood of 1953

The Great Flood at Canvey Island

59 years ago today, on the night of 31 January 1953, the Great Flood swept across Europe, claiming over 2,000 lives. In the UK, tens of thousands of people were made homeless, and in Canvey Island alone over fifty people died.  The flood was caused by a terrifying storm in the North Sea, where many boats were sunk, including the British MV Princess Victoria, with the loss of 133 lives.

Although the East Coast of England bore the brunt of the flooding, the water soon made its way inland.  When the Thames overflowed into Silvertown, many of the factories there sustained some damage, although Tate & Lyle had good flood defences in place.  The water drained out into the sewers, only to rise up again in the lower-lying neighbourhoods of Custom House and Tidal Basin. The people there waited upstairs, terrified, as the water swept into their houses and began ruining their possessions.  Eventually the Salvation Army arrived with a dinghy, passing tea and biscuits through upstairs windows, and in time they were evacuated to the public hall in Canning Town, which had been converted into a rest centre.

Fortunately, there was only one local casualty - William Hayward, a nightwatchman at William Ritchie and Son in Tidal Basin, who had escaped the flood waters only to be gassed thanks to a damaged pipe.

Nonetheless, the effect of the flooding was dramatic for the local people.  Joan Kately, a can-maker at Tate & Lyle at the time, spoke to us of coming home to find the downstairs of the family home thick with black mud even after the water had receded.  'Afterwards everyone had all their furniture out in the streets, washing it down,' Joan told us. 'Not that we had much anyway.'

The Kately family washing down furniture

Meanwhile, rats which had been washed up from the sewers were still scurrying about in the streets.

For children, however, the flood offered opportunities for fun, and many enjoyed wading in the waters, despite the cold.  Joan Cook, who lived in Otley Road near the West Ham greyhound-racing stadium, couldn't resist the temptation to have a swim.  'The water was coming up Prince Regent's Lane and we were running towards it to get in it!' she told us.

Boys playing in flood waters (Tate & Lyle factory in background)

 

Links:

For more information on the floods, see this from the Royal Society.  

Kathy Taylor has written an excellent account of the impact of the floods on Newham residents, including many fascinating interviews.

There are some amazing pictures of the flooding in Silvertown at Stan Dyson's gallery.

The Newham Story offers a fascinating first-hand account of the flooding.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is Holocaust memorial day, marking the 67th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945.

When we were researching The Sugar Girls, we were surprised to learn that, following the Second World War, Tate & Lyle employed many European refugees who had settled in the East End.

The saddest story we heard was of a Polish man called Bassie. Here is the account of Erik Gregory, who started work at Tate & Lyle in the 1950s as a boy of 15:

"One man I met, I've never forgotten him, his name was Bassie. A Polish man. He lived in the Polish community in Stepney then. And I've never seen eyes like he had in my life. They were like grey steel, and fixed as if looking in the far distance.

One day it was snowing and us boys were pulling a huge load of bags on steel pallets, and he was pulling the handle along on a pump up truck, with two boys behind him pushing him, and it was snowing, bitterly cold. And you know how boys are, we were like 'Leave him to it, he can pull it himself.' He was like a cart horse, his strength was immense. And we were leaning against it, and he obviously knew that, so he came round to the back and he said, 'Oy you boys, are you taking the piss?'

Anyway this charge-hand came round, old George it was, and he said, 'What's the matter?'

Bassie said, 'These boys are playing up.' He said to us, 'You boys, you think this is hard and cold?'

My mate said, 'Cold? Yeah, Bassie, it is cold.'

And he said, 'No. You don't know cold. You don't know hard. You don't know what hard work is.' He said, 'I've chopped trees at fifty below zero in Siberia. When the Russians invaded our country we were in cattle trucks, hundreds of us, shipped there.' Of course, I'd heard about it, but I'd never actually met anyone who'd had it.

We said to him, 'Why didn't you go back to Poland after the war?'

He said, 'I can't go home, there is nothing there.'

We said, 'Where's your family?'

He said, 'Auschwitz. Gassed by the Germans.'

He said, 'We was taken to Siberia and they gave us rotten fish eggs and we used to crush bones up and eat it up. The Russians made us dig holes to live in, and if you couldn't do it, kneel down, bang. Or you were just left to die.' Then Germany invaded Russia and the British government came to an arrangement that so many Polish prisoners could come and join the forces here.

He said, 'I was very lucky.' He managed to get here and train with the Polish free force and he said, 'Three times I've been blown out of a tank.' (He was the tank driver.) 'I was the only survivor three times, blown out of three tanks.' He said, 'You don't know what hard work is, and I never want you to. You don't know the jackboot smashing the door down, you know nothing of them things, you've been told about them but you know nothing.'

He said, 'I don't want you to see it, but don't you take the piss out of me.'

We learned a lesson there and we didn't take the piss no more."

For more information on Holocaust Memorial Day, and to sign the 2012 pledge, click here.

The Sugar Girls goes live

The Sugar Girls website has just gone live. Here at www.thesugargirls.com you will find more information on the book, including:

- Brief biographies of the four main 'sugar girls': Ethel, Lilian, Gladys and Joan

- Audio clips so you can hear them speak about their lives in their own words

- A gallery of pictures, both of the four main women and of other sugar girls

- Extracts from the book to whet your appetite

- Some background history on Tate & Lyle – The Sugar Girls blog and Twitter feed

Once the book is out at the end of March we hope to be able to post some reviews. In the meantime, we'll be adding more content all the time, so keep checking back regularly.

Finally, a huge thank you to Gilly Furse for all her work building the site. We hope you enjoy exploring it.