John Bentley
Today we spoke to a man called John Bentley, who worked at Tate & Lyle's Thames Refinery in Silvertown for forty years, starting in August 1953 at the age of 16.
When he began working for Tate & Lyle, John was an apprentice electrical engineer. He lived in Stratford and would travel to the factory on his bike every morning. He loved the job, and felt the company really looked after its workers, but as far as John was concerned, the best thing of all about working at Tate & Lyle was the sugar girls. With so many young female colleagues, he described it as 'like being in a sweet shop'!
John would dash down to the canteen at the start of his lunch break, hoping to catch the girls before they went back to work so that he could chat them up. His first girlfriend at the factory was called Christine and worked on the Hesser Floor, but over the years John went out with many other sugar girls. He would visit them at their machines throughout the day, taking care to make himself scarce if one of the foreladies put in an appearance. (The boys at the factory weren't officially under their control, but they were formidable women and didn't like their girls being disturbed on the job.)
As well as girlfriends, John formed strong male friendships at Tate & Lyle, and he is still in touch with many of his fellow engineers today, sixty years since they began working together at the factory.
Over the course of his four decades at Tate & Lyle, John saw many changes at the factory. As automation became more widespread and machines took over much of the work of packing, the number of female workers sadly dwindled. But John still remembers the good old days of the early 1950s when the canteen would be packed every lunchtime with up to 500 people, among them plenty of sugar girls waiting for a nice young man to come up and talk to them.
