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".
