Sugar and spice... the Tate & Lyle dream girls

NUALA CALVI recounts what many women say were their happiest years, in a new book about London’s East End in the Forties and Fifties

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”.

The job might be hard and repetitive but a Sugar Girl was regarded as distinctly glamorous and those lucky enough to be issued with the regulation dungarees, checked blouse and turban wore them with pride. A Sugar Girl had a certain image to uphold, so most of those dungarees had been painstakingly taken in by hand to make them as figure-hugging as possible, while the turbans were stuffed full of stockings and knickers to make them sit fashionably high on the head.

There were numerous jobs for women at Tate & Lyle, from filling the sugar bags to making the tins of Lyle’s Golden Syrup, but it was in the Blue Room, where the sugar bags were printed, that the most alluring girls of all worked. The department was nicknamed The Beauty Shop and its inhabitants were always well represented at the annual Tate & Lyle Beauty Contest, a hotly anticipated event judged by such movie stars as Derrick de Marney, Paul Dupuis and Dennis Price. One six-footer even went on to join the exotic dancing troupe The Bluebell Girls, in Paris.

Being a Sugar Girl was about more than just looks though, it was an attitude. The factory might be full of attractive young women but when one bus conductor announced: “Tate & Lyle: disembark here for the knocking shop!” he found himself brought to book. “Excuse me, mate,” a young Sugar Girl rebuked him, “I work there and I’m not a tart, so I think you ought to shut your mouth!” The male dockers on board gave her a round of applause and the conductor was suitably cowed.

Like their sisters at the Ford motor plant, immortalised in the film Made In Dagenham, the Sugar Girls were no pushovers. The women may have earned less than the men, even when they took over their jobs during the war, and encountered casual sexism or worse but they found their own ways of getting even.

Tea girl Joan got sick of feeling an unwelcome hand creeping up her leg while serving a male manager, so she ran her trolley over his feet. From then on he kept his hands to himself. When the factory floor was too cold one day a Sugar Girl called Edna complained, only to be told that the girls should work in their coats and hats. Unimpressed, Edna marched the lot of them to the canteen, where they sat out the day on an unofficial strike. The next morning, they went in to find their department toasty and warm.

In those days, Tate & Lyle was still a British-owned company and inspired great loyalty among its East End workforce. Many Sugar Girls were the fourth generation of their families to have worked there, their forefathers having come down from Liverpool or Scotland with sugar refiners Henry Tate and Abram Lyle when they set up their rival factories in the late 19th century.

Even by the Forties, two decades after the companies had merged, workers remained remarkably tribal and still referred to themselves as either “Tates’s” or “Lyles’s”. Their rivalry was played out at the annual Sports Day, where workers competed in football, cricket, netball and athletics to win the coveted Inter-refinery Shield.

For a Sugar Girl, the factories also provided an unrivalled social life. There were more teams and societies than most universities could boast, including pet clubs, amateur dramatics, photography, art classes, rifle-shooting and table tennis, in addition to the many sports teams. A social club called The Tate Institute, now derelict, laid on dances every week with cheap rum shipped in from the colonies.

In the days before “health and safety” there was even an on-site bar, open during