Tate & Lyle's Golden Girls

In this guest post, Nuala Calvi gives us a sneak preview of her forthcoming book The Sugar Girls: Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle’s East End.

It’s officially the oldest brand in Britain, but few people know the full history of Lyle’s Golden Syrup, and of the young East End girls whose hard work went into every tin.

In the mid-20th century, thousands of girls left school each year aged 14 or 15 and headed straight to the company’s factory in Silvertown – a strip of land wedged between the bustling Royal Docks and the Thames that was once home to more than 20 factories. 

As well as syrup, the Plaistow Wharf refinery, built by Abram Lyle in 1881, had always produced sugar, and since 1921, when his family firm had merged with that of Henry Tate to form Tate & Lyle, the factory had been printing the company’s famous blue sugar bags as well.  There were several departments staffed almost exclusively by women – the can-making and syrup filling, where the iconic tins were crafted and filled, the Blue Room, where the sugar bags were printed, and the Hesser Floor, where the bags were filled with sugar and packed up onto pallets. 



Workers choose a record to listen to while they work, in the 1950s

During the Second World War, the Plaistow Wharf factory became female-dominated for the first time, as did Tate’s Thames refinery a mile downriver.  An army of door-knockers went around the local neighbourhoods of Custom House, Plaistow and Canning Town, calling on women who had left their jobs at the factory when they got married to return, and many took on ‘men’s work’: loading up the lorries, working as fitters in the syrup-tin department, even taking on the high-status role of the ‘panmen’ who boiled up the sugar liquor.  The women were ecstatic at the higher rates of pay that came with such jobs, although they still only got 75% of what their male counterparts had earned. 

'An army of ‘sugar girls’ kept things running while
the men were away at war'

After the war, the men returned to their traditional roles, but the impact made by the army of ‘sugar girls’ who had kept things running while they were away was not forgotten – and women became increasingly integrated into the running of the factory.  By 1948 they were able to eat side by side with male workers in a mixed-sex canteen for the first time. 

The work at the factory was tiring and repetitive, but for the women who undertook it a job at Tate & Lyle was a great source of pride.  A girl in a Tate & Lyle uniform was regarded as glamorous, and women were proud to be seen wearing their outfits on the way to work. Many took in the regulation dungarees to make them as figure-hugging as possible, and stuffed their checked turbans with stockings and underwear to make them sit fashionably high on their heads.

Tate & Lyle was seen as a desirable company to work for, since it paid some of the best wages in the area, with generous bonuses several times a year, thanks to its profit-share scheme. It was considered to look after its workers well, and had an onsite surgery, chiropodist and hairdresser, and paid for sick workers to convalesce by the seaside.

It was also unrivalled in its social and sports facilities: there were a myriad of sporting teams, including netball, athletics and swimming, as well as clubs for every activity and hobby imaginable, from rabbit breeding to amateur dramatics. The company bar and social club – the Tate Institute – was the top nightspot in the neighbourhood. 

Tate & Lyle also paid for regular ‘beanos’ to the seaside, giving their workers some much-valued time off in Margate and Southend.  The coaches would be loaded up with beer, and the girls would drink and sing all the way to the coast – often hooking up with lads from other factories who were also there on work beanos, who they knew would pay for their rides at the amusement parks.

"They were the best years of our lives,"

There were many factory romances too, with so many marriages between employees that the company magazine, the Tate & Lyle Times, began printing pictures of the latest newly-weds in every edition. Extra-marital affairs were also common, and at one point the factories acquired the nickname 'the knocking shop' because of its association with loose morals.

But it is the female friendships made in the factories that most women recalling Tate & Lyle’s East End heyday in the 1940s and 1950s remark on most.  Many look back on their time there as a golden period of independence and fun, before the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. Most women had married by the time they were in their early 20s, and, according to the factory rules, had to leave their jobs at Tate & Lyle behind.

But those early friendships would often last long after they had left the factory gates.  "When you worked there you had friends for life," one former sugar bag printer recalled.  "They were the best years of our lives, when you look back on it."

The Sugar Girls: Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle’s East End, by Duncan Barrett & Nuala Calvi, is published by Collins on the 29th March 2012, (priced £6.99).

You can find out more about the lives of the Sugar Girls, see pictures of them and listen to them speaking, at www.thesugargirls.com. 

Casting off the corsets - a history of women's underwear

 Corsets, constipation and Oliver Cromwell - Dulcie Lewis's new short history of women's underwear is  definitely educational...and frankly a little bit scary!

1. Ethical undies: The Victorians were so obsessed with underwear that they published books on the subject. According to The Ethics of Underwear (1889): 'Correct underclothing, under all circumstances, shows a nicely balanced mind, and a sense of the fitness of things, which some people can never acquire'.

2. Immovable bowels: Victorian women spent a lot of time on their chamber pots. Apparently, during the period many doctors thought that women were prone to constipation, as so many tightly-corsetted ladies sought medical help.

3. My red beret is going to Oxfam: 'Women of easy virtue were thought to advertise their availability by wearing a red hat'. 

4. Knickers to the men: Underwear was once used to suggest sexual equality. In the 1890s, the young members of the Rational Dress Society donned 'masculine' tweed and wool knickerbockers to aid them in manly pursuits, like cycling and climbing mountains.

5. Witchcraft and eyeliner: Oliver Cromwell was apparently responsible for a bizarre piece of legislation entitled 'Vice of painting and wearing Patches and immodest Dresses of Women'. Part of this anti-beauty bill stated that any woman who used 'artificial teeth, iron stays, hoops or bolstered hips' to trap a man into marriage, could be tried as a witch and her marriage annulled.

  

Casting off the Corsets is published by Countryside Books

Blue by name...plaque proposed for London's first stripper

Bombs might have been raining down on London, but that didn't stop Phyllis Dixey getting her kit off for a packed theatre of Tommies three times a day. 

Phyllis has the dubious distinction of being the very first woman in England to perform a naked striptease. During the 1930s, nude shows were only legal if performers remained completely motionless. But, at the Tivoli Theatre, in unlikely Hull, variety singer Phyllis Dixey flouted the “If you move, it’s rude” rule and used ostrich feathers to tantalise her audience glimpses of her birthday suit during her 'Confessions Of A Fan Dancer' act, in November 1942.

This shocking peformance was swiftly investigated by the police, but everything was smoothed over when the Lord Chamberlain, then responsible for stage censorship, granted his approval. Phyllis went on to form a company of dancers and put on striptease shows at the Whitehall Theatre in Soho, throughout the early 40s.

English Heritage has raised eyebrows by announcing its plans to honour London’s ‘Queen of Striptease’ with a blue plaque. Net curtains have been set twitching along a quiet Surbiton street by the organisation's request to put up a plaque inscribed ‘Phyllis Dixey 1914 to 1964, Striptease Artiste lived here in flat number 15’. Some have suggested that she is more discreetly referred to as a ‘fan dancer’ or ‘burlesque performer’ instead.

Despite a brief foray in film (starring in Dual Alibi with Herbert Lom), Phyllis's post-war career floundered, and she found herself playing provincial theatres, under pressure to reveal increasing amounts of flesh. Her lowest point came when she was fined £5 for indecency after a show in Scunthorpe. Declared bankrupt and living out her retirement in obscurity, Phyllis died aged 50, in 1964.
 

Celebrating Shelagh Delaney

Pioneering female playwright Shelagh Delaney died this week. A bright working class Lancashire lass born in 1939, Shelagh transformed herself from usherette to award-winning playwright at just 18.

After leaving school with a handful of O-Levels, there were few career options open to Shelagh, who spurned teaching and took on a series of dead end jobs, while she enjoyed going out dancing at the weekend.
 
She began writing her first play, A Taste of Honey, infuriated by a performance of Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme, which she felt showed "insensivity in the way Rattigan portrayed homosexuals".

Written in a fortnight, A Taste of Honey exploded on to the stage and quickly became considered the most performed play by a female playwright in post-war Britain. The play's teenage heroine Jo is dragged on midnight flits between dingy Salford bedsits by her feckless mother Helen, who is bent on marrying her flashy younger suitor (and concealing the fact that she's over 40).

Rita Tushingham as Jo
and Paul Danquah as Jimmy

Jo briefly finds happiness when she meets Jimmy, a black sailor, but he disappears, leaving her pregnant and homeless. The only functional relationship in the play is between Jo and Gordon, a young gay shop assistant, who she sets up home with.

The play was daring and controversial for its time, dealing with issues like race, homosexuality and teen pregnancy, but it was a great success. The rights to the 1961 film version, starring Rita Tushingham, earned Shelagh a whopping (for the time) £20,000, and her screenplay, co-writted with director Tony Richardson, won a BAFTA for best screenplay.

Shelagh never acheived quite the same splash with any of her other work, but she went on to write well-received screenplays for film and television, as well as radio plays, including a Ruth Ellis biopic, Dance with a Stranger (1895).

A Taste of Honey is one of my favourite films. Sharp, bitter, and funny - and one of Morrisey's main inspirations for The Smiths lyrics - it's well worth a watch!

Olive Schreiner's Letters Online

A fantastic new project run by several UK universities has paid homage to the work of pioneering feminist writer Olive Schreiner (1855-1920).

South African-born Olive wrote daringly about big issues for the time - racism, women's education and agnoticism. Her novels, like The Story of an African Farm, were hugely popular, and her political writing provoked and inspired contemporaries. 

Olive's 5,500 plus letters are now scattered throughout the world in over 40 locations, but the Olive Schreiner Letters Online project will make them all accessible at www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk from January 2012.