The Sugar Girls

by Duncan Barrett

  ‘I’m sorry, love,’ replied the other woman, shaking her head. ‘He was out on a bike he’d been given, and got hit by a lorry. Poor little thing never stood a chance.’

  Despite the season of goodwill, Christmas cheer was not universal at the factory, as Ethel soon discovered. Over the past few weeks she had been helping the foreman Tony Tunkin order in the sugar for the Hesser Floor, with quantities carefully worked out according to the number of bags packed the previous week. This involved a trip to the main office block one morning a week, where the clerical workers would take down the relevant figures and phone through the requests.

  While Ethel learned the ropes, Tony was by her side, talking her through the instructions she was to give to the office workers. The staff were always courteous and friendly, offering their guests comfortable chairs and cups of tea while they went through the figures. Ethel arranged with Tony that she could take her break mid-morning rather than at lunchtime, so she could have a cooked breakfast in the canteen after the meetings.

  The run-up to Christmas was a busy time, and Tony decided that Ethel was now capable of putting in the sugar order without his help. She jumped at the chance of a bit of extra responsibility, and headed to the office with the paperwork as usual. But this time the atmosphere there was completely different. The men in the room barely looked up from their desks when she said hello, and they acted as if they didn’t know her.

  ‘Yes?’ a chubby woman behind a desk demanded coldly.

  ‘I’ve come to do the sugar order,’ Ethel replied.

  The woman sighed. ‘All right then, go ahead.’

  Ethel was shocked. The woman hadn’t even offered her a chair, much less a cup of tea. Struggling to mask her surprise, she laid the documents out on the desk and began going through the sums. The secretary merely nodded as she noted down each figure, never once looking up throughout Ethel’s long speech, and leaving her standing throughout.

  ‘Fine,’ she snapped, as Ethel came to the last of the figures. ‘I’ll see the details are phoned through. You can go now.’

  ‘All right,’ Ethel said awkwardly, turning to leave. Had she done something wrong? She couldn’t understand why things were so different to how they had been before.

  As she went to leave the room, she heard a whisper behind her, and froze with her fingers on the door handle. ‘Come up from the factory floor, you know,’ a male office worker muttered to his colleagues, one of whom laughed contemptuously. Ethel tried not to bristle as she pulled the door open and walked out.

  ‘How did you get on?’ Tony Tunkin asked her when she returned to the Hesser Floor.

  ‘The woman in there treated me like a school kid!’ Ethel told him. ‘She sat there while I ordered the sugar, and didn’t even let me sit down. Who does she think she is? I could do her job standing on me head, but I’d like to see her try and run around the Hesser Floor like I do.’

  Tony nodded quietly at Ethel’s words, and she went away, still seething.

  But the next time she went to the office to do the sugar order, she found that the chubby woman was nowhere to be seen, and a new man had been put in her place. She must have been given the push, Ethel thought to herself, with satisfaction. Clearly Tony had taken what she said seriously.

  Just as last time, the other men in the office treated Ethel as if she was beneath their notice. But to her pleasure, the new man had obviously been given careful instructions. He offered Ethel a chair to sit in, and was kind and courteous as they went through the figures.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ she said cheerily, when they had finished their sums. ‘Now I’m off to the canteen for my cooked breakfast.’

  ‘Ooh, that sounds good,’ the man said. ‘I could murder a bacon sarnie.’

  Ethel smiled at him and left the room. But on her way to the canteen she decided she would make a point of acknowledging his politeness in front of his rude colleagues. She ate her own breakfast as usual, but before going back to the Hesser Floor she asked for a bacon sandwich wrapped in brown paper to take away with her.

  A few minutes later she was back in the office. ‘Here you are,’ she said loudly, placing the package on the nice man’s desk. ‘I bought you a Christmas present!’

  The man eagerly unwrapped the brown paper to reveal the piping hot bacon sandwich inside, and its aroma quickly filled the room.

  ‘Ethel, you’re an angel!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re very welcome,’ Ethel said pointedly, glancing at the other office workers, who looked on hungrily as he sank his teeth into the sandwich.

  Although Ethel had worked at the factory for several years before finding herself on the receiving end of such snobbery, it was far from a rare phenomenon at Tate & Lyle. Class was ingrained in every aspect of day-to-day life, from the timetable – with office staff coming in at nine and factory-floor day-workers at eight – to the crockery. Senior managers took their tea on trays with bone china cups, individual milk jugs and silver sugar bowls, while the rank and file drank from mugs straight off the tea trolley. The office staff enjoyed silver service in an upstairs restaurant, but floor workers had to rush to the canteen in their break to queue up, swallow their food and get back to work in under half an hour.

  Sometimes this arrangement had unfortunate consequences for families. When a girl called Barbara Bailey started work in the costing office she found that her father was not allowed to join her for lunch in the restaurant, despite having worked for the company for 30 years. Nor was she supposed to show her face in the workers’ canteen. Meanwhile the directors’ private dining room was off limits to all but the top brass and their privileged guests, and was rumoured to be a plushly carpeted affair with leather chairs and an enormous table.

  One young woman who was constantly reminded of the class distinctions inherent in the company was Joan Adams. A waitress in the staff restaurant at the Thames Refinery, like Ethel she was Silvertown born and bred. From the moment she arrived at Tate & Lyle, Joan was acutely aware of the gulf that existed between workers who lived locally and those who commuted across the Thames from Woolwich. As she wheeled her tea trolley along to the offices, Joan would hear the girls joking about how they were ‘slumming it’ by coming to work across the water, loudly wondering how people could possibly live in Silvertown.

  As a waitress, Joan had been told never to answer back to her betters. But despite growing up in relative poverty, she believed that she was equal to anyone. One day the snide comments from the office girls got too much, and she retorted, ‘It can’t be that bad – else why do you lot come to work here?’ Before they could answer she had trundled off, leaving them open-mouthed.

  Despite having joined the supervisor class herself, Ethel was determined not to let her sugar girls be looked down on. She was quick to remind anyone in the offices who made disparaging remarks that without the girls to pack the sugar there would be no job for them to do. And when one of the managers commented wearily, ‘Oh those kids – they drive me mad at Christmas,’ Ethel promptly replied, ‘They’re not kids, they’re young ladies, so don’t you go calling them that.’

  Christmas, as it turned out, presented Ethel with a new reason to stand up for her girls. Of all the festive traditions at the factory, perhaps none was as legendary as that which took place at lunchtime on Christmas Eve. The sugar girls, knowing that only a few hours of work stood between them and the much-anticipated holiday, would head not for the canteen but for the Rec, where they would knock back as much alcohol as was physically possible in a 30-minute period.

  Not even the terrifying figure of Miss Smith could prevent the inevitable, although she did try her best. Every year, without fail, she would instruct the womenfolk of the factory to remember their modesty and take care not to drink more than they could handle. But she knew such entreaties fell on deaf ears, and as long as the girls were back at work on the dot, there was little she could do. In the years before health and safety had permeated workplace culture, they w
ere entitled to do as they pleased with their free time, and, after all, the bar was open during the working day.

  Of course, if the girls failed to report back to their machines on time, then Miss Smith was ready to pounce. One year, when a group of tardy syrup-fillers failed to return from their break, she turned the factory upside down searching for them. Holed up in the Jubilee pub across the road they thought they were safe, but before long the door was thrown open. ‘Look out, girls, it’s the guv’nor,’ joked the landlord Eric Bowden, before Miss Smith marched in and dragged them back to the factory.

  At the Thames Refinery, forelady Rosie Bennett was once so shocked at the state of her Hesser girls on Christmas Eve that she ordered them to be shut in the ‘cage’ where the paper bags were stored, instructing the men to keep them there until they quietened down. It worked out pretty well for the girls in question, since they were paid for the rest of the day without having to lift a finger, and the only lasting consequence was the hangovers they woke up with the following morning.

  Understandably, Ethel was nervous at the prospect of her girls hitting the Rec for the traditional lunchtime booze-up, but she was well aware that there was nothing she could do to dissuade them. She ate her own lunch hurriedly, and without alcoholic accompaniment, before anxiously returning to the floor. To her horror she saw that some girls from the office block, who normally visited the department once a week to check the tally figures and to calculate the weight of sugar wastage, had arrived uncharacteristically early – and it didn’t take much guessing to work out why. They had obviously heard the legends of the intoxicated sugar girls and had come to catch their walk of shame back onto the floor. No doubt it would be highly diverting to see their ‘inferiors’ fall arse over tit as they struggled back to their machines, and would provide a good joke to share with everyone else back in the office.

  Not on my watch, Ethel told herself. She went to wait in the cloakroom for the girls to return, determined to intercept them before they got back to the floor.

  Meanwhile, in the Rec, the party was in full swing. It was a raucous enough place at the best of times, but never more so than now. Workers were laughing and singing together as they knocked back drink after drink. The poor barmen and women on duty were struggling to keep up with all the orders, not helped by the fact that one of their number was chasing a group of boys around the room who were playing a game of football with her wig. ‘Give it back!’ she shouted. ‘You’ll get it all filthy!’

  As their half-hour break neared an end, the Hesser girls reluctantly swigged the last of their drinks and staggered out of the Rec.

  When they barrelled into the cloakroom of the Hesser Floor, Ethel leapt to her feet.

  ‘We’re not late, Ethel!’ one of them protested.

  ‘It’s not that,’ she replied, urgently. ‘There’s something that I thought you’d want to know before you go back on the floor.’

  At this even the most bleary eyes attempted to focus on her.

  ‘Listen,’ Ethel continued, ‘there are some office girls in there right now, and I know what they’re up to. They’re waiting to see how you act when you come in, so they can go back and have a good old laugh with them upstairs about how you carried on.’

  There was a moment’s pause as the girls’ befuddled minds processed the information. Once it had sunk in, outraged comments about the ‘stuck-up pigs from the office’ went round the group.

  ‘All right, thanks Ethel,’ one girl said. ‘Yeah, thanks Ethel,’ the rest echoed.

  ‘I’ll walk you back in,’ she replied. ‘Ready?’

  Ethel watched as they drew themselves up to their full height and fixed their faces in an expression of the utmost sobriety. Then she led the way through the double doors onto the floor, with her head held high like a proud mother duck followed by her ducklings.

  The sugar girls walked calmly and carefully to their machines and began to start them up, all without a murmur passing between them. The girls from the office stood watching in astonishment at this picture of sober professionalism. An engineer did his best not to laugh as their faces turned from haughty amusement to embarrassed disappointment, and they quickly shuffled off to do their work.

  That afternoon, Ethel’s sugar girls gave her a big box of chocolates to say thank you – and she, in turn, persuaded the foreman to let them all go home early.

  14

  Joan

  On Saturday 31 January 1953, with the Christmas decorations all tidied away for another year, an unusual combination of high tides and a severe windstorm coming from the North Sea conspired to blast the east coast of England with a devastating storm tide. By sunset, sea walls were giving way along the coast and the water was rushing inland, leaving a trail of destruction and ruin in its wake.

  At one a.m. the watchman at North Woolwich Pier reported that the Thames had reached a dangerous level. Less than an hour later, six feet of surplus water was spilling out of the Royal Docks and onto the streets of Silvertown, where it was flushed into the local sewers and back up into the lower-lying neighbourhoods of Custom House and Tidal Basin. The public hall at Canning Town was converted into a control and rest centre, and was soon home to nearly 200 displaced local people. Refugees began to arrive from further afield, including many from Canvey Island, which had been completely submerged in water with the loss of 58 lives. The locals had fared much better, with only one fatality recorded – William Hayward, a night-watchman at William Ritchie & Son in Tidal Basin, who had escaped the flood waters only to be gassed thanks to a damaged pipe. Across Europe the total death toll was over 2,000.

  By Monday morning, after much pumping from the local fire brigade, the waters had receded. But they left a carpet of thick black mud on the streets, and in the downstairs rooms of many people’s houses. The local residents mopped their ruined homes down and dragged what little furniture they owned out onto the streets, rinsing it with buckets of water and trying to avoid the rats that had been washed up from the sewers.

  Although both Tate & Lyle factories escaped any serious damage, not all the girls who worked in them were as lucky. A young can-tester from Plaistow Wharf had been forced to flee upstairs when the water completely flooded the ground floor of her family’s house. The Salvation Army came round in a rubber dinghy mid-morning, passing tea and biscuits through their window. But it was many hours before the Army proper arrived with a rescue boat and they were evacuated to Canning Town Public Hall, and several days before their belongings were free of the black mud.

  Not everyone, though, saw the flood in such grim terms. While most people were doing their best to stay safe and dry, one girl, Joan Cook, was rushing headlong into the water for a swim.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ her mother cried, running after her as she waded in. But it was no use. The girl was already diving into the bracingly cold water, and emerged a few moments later, laughing and holding aloft an old boot.

  ‘Mum! Look what I found down here!’ she shouted.

  ‘Put it back, Joan,’ her mother said urgently. ‘You don’t know where it’s been!’

  ‘Nah, it’s all right, Mum,’ she replied. ‘The water’s washed it clean.’ She tossed the boot back into the murky depths and flipped onto her back for a few strokes.

  Fortunately it was February, and no girl, however bold, could spend more than a few minutes in such cold water. Joan soon hauled herself out and staggered back towards her mother, her clothes clinging to her goose-pimpled flesh.

  Mrs Cook took off her own coat and hastily threw it round her daughter, covering as much of her slippery wet body as she could manage. She hurried the dripping girl back into the house, quickly pulling the door closed behind them.

  ‘What were you thinking, Joan?’ she exclaimed frantically, towelling down the long blonde hair, now grown sticky and dull with the dirty water. ‘What will the neighbours say?’

  ‘Just felt like a dip, that’s all,’ Joan replied. ‘It ain’t every day there’s a s
wimming pool in the street.’

  Joan lived in Otley Road, a stone’s throw from the old West Ham Stadium, where crowds of more than 50,000 gathered several times a week for the motorcycle speedway and greyhound racing. When there was a race on, half the neighbourhood seemed to pass by her front door, and she would rush outside to watch the great saloon cars chauffeuring the speedway riders past.

  Joan’s father, and his mother who lived downstairs, both kept greyhounds and whippets, and raced them at the track. Nanny Cook was well known in the neighbourhood for lending money to those who found themselves a few bob short. She was also thick as thieves with the local fairground community, the Bolesworths, whose young boys she regularly took in while the adults were touring around the country. The travellers’ gratitude was evidenced in the old woman’s sideboard, proudly stuffed with silverware they had presented her with over the years.

  Joan herself had never got on with Nanny Cook, who she felt favoured her younger brother John. But the appeal of the fairground connection was not lost on her. She adored the bright lights, the swirling waltzers, the colourful prizes on offer and the smell of candyfloss and popcorn, and was never happier than when the fairground folk allowed her to help out with manning one of their stalls.

  Her mother, on the other hand, was not so keen. ‘I don’t know what your old mum sees in that lot,’ she would tell her husband, John. ‘And I don’t want our Joan getting mixed up with them.’

  Mrs Cook, who had named her daughter Joan after herself, was a woman with aspirations for her family. Although an East Ender born and bred, she would assume the accent and demeanour of a middle-class lady when it suited her. Joan found it excruciating getting onto the trolleybus with her mother and hearing her ask the conductor for ‘two singles, if you would be so kind’.