Wartime for the Sugar Girls

by Duncan Barrett

  Cautiously, Ethel pushed the door open. Inside, the source of the noise soon became apparent. In among the cables and wires which snaked around the little room, carrying the current which powered the entire department, was a sweeper, leaning upright on her broom and snoring away.

  Ethel had always been supportive of the sweepers, who were generally looked down on in the factory, and had long championed their cause to anyone who would listen. ‘Think of the mess we’d be in without them,’ she would point out. ‘How would we ever get anything done wading up to our ankles in sugar?’ In any case, Miss Smith herself had begun her time at Tate & Lyle as a sweeper in the Blue Room.

  Ethel knew that sweeping up was an exhausting job, and the desire to catch forty winks must be overwhelming. But there were limits, and sleeping in a room that was out of bounds on safety grounds went well beyond them.

  ‘Wake up!’ she shouted at the woman, ‘You’re not meant to be in here. Didn’t you see the sign on the door?’

  The snoozing sweeper jerked awake immediately, almost falling over her broom as she did so. Evidently embarrassed, she muttered a string of apologies before rushing past Ethel and out of the door.

  A few days later, Ethel found herself in the same area of the department, and once again the tell-tale nasal clamour was audible above the soft hum of the electrics. She threw the door open with such a crash that the woman leapt into the air.

  ‘Haven’t I warned you?’ Ethel said, exasperated. ‘It’s dangerous to be in here. You know if I catch you here again I’ll have no choice but to let you go – no more warnings.’

  The other woman nodded, before scurrying away.

  The next day Ethel began her rounds with a sickening feeling. She felt sure of what she would find if she opened the door a third time, but to walk on by without checking would be a grave dereliction of duty. Reluctantly, she turned the handle and pushed.

  There was the woman again, standing with her broom in one hand, not even asleep this time but looking completely shattered.

  ‘Come on,’ Ethel said softly, ‘you know what has to happen now.’ She took the sweeper up to the manager’s office, where she handed back her broom and was formally dismissed from Tate & Lyle.

  There were a number of crimes that would automatically lead to a sacking, and top of the list was theft. But the temptation to pinch a bit of sugar – particularly since it was still rationed until 1953 – must have been considerable to anyone surrounded by the stuff all day long.

  One man was summarily dismissed when he got caught with sugar in the turn-ups of his trousers. On another occasion, a commissionaire and two foremen on the gate were fired when it was found they were deliberately misrecording the amount of sugar going out. Security was tightened immediately but not everyone was happy with the ensuing crackdown, and freelance delivery drivers were often driven to distraction. One driver by the name of Terry was so frustrated when the commissionaires demanded he unload a consignment of sugar to be counted a second time that he simply tipped the lorry’s contents out on the ground and drove off. ‘You can stuff your contract!’ he shouted at them as he departed.

  Some thieves came in unexpected guises. One day, a rabbi arrived at the factory to bless a consignment of sugar that Tate & Lyle had agreed to donate in honour of a Jewish religious festival. The sugar girls found it hilarious to watch him blessing each packet of sugar as it went past on the conveyor belt – all the more so because one of their colleagues further down the line had begun her own ritual too, solemnly intoning, ‘Fuck this sugar! Fuck this sugar!’ as each bag went past.

  So bizarre was the spectacle that it was a while before anyone noticed something else that was unusual about the rabbi’s behaviour: every so often he would ruffle up his long dark coat, as if fiddling with something in his pockets. One of the girls had her suspicions. ‘He’s nicking the sugar, ain’t he!’ she told the charge-hand on duty.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ her superior responded. ‘We can’t ask a rabbi to turn out his pockets.’

  ‘Course we can,’ the young girl insisted, and proceeded to do just that. The guilty rabbi was promptly escorted from the premises and the blessed sugar repackaged for regular sale.

  Of course, making off with a secret stash of sugar wasn’t the only way of ripping off the company, and some workers tried their hand at more elaborate scams. One woman in the offices discovered that she could put in for all sorts of fraudulent claims through the company’s health insurance scheme, going through the roster of girls in perfect health and putting them down for new glasses or sets of false teeth. When the money arrived to pay for them she would pocket it discreetly, signing a raft of false signatures in her register to confirm that every penny had been accounted for.

  When the truth came out, the commissionaires frog-marched her out of the building, past her distraught manager, who wept to think that he had failed to spot what she was doing. Tate & Lyle were lenient, however, declining to prosecute and merely barring her from working in their factories ever again.

  Not all rackets were quite so sophisticated. One Christmas an old hand at the Thames Refinery was seen flapping about in tears because she had lost her pay packet, including the usual festive bonus. ‘It must be one of them new girls,’ the woman wept. ‘I knew they couldn’t be trusted.’

  The whole department submitted to searches and every locker was opened up, but nothing was found. With typical generosity, the company agreed to pay her the money again. But just as she was leaving with the second pay packet in hand, someone shouted, ‘Hey! What’s that thing sticking out of her shoe?’

  The woman was ordered to take off her footwear, and out fell the first pay packet. It being Christmas, she was allowed to take home her bonus, but there was nothing she could do to save her job.

  After thieving, fighting was the most common cause of sackings at the factory, although most girls knew how to get away with it. Joan Fittock, a young stacker on Ethel’s shift, was waiting to clock off one day when she got into a dispute with a girl who had jumped ahead in the queue. ‘Oi! Get to the back where you belong, you bleedin’ chancer,’ Joan shouted, at which the other girl promptly clocked her one in the mouth. Joan restrained herself until the two girls were in the cloakroom together, unseen by their superiors, and then walloped her for all she was worth.

  If Ethel ever witnessed a fight, her natural instinct was to wade in and do her best to stop it. Early on in her days as a charge-hand she spotted two girls on her floor clawing at each other, and immediately rushed over to separate them. Her intervention had the desired effect, but afterwards one of the foremen took her aside.

  ‘You shouldn’t have got involved, Ethel,’ he told her.

  ‘Why not? I couldn’t just stand by,’ she replied.

  ‘Because you could have got dragged in yourself and been hurt.’

  He knew that some fights between sugar girls could be unexpectedly bloody. One day, when two girls on the Hesser Floor got into a row over a man, they arranged to sort it out later in the cloakroom. Before the allotted hour, one of the girls paid a visit to a boy on the lorry bank, who lent her a knuckleduster to use. The state of her opponent’s face afterwards was too terrible for any supervisor to overlook, and procedures were initiated for her dismissal.

  While many fights between sugar girls centred on men, sometimes disputes broke out over the most unlikely things. Most departments now had music playing on the factory floor, the result of a chance encounter during the war years when Oliver Lyle had walked in on a group of syrup-fillers giving an enthusiastic rendition of ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’. Far from punishing the young women as their forelady had expected, he promptly bought them their own radiogram – realising that a good singalong was one way to boost productivity. Other departments had since followed suit, and on the Hesser Floor a competitive edge had been added: every week, whichever team of girls bagged the most sugar was entitled to choose a seven-inch record, which the company would pay for. The new reco
rd would then be played repeatedly – some might say excessively – throughout the following week.

  One team, under an older woman by the name of Aggie Nicholls, put out a tally count that was virtually unassailable. Aggie was something of a character, and so obsessed with her output, to the exclusion of almost everything else, that she didn’t even bother putting in her false teeth at the start of the working day. She had been on the Hessers since they were first installed in the 1920s and, although picking the latest record was actually of minimal interest to her, she saw winning the competition every week as a matter of personal pride.

  As far as Aggie was concerned, nothing was off-limits in the pursuit of this obsession. She would frequently misrecord her own tally, and when no supervisor was watching she would take her machine’s waste output, which counted against the team in the final calculation, and secretly get rid of it. Worse, though, was the way she drove the other girls who worked with her. In Aggie’s book, stopping the machine was the worst crime a sugar girl could commit, and any poor young woman who did so could expect to receive quite a dressing down, even if it was mumbled through a pair of toothless gums.

  On occasion, such disputes would spill over into rows. One of the girls on Aggie’s machine, Jean Mitchell, was having tea in the cloakroom with some friends before her shift, when Aggie marched in and began shouting at her for not starting work early. Jean did her best to listen patiently, but eventually became so exasperated with the barrage of complaints that she could take it no longer, and hurled her thermos flask at Aggie. The flask hit a beam in the ceiling, shattering the glass inside, and came down to hit Aggie in the face. All the girls scarpered, one of them shutting herself in a locker in terror, and Aggie stormed off to the toilets.

  A few hours later, Aggie was sporting a black eye and a foreman came over to ask what had happened. Jean was convinced that she was about to lose her job, but to her astonishment Aggie replied without a moment’s hesitation, ‘Oh, I just fell and hit me head.’ She might have been an obsessive, but Aggie was certainly no snitch.

  Unconvinced by the explanation, the foreman asked around and eventually discovered the truth. But at Aggie’s insistence Jean stayed in her job. Among the management Aggie held an almost legendary status, and when she asked a favour it was granted with no questions asked.

  Company policy dictated that a union representative was required to attend all serious disciplinary meetings. On Ethel’s shift the shop steward was now Betty Foster, the girl who had almost set herself on fire trying to avoid being caught smoking in the cloakroom. Betty was a straight-talking and reasonable young woman, and Ethel found her easy to deal with, even when they were technically on opposite sides of a dispute. The fact was that in most cases there was little the union could do to prevent a dismissal, and nine times out of ten they were simply there to witness that proceedings were all above board.

  On one such occasion Betty was called up when a man had poured sugar into the glue trough of a Hesser machine, so desperate for a break from hauling away the stacked-up parcels that he had resorted to sabotage. It was an open-and-shut case – with numerous witnesses to the act, including Betty’s friend Jeanie, there was nothing she could say or do to help him.

  Nonetheless, it was a risky business playing witness to such dismissals, since resentment could end up being directed at the union rep for not being able to do more, rather than at the manager who was doing the firing. On one occasion a pair of stackers had been fighting on the Hesser Floor. One was transferred to syrup-filling – not much of a punishment, since the work there was easier than on the Hessers – while the other girl was given the sack. Betty had sat in on the dismissal but, as was often the case, didn’t think that there was scope to intervene.

  The fired girl obviously felt otherwise, because once Betty was outside the gates of the factory and on her way home she attacked her with a plank of wood, splitting her head open.

  Betty ran back into the factory and sought refuge in the office block, where a foreman helped hold her scalp together and got her to the surgery. Once the nurse had applied ten stitches to the wound and Betty had recovered from the shock, she demanded that the police be called.

  The foreman hesitated. ‘I think that’s a decision for management,’ he told her. ‘After all, you’re not the one who fired her.’

  Betty was furious. ‘Give me the bleedin’ phone,’ she demanded, and dialled 999 herself.

  As the foreman had predicted, Tate & Lyle were not happy that Betty had taken matters into her own hands, perhaps worried about adverse publicity if the fracas got into the local press. But even if the company wasn’t willing to pursue the case, Betty wasn’t going to let it drop. She testified against her assailant in court, and the girl was successfully prosecuted. Despite their displeasure, there was nothing that her superiors could do. Like all union girls, Betty knew her rights.

  Sometimes, sugar girls would have to find more inventive ways of ensuring that justice was done, particularly when the offending party was one of their ‘betters’. At the Thames Refinery, one of the office workers, a Mr W—, was notorious for wearing particularly soft-soled shoes which enabled him to sneak up on unsuspecting girls in the corridor and find some excuse to touch them up. In the staff restaurant, waitress Joan Adams had felt an unwelcome hand creeping along her stockinged leg under the table while leaning over to serve him his lunch. Joan was shocked, but the received wisdom among her colleagues was that you didn’t go telling on people, and although many of them had experienced the same thing, none of them had felt able to speak out.

  Joan discussed the situation with her boyfriend Stan, who worked for Tate & Lyle’s shipping firm Silvertown Services Ltd. On hearing her story he was appalled. ‘Well,’ he announced, ‘if the girls won’t say anything, I will.’

  The next day Stan went to a phone box just outside the factory, dialled the switchboard number and asked, in his most authoritative voice, to be put through to Wally King, who was in charge of the offices.

  ‘Who’s calling, please?’ asked the receptionist.

  ‘Um, it’s Mr Peabody,’ Stan replied, improvising.

  Moments later, Wally King came on the phone.

  ‘Mr King?’ said Stan. ‘You’ve got a Mr W— working for you, is that right?’

  ‘Yes. Who is this calling?’ the manager replied.

  ‘It don’t matter,’ said Stan, ‘but if I were you I’d tell him to keep his hands off the girls. He’s getting too touchy-feely with them, and my girlfriend don’t like it. I just thought you should know. Goodbye!’

  A few weeks later, Joan was in the kitchen washing up the coffee cups, when her sister Margaret came in to see her. A visit from Mags was a rare thing, since she worked in the costing office and therefore normally associated with her ‘posh friends’ there, rather than her sister in the restaurant, a habit that had lent her the nickname ‘Lady Margaret’ among the other girls in their family. It was clear from the look on her face that something was seriously wrong.

  Joan took her sister into the pantry and closed the door. As soon as it clicked shut, poor Margaret burst into tears. ‘It’s Mr W—,’ she sobbed. ‘I was walking up the corridor and there was no one about, and he come up to me and said, “Oh my dear, I see you’re wearing different colours today.” And he touched my boob.’

  ‘He what?’ A hand on a stocking was one thing, but molesting Lady Margaret was the final straw. ‘I’ll sort that bugger out once and for all,’ Joan promised.

  That afternoon she was setting off on her tea round, wheeling her trolley along to the offices, when she saw Mr W— creeping towards her from the other end of the corridor. His face lit up as he approached her.

  ‘Oh hello, my dear …’ he began to simper.

  Joan mustered all her strength and gave the heavily laden trolley a great shove, shouting ‘Out the way, Mr W—!’ just too late for him to hop aside. The trolley careered into him, crushing his toes in their soft shoes and leaving him screeching
and swearing in agony, and Joan made off triumphantly down the corridor.

  From then on, Mr W— never bothered Joan or her sister again.

  Although Joan had felt there was no option but to take matters into her own hands, in fact many charge-hands and foreladies at Tate & Lyle took their pastoral duties very seriously, and in addition to meting out discipline would spend a good deal of time worrying about the wellbeing of their young charges. They would visit sugar girls who were off sick to see if there was anything they could get for them, make sure that those leaving to get married had their finances in order, and offer support to those going through difficult times with partners or parents. When a young worker called Maureen Richfield was having problems at home, her forelady Eva West invited her round to her house after work, offering a shoulder to cry on and plenty of tea and biscuits.

  Sometimes, however, a girl made it clear that she didn’t want help, and there was nothing that her superiors could do to intervene. Bella, one of Ethel’s Hesser girls, was sporting a bump that seemed to be growing by the day. She was unmarried, with a boyfriend away at sea in the Navy, so her situation was socially perilous. Unwilling to face the reality of what had happened, Bella had done her best to hide her condition, both at work and from her parents, by wrapping herself up as tightly as possible with a length of bandage hidden underneath her uniform. But the truth of the matter was obvious to anyone who saw her, and after a while a concerned Miss Smith summoned Bella to her office.

  ‘I just want you to know that we are here to support you if you need help,’ she told the young girl. ‘You can talk to me about anything you like.’

  Bella did her best to look blank. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about, Miss,’ she replied.

  ‘Are you pregnant, Bella?’ Miss Smith demanded calmly, not letting her gaze falter from the young woman in front of her.

  For a few moments Bella fell silent, and Miss Smith thought that she might be about to confide in her, but then the defensive young woman reasserted herself. ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Where’d you get an idea like that from?’