But the contribution of the sugar girls, those ordinary young women who played such a central role during Tate & Lyle’s East End heyday, is not widely recognised, and their lives have not generally been recorded. Until now.
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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 swimming 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’.
Nevertheless, Joan adored her mother, whose warm and cheerful personality ensured she was beloved by everyone she met. And Mrs Cook’s desire for respectability had not come from nowhere. Her own mother, Nanny Polly, was a former ship’s scrubber who had worked hard all her life, and had often been forced to pawn family jewellery in order to make ends meet. She valued such small luxuries as she could afford, like a sparkling white tablecloth and a set of china teacups, which would be whipped out at the drop of a hat for visitors. But despite this positive example, not all her progeny had taken such a refined approach to life as Mrs Cook had, and some of their in-laws were rather less salubrious than the two of them would have liked.
Mrs Cook’s brother George had married a woman who already had two children from a previous marriage. To make matters worse, she was the madam in a brothel, where her daughter was employed as a maid. Their son had spent time in prison after using his own vehicle as the getaway car in a robbery, and was later found dead on a bridge near Portsmouth, on his way back from a trip to buy bootleg cigarettes.
Meanwhile, Mrs Cook’s brother Peter had a new young wife called Iris, who had produced her first baby alarmingly soon after their wedding. ‘Probably hooked him,’ Joan heard her mother mutter one time when they were round visiting the couple, who unfortunately lived upstairs from Nanny Polly and were therefore rather hard to avoid.
As ever, Mrs Cook’s anxieties about Iris had served to have the opposite effect on her daughter. Joan was in awe of the attractive young woman, who was only ten years her senior. Iris wore a red chiffon headscarf and worked at the local cinema, and to Joan she exuded pure glamour. Best of all was Iris’s bedroom, where the mantelpiece was piled high with all the latest make-up. Every weekend, when Joan and her mum went to visit Nanny Polly, she would dash straight upstairs to see if Iris was in, and her mum would have a job dragging her back downstairs to see the rest of the family.
‘I’m sure your aunt is very busy,’ Mrs Cook would call up hopefully. ‘Why don’t you come and say hello to Nanny?’
‘It’s all right, love,’ Iris would