As the road dropped down towards Silvertown, the great expanse of the Royal Victoria Dock stretched out to her left, where the giant ships unloaded cargo from all over the world. She passed the lock that linked the dock to the Thames, and then suddenly they were in the heart of industrial West Silvertown, with British Oil and Cake Mills, Pinchin Johnson’s paint factory and Ohlendorff’s fertiliser plant spewing out smoke from their giant chimneys. A swarm of shift workers was descending on the factories lining the river on her right, and on her left was the parade of little shops and cafés that served the local community, as well as the Jubilee pub where many a Tate & Lyle worker celebrated the week’s end. Before long she could see the refinery itself, and the bus conductor called out, ‘Tate and Lyle, Plaistow Wharf. Disembark here for the knocking shop!’
A peal of gruff laughter went around the bus, which was largely filled with dockers and factory men, among whom Tate & Lyle had something of a reputation for promiscuity.
But one young sugar girl on the bus was not amused. ‘Excuse me, mate,’ she shouted angrily, ‘I work there and I’m not a tart, so I think you ought to shut your mouth!’
There was another roar from the crowd, this time of approval for the plucky teenager. The cowed conductor muttered an apology, before the tough young woman marched off the bus. Gladys followed close behind, a little in awe.
Near the bus stop was a coffee stall and newspaper stand where the workers were picking up their morning’s necessities. The crowd thronging towards the gates of Tate & Lyle was particularly heavy, but amid the bustling movement one man stood perfectly still. He was a slim, elegant-looking fellow in a pale mackintosh, with grey hair slicked back across his scalp, and he stood scribbling in a little notebook.
His name was Bob Tyzack and he had never got over being given the sack from Tate & Lyle. He stood outside the factory day in, day out, noting down the lorries coming and going, for reasons known only to himself. This was particularly awkward for his brother Bill, the head commissionaire, who was charged with making sure he never stepped onto the factory grounds. The Tyzacks were a well-known Tate & Lyle family, and their name was soon to become famous across the country when Bill’s niece Margaret became a film star.
Gladys headed across the road with the rest of the throng. She looked up at the big white clock above the factory gates, which read two minutes to six: she wasn’t late yet.
Suddenly a collective groan went up from the crowd – a train was about to pass along the tracks in front of the gate. They waited impatiently for it to go through. ‘That’s it, we’ll be docked a quarter of an hour’s pay now!’ grumbled one girl.
Gladys turned to her. ‘But the train won’t take that long, will it?’
‘Don’t matter,’ said the girl. ‘You’re even one minute late here, they close the gate and make you lose 15.’
This harsh rule prompted some Tate & Lyle workers to risk their lives by scrambling under the trains as they slowed down, and stories went round the factory of the injuries suffered by those who had miscalculated.
When the gates finally reopened there was a great rush towards a board on the wall, where clocking-in discs were waiting on hooks to be collected and taken to the various departments. Gladys was almost knocked over in the fray, but fought her way to the commissionaire and asked for the Blue Room charge-hand, Julie McTaggart.
Before long, she saw a stern-looking woman with very dark hair marching towards her, hands clasped firmly behind her back.
‘Gladys Taylor?’
Gladys nodded.
‘You’re late.’
Defiance welled up in Gladys’s chest. ‘It weren’t my fault,’ she retorted. ‘It was the train. Silly place to put it, if you ask me.’
Julie looked at her straight-faced. ‘I didn’t.’
They headed to the surgery, where a nurse checked Gladys over and passed her fit for work. Then Gladys followed Julie into another building. ‘We’re in here, underneath the syrup-filling,’ Julie said, leading her into a cloakroom and pushing a bundle of clothing into her hands. ‘Don’t be long.’ The door swung closed, leaving Gladys alone in the little room.
She laid out the pile of clothes on a wooden bench: a pair of dark-blue dungarees and a blue-and-white checked blouse – plus a spare set of each. Like going into the bleedin’ Army, she thought ruefully.
Gladys changed into her new uniform. The dungarees hung loosely on her boyish frame, the crotch resting somewhere down by her knees and the backside looking like a crumpled sack waiting to be filled with potatoes. The short-sleeved blouse seemed to have been designed with a buxom matron in mind, and one with arms as thick as her legs, not a skinny, flat-chested 14-year-old. What kind of monstrous creatures worked in this Blue Room?
Then Gladys noticed the final addition, which had fallen to the floor by her feet – a piece of checked cloth which was evidently intended for a turban. ‘How am I supposed to wear that?’ she muttered, scooping it up. She twisted it around her head a few times, shoved the end under the rim, and tried unsuccessfully to poke her red hair beneath the material.
As she left the cloakroom, the dungarees flapping between her legs almost tripped her up. She followed Julie McTaggart into a long, narrow room which was painted blue. ‘This is where we print the packets for the sugar,’ Julie told her.
Around twenty girls were standing at machines of varying sizes. They were chatting and laughing loudly, singing along to music, or talking to young men who were hauling great reels of paper onto one end of the machines. Behind a glass partition was an office where the forelady Peggy Burrows sat, busy with her paperwork.
As Julie approached, a hush immediately fell and several girls rushed back to their machines from other parts of the room.
Gladys stared at them open-mouthed. Far from the monstrous creatures she had expected, they were all extremely young, slim and glamorous, their dark-blue uniforms neatly tailored to show off their figures and their checked turbans not roughly assembled cowpats like her own, but towering works of art that gave them the stature of models. As they returned her gaze, some of them began to giggle and Gladys’s pale skin turned bright red as she remembered the baggy dungarees swinging between her legs.
‘Be quiet, the lot of you,’ snapped Julie. She turned to Gladys. ‘Let’s get you to work.’
At each machine, a girl stood watching the progress of the paper, checking for smudging as it turned dark blue and the white letters ‘TATE AND LYLE PURE GRANULATED SUGAR, UNTOUCHED BY HAND’ emerged. The machine then cut the papers down to the size of sugar bags and spat them out at the other end onto a pallet which, when full, was taken away by one of the boys to the Hesser Floor for filling. Every now and then the girl would pick up one of the stacks of paper, fanning them out and expertly counting them in fives up to 1,000. Everybody, Gladys noticed, had blue ink-stained fingers.
Julie led Gladys over to a machine. ‘If your reel starts running out, call one of the boys to replace it immediately, and keep an eye on the ink duct – if it’s running low, get an engineer to top it up,’ she told her. ‘And if you need the loo, put your hand up so someone can take your place. We can’t have the machines stopping for anything.’
Gladys nodded.
‘Maisie!’ Julie shouted across the room. ‘Stop flirting with the reel boys and come and show Gladys the ropes.’
Gladys turned to see a young blonde woman saunter across the floor. She was without doubt the prettiest and most glamorous of all the Blue Room girls, and that was no mean feat. Her uniform seemed to be a few centimetres tighter even than everyone else’s, and the top few buttons of her blouse were undone. She walked with a distinctive wiggle, which the best-looking boy on the floor was currently doing an impressive job of imitating behind her back. When she heard the other boys begin to whistle at