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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While the Second World War was a time of misfortune for many in the East End, Gladys Taylor’s family seemed to have something of a lucky streak. Although their house had received a direct hit on the first night of the Blitz, seven-year-old Gladys, her four brothers, baby sister and parents had survived – emerging blinking from their Anderson shelter just a few feet away, completely unscathed.
They had just been admitted to the local rest centre, in the basement of South Hallsville School in Canning Town, when they were intercepted by Gladys’s Aunt Jane. ‘Don’t even bother staying here, the place is packed to bursting,’ she advised them. ‘We can hitch a ride to Kent instead, and go hopping till things quieten down.’
Soon the whole family was huddled in the back of a lorry, relieved to be getting out of harm’s way. They began to curse their decision, however, when a German fighter plane swooped and began machine-gunning the vehicle as it was going over Shooter’s Hill. They passed the rest of the night cowering underneath the lorry, wishing they hadn’t listened to Aunt Jane, before finally making it safely to the hop fields in the morning. But little did they know how fortunate they had been.
While the Taylors spent the next two days hop-picking, the 600 people at South Hallsville School continued to wait for the coaches that were due to pick them up and take them to the countryside. Sunday and Monday went by, and still the vehicles hadn’t arrived. They were offered no explanations, just endless cups of tea. A rumour went round that the drivers had mixed up Canning Town with Camden Town in North London and gone to the wrong place.
As darkness fell again on Monday night, so too did the bombs. One made a direct hit on the school, demolishing half the building and causing many tons of masonry to collapse onto the people huddled below. Hundreds of terrified men, women and children lost their lives, in one of the worst civilian tragedies of the Second World War.
Five days later, when the Taylors returned to London to pick through the wreckage of their home, neighbours’ mouths gaped at the sight of them. Their names had been on the list of those declared dead, and if not for Aunt Jane they too would have ended their days in the wreckage of Hallsville.
Some attributed the Taylors’ luck to the fact that Gladys’s mother Rose was from a well-known gypsy family, the Barnards. A tiny Romany woman with long, plaited hair rolled into enormous coils on either side of her head, Rose had been expected to marry inside the gypsy community. But after a childhood spent roaming the fields of Kent and Sussex in a caravan, she had been determined to give her own children a more settled existence.
To that end she married a young man from Tidal Basin, near the Royal Victoria Dock, moving into a flat on Crown Street right next door to his parents. The neighbourhood was full of sailors who had married and settled down there – many of them black men who had taken up with local white girls, lending the road the nickname Draughtboard Alley.
Rose may have wanted a settled life, but her new husband Amos, a red-headed and rebellious seaman, had other ideas. Perhaps she should have heeded the warning lying in his parents’ garden – Amos’s uniform, helmet and gun, which had been hastily buried there when he deserted from the Army and ran off to sea during the First World War.
After fathering three sons with Rose, Amos did a second disappearing act, going AWOL from the family for 18 months without a word. When Rose could bear his silence no longer, she threw off her pinny and marched up to the shipping office, demanding that her husband be traced. The errant father was discovered to be working as a professional footballer in New Zealand, and duly returned with his tail between his legs.
The arrival on the scene of Gladys, with a shock of red hair just like her father’s, prompted the final showdown between Rose and Amos, whose seafaring could no longer be tolerated now that there were six mouths to feed. 19 Crown Street trembled to the sounds of the almighty row, which ended in his service book being ripped up and thrown onto the fire. Amos accepted his fate, and a job in the docks – where he would wistfully sing the dirty sea ditties of his youth. But he never quite forgave his daughter for thwarting his ambition.
Fourteen years later, Gladys’s own ambition in life was to become a nurse. Playing doctors and nurses had been a favourite game ever since, aged three, she had fallen ill with diphtheria and had her life saved by the staff at Sampson Street fever hospital. She had also been told more than once that, compared to other girls, she was remarkably unsqueamish, a virtue she assumed was much needed in the medical profession. Having been brought up with four brothers, she was a natural tomboy who didn’t think twice about picking up spiders or other creepy-crawlies, to the horror of the girls at school – a habit which frequently landed her in the headmaster’s office. One day she had pierced her own ears out of curiosity, and she was soon piercing those of the local gypsy boys as well. She was used to the sight of blood, thanks to her dad’s hobby of breeding chickens and rabbits to sell at the pub, which he would slaughter and nail upside down in the back yard to drain.
With no qualifications to her name, save for a half-hearted reference from her long-suffering headmaster stating that she was a trustworthy sort, Gladys headed straight to the hospital on Sampson Street as soon as school was out, and collected an application form.
She returned excitedly to Eclipse Road, clutching the papers in her hand.
‘What’ve you got there, love?’ her mother asked.
‘It’s my papers from Sampson Street. I’m going to be a nurse!’
‘Oh yeah?’ said her father, raising his red eyebrows. ‘And do you know what you have to do when you work in a hospital?’
‘Well, look after people and all that,’ said Gladys.
A mischievous grin spread across Amos’s face. ‘You have to get old men’s willies out and hold them while they wee!’
‘I’m not doing that!’ shrieked Gladys, who had never seen a grown man’s willy in her life.
‘Well you’re not going to be a nurse then, are you?’ said her father, erupting into a loud belly laugh.
Gladys tore up the papers in disgust and threw them onto the fire, watching her own ambitions fly up the chimney. ‘What am I going to do then?’ she moaned.
Her dad grinned with satisfaction. ‘What do you think? Go down Tate & Lyle’s like everyone else.’
On Monday morning, Gladys found herself outside the Personnel Office at the Plaistow Wharf Refinery. A shiny new sign on the door read: MISS FLORENCE SMITH, LABOUR MANAGERESS.
Gladys knocked reluctantly and a deep voice issued from the other side of the door. ‘Come in.’
Inside the pokey little office, three women were seated behind a single long table. In the centre was Miss Smith, a huge, broad-shouldered boulder of a woman with a stern, matronly look. Her blonde hair was cut in a short, severe crop, and her grey suit and white blouse were buttoned up so tight over her enormous bosom that it was a wonder she could breathe. She was a recent appointment to the top woman’s job at the factory, although no one who met her would ever have guessed.
The other two women in the office were both called Betty. To Miss Smith’s left was the young Personnel secretary, Betty Harrington, and on her right sat her deputy, Betty Phillips, a thin woman with glasses.
Miss Smith nodded to