The Sugar Girls: Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle’s East End

Gladys looked at the floor. ‘It would never have happened if they’d given me the right size uniform,’ she muttered bitterly.

‘I think you’ve forgotten my fourth rule,’ said Miss Smith.

‘What’s that?’ asked Gladys, struggling to recall anything before the life-threatening incident.

‘No cheek,’ said Miss Smith, firmly.

When Gladys returned to the Blue Room, the girls were astonished to see her. ‘We all thought The Dragon was going to sack you,’ Maisie whispered. ‘How come you’re still here?’

‘I dunno. Beginner’s luck?’ shrugged Gladys.

When break time finally came, the girls invited her to come with them for breakfast at the café across the road. ‘You don’t want to bother with the canteen here, it’s too dear,’ Maisie told her.

They joined a gaggle all heading across the road, some of them dressed in dungarees and checked shirts like her own but in a lighter blue. ‘Those are the Hesser girls,’ said Maisie, disdainfully. ‘Look at them, they’re like navvies!’

As they neared the café they saw two dockers who were about to go in. Hearing the girls’ chatter, the men glanced behind them and immediately changed their minds. ‘We’re not going in here, mate,’ said one to the other, as they hurried off. ‘Not when it’s full of sugar girls.’

Once inside, Gladys could see why. The place rang with the noise of female shift workers laughing, singing, chatting and shrieking, while the café owners ran around like maniacs trying to deal with the breakfast rush.

She looked at the menu. Eggs, bacon, tomatoes, bread and butter … and fried mushrooms! Gladys had never eaten mushrooms before, and after the events of this morning who knew if she’d survive long enough at Tate & Lyle to get another chance to try them?

‘I’ll have mushrooms on toast,’ she said confidently, as if ordering her usual.

The mushrooms arrived, tender and dripping with butter, and Gladys savoured each bite of her exotic treat, while trying not to appear too excited. As she did so, the other girls confided to her the secrets of the Blue Room. Printing was the easiest job in the factory, they told her, so she was very lucky to have been given it. Theirs was one of the smallest departments – much smaller than the Hesser Floor – and therefore far more exclusive. Peggy Burrows, the forelady, took such pride in her machines that every night at the end of the late shift the girls were told to stop work half an hour early to clean them with methylated spirits till they shone.

But the biggest source of pride was the fact that the Blue Room had acquired the unofficial title of the Beauty Shop, thanks to the svelte appearance of the girls. One of their number, Iris – a six-foot stunner – had gone down in legend for running off to Paris to join the Bluebell Girls as a topless dancer. It was beginning to dawn on Gladys that there were standards she was expected to uphold – and that she was rather ill-equipped to do so. Had Miss Smith sent her to the department for her own amusement?

‘Why are all your uniforms so tight compared to mine, then?’ she asked, butter dribbling down her chin.

‘They weren’t when we got them,’ winked Joanie. ‘The trick is, once you get them home, you put a seam up the front and back of the dungarees so they fit more snug. You’ll have to take your blouse in, too.’

‘Then you’ll have to get that turban up a bit higher,’ put in Joycie.

‘How do you do that?’ asked Gladys.

‘Knickers,’ she said.

‘Knickers?’

‘Yeah, you wind up the turban with stockings, knickers, socks, whatever you’ve got. Helps bulk it out a bit. Flo Smith don’t like it – a notice went up saying we wasn’t to do it no more, but bit by bit we’ve been sneaking them in again.’

Work finished at two p.m., but Gladys knew she still had a long afternoon ahead of her. She was determined to rein in her unwieldy dungarees before tomorrow, and that meant taking them in by hand – a laborious process, especially given her pitiful needlework skills.

She caught her two buses home and turned the corner into Eclipse Road, where she spotted the group of local lads she usually hung around with, going up the street with a football. Among them was a bespectacled boy called John, whose mother always made him wear a ridiculously short leather sports jacket. ‘Oi, Bum Freezer!’ Gladys shouted. This was her nickname for him, in return for which he called her ‘The Girl with the Lovely Legs’, which was guaranteed to annoy a tomboy like Gladys.

‘You coming for a kickabout?’ he asked her. ‘We’re going over Beckton Road Park.’

Gladys considered for a moment. She would dearly love the opportunity to give John a good thrashing at football, especially considering how stupid he looked right now in his jacket. But then the image of the glamour girls in the Blue Room floated back into her mind.

She sighed. ‘Can’t. Got more important things to do now, ain’t I?’

On Wednesday, Gladys went into Tate & Lyle with her head held high – very high, in fact. Her turban was now stuffed full of as many of her brothers’ socks as she could find, as well as several pairs of knickers and a few stockings for good measure. Her dungarees had been sliced almost in two to fit her skinny frame, and the crotch was now where it belonged.

As she walked into the Blue Room, the girls nodded in approval. ‘I like your turban, Gladys,’ said Joycie. ‘It’s even taller than Maisie’s!’

‘Thanks,’ said Gladys, with attempted nonchalance, shoving the enormous bundle back into place as it began to slide down her forehead.

To the girls, Gladys had come top in the day’s unofficial fashion stakes, but the boys saw her new headwear as an irresistible challenge – particularly since they knew what must be wrapped up in it. When the coast was clear, Robbie and Joey gave each other a quick wink and Joey walked over to Gladys’s machine with a concerned look on his face. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, frowning as he pointed to the ink duct. ‘I think you might be running out of ink.’

‘Really?’ said Gladys, peering into the duct, unaware of Robbie sneaking up behind her. ‘But I only just had it filled up.’

She felt the turban sliding forwards again as she leaned over, and put up a hand to steady it. But before she even reached her brow, Robbie had already flung out an arm and whipped the turban clean off her head, leaving Gladys to grasp at nothing but a handful of ginger curls.

‘Oi, give that back, you buggers!’ Gladys shouted, spinning round in time to see the checked cloth flying through the air, her assorted underwear cascading out of it as it unravelled. The boys’ laughter was so loud it momentarily drowned out the noise of the machines. Then it stopped abruptly.

Gladys followed their gaze and watched as a pair of white knickers finished its graceful flight and landed, with perfect precision, at the toe of a very large ladies’ shoe. She looked up at the shoe’s owner and found herself meeting the angry stare of Miss Smith, who had arrived on her daily round of the factory.

‘Pick up your things immediately,’ she barked, as Gladys scrambled to collect the offending items. ‘The turbans are for safety, not for making fashion statements.’

Gladys hurried back to her machine, but when Miss Smith had circled the room she stopped by her again. ‘I’ve got my eye on you,’ she said, before marching out of the door.

On Thursday morning, Gladys’s mother brought her freshly washed uniform up to her room, along with her bowl of bread and milk.

As Gladys pulled on her dungarees, they seemed smaller than she remembered, and she had trouble getting her feet through the leg holes. By the time she had squeezed her thighs and bottom in, the once-baggy dungarees seemed to have become even tighter than any in the Blue Room.

Gladys attempted to sit back down on the bed and felt a sharp pain around the tops of her legs as the material pinched her skin. She ate her breakfast standing up, before hobbling painfully down the stairs.

At work, Maisie regarded her pityingly. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You didn’t take the dungarees in before you put them in the laundry, did you? They always shrink the first time you wash them.’

Gladys spent the morning standing rigidly at her machine, trying not to breathe in too deeply and dreading the inevitable moment when Miss Smith would come by on her daily round. When she saw the matronly form entering the room, she rolled her eyes. ‘Here we go,’ she muttered to herself.

‘Gladys Taylor,’ said Miss Smith, with undisguised pleasure, ‘I know you’re intent on making an impression here, but how on earth do you expect to bend over in those?’

By Friday, Gladys was almost beginning to feel at home in the Blue Room. She might not have been as glamorous as the other girls there, but they seemed to have accepted her as the department’s token tomboy. She had even proved useful by piercing a few of the girls’ ears in the toilets, and at break times she had begun to join the reel boys in a game of football in the yard rather than spending all her time chatting in the café.

After a week of trials and tribulations, she felt she had been well and truly initiated into life at the factory. But the reel boys had other ideas.

Among Tate & Lyle’s male workforce, the tradition of initiation rituals was strongly embedded, and usually involved sugar or syrup being poured down the new recruit’s trousers. Girls weren’t generally subjected to this sort of thing, but Gladys had unwittingly set herself up as fair game. So what was the appropriate initiation for a boyish girl?

Barry, Joey, Johnny and Robbie put their heads together. It couldn’t be anything too mean, they reasoned, or they’d look like bullies. But Gladys didn’t seem like the kind who’d burst into tears at a bit of good old-fashioned fun, either.

‘I’ve got it,’ said Joey, with a sparkle in his eye. ‘The telpher.’

The telpher was a large wooden crate which went around the outside of the building on a cable, carrying items from one department to another. It made its journeys a good twenty feet in the air and was most certainly not designed for human cargo.

The others looked at him apprehensively. ‘What if she breaks it and falls out?’ asked Barry.

‘Nah, she won’t,’ insisted Joey. ‘She’ll be safe as houses.’