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

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 the spectacle, she swung her head round with a swish of her beautiful hair. ‘Give it a rest, Alex, you ain’t got the hips for it,’ she told him.

Julie McTaggart looked at Maisie disapprovingly before marching off, her hands behind her back.

Maisie walked over to Gladys, and leaned in to whisper in her ear. ‘She was in the ATS in the war,’ she said, nodding to Julie. ‘Thinks she still is.’

Gladys giggled. Then, looking up at Maisie, she found herself mesmerised by her eyes. Each one was framed by the thickest, darkest, most luscious curled lashes she had ever seen.

‘Like ’em?’ Maisie asked, batting them seductively. ‘I bought them myself. Now let me introduce you. That’s Joycie and Eileen – they’re sisters – and Rita their cousin. Over there’s Ruthie, Annie, Blanche and Joanie,’ she said, pointing to girls who looked no more than 14 or 15 themselves and who gave her a friendly nod. ‘And that’s the other Annie, Dolly, the two Lils and Ivy the cleaner,’ she added, waving to some women who looked very grown-up. They must be in their early twenties at least, thought Gladys.

‘That cheeky bugger working on the scrap paper is Alex,’ Maisie said, ‘and the reel boys are Robbie, Johnny, Barry and Joey – he’s that sweet one over there who’s lame in one leg. A word of advice – don’t get stuck behind a reel with Robbie or you’ll find his hands wandering where they shouldn’t.’

‘Oh no they won’t,’ said Gladys confidently, ‘or he’ll get a clout from me.’ Inwardly she felt relieved that there were some lads here she could have a laugh with, amid all the glamour girls. She had grown up with four brothers, and most of her friends in Plaistow were male.

Gladys soon discovered that working in the Blue Room was far from strenuous, and after twenty minutes or so she began to realise that the hardest thing about it was keeping her concentration. She found it was perfectly possible to take her eyes off the job for several minutes at a time and look around for something more entertaining to do – as long as she turned back quickly enough when Julie McTaggart came past on patrol, or Miss Smith appeared on her daily round. Since the other girls appeared to be terrified of Miss Smith, a shout of ‘The Dragon’s coming!’ went up from the person nearest the door as soon as she approached, and the warning was quickly passed around the floor.

The best opportunity for fun came from the reel boys who, working on a floor full of girls, were in a permanent good mood. When Barry went past with a reel of paper, Gladys fell into easy conversation with him. ‘They left you room to grow in that, have they?’ he teased, pointing to her outfit.

‘Oi you, don’t be cheeky,’ she retorted. ‘I’m not so skinny I couldn’t lift one of those reels of yours.’

‘Nah, girls can’t do it. That’s why you need us strong men around,’ he joked.

‘Oh yeah?’ she said. ‘Pass me one then, and let’s see.’

As she turned towards him, away from her machine, Gladys felt something tugging at the back of her right thigh. Maisie’s warning about Robbie’s wandering hands flashed into her head, and she quickly looked over her shoulder, her fist clenched in readiness to deliver the promised clout.

To her surprise, there was no one there. Instead, she looked down with horror to see that the machine was giving her dungarees the alteration they so desperately required, wrapping the baggy material round and round a spindle and making them increasingly tight.

‘Barry, help me!’ Gladys said, turning back to him while frantically clutching at her behind.

‘Oh, so you’ve changed your mind now, have you?’ he joked. ‘You girls do need my help after all?’

‘No, you don’t understand – I’m being sucked into the machine!’ she cried, pulling at the material with all her might and feeling it slip, bit by bit, through her fingers.

‘Yeah, nice try,’ laughed Barry, turning away with his reel.

‘It’s cutting off my blood flow!’ Gladys hollered, her face bright red with the effort of resisting the machine. Her right trouser leg was now at least as figure-hugging as those of the other Blue Room girls, and it was getting tighter by the second. She could feel a creeping numbness at the top of her thigh.

Barry dropped the reel he was holding, which went careering along the floor leaving reams of paper in its wake, and grabbed her around the waist. ‘Let’s pull at the same time,’ he said. ‘Maybe we can rip the material.’

Gladys nodded.

‘Ready? One … two … three!’

They both yanked as hard as they could, but the factory-issue dungarees were sturdy. Gladys herself was now pressed right up against the machine. ‘It’s going to swallow me,’ she gulped.

Other girls ran over to see what the commotion was about and one of them began to scream.

‘Turn off the machine!’ shouted Barry.

‘But we can’t – we’re not allowed,’ said Maisie, flustered.

‘Turn it off now!’ screamed Gladys, silencing them all.

One of the other reel boys ran round to where a big red button waited, ready for the unthinkable act. He slammed his hand down hard and the machine whirred briefly before coming to a final, juddering halt. The spindle gave up its claim on Gladys’s trouser leg and she pulled it free, feeling the blood rushing back all the way down to her foot. She gave the machine a heartfelt kick of retaliation.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Julie McTaggart shouted, rushing out of the office. ‘And how dare you turn off this machine!’

Gladys opened her mouth to protest, but Julie didn’t give her a chance to answer.

‘Get to Miss Smith’s office immediately,’ she told her.

The other girls stared at Gladys as if she had just been handed a death sentence.

‘Good luck,’ whispered Maisie, anxiously.

‘The rest of you, back to work,’ snapped Julie, and they all hurried off to their machines.

Inside the Personnel Office the two Betties were typing away, but there was no sign of Miss Smith.

‘Oh, hello,’ said Betty Phillips. ‘We didn’t expect to see you again so soon.’

‘I couldn’t stay away,’ quipped Gladys, bitterly.

Miss Smith marched into the room and took her seat behind the desk, leaving Gladys standing awkwardly before her. ‘So what have you done? I’m waiting,’ she demanded.

‘They had to turn off my machine,’ Gladys admitted. ‘But it weren’t my fault! I only looked away for a second, and my trousers got sucked in.’

‘You shouldn’t have looked away at all,’ Miss Smith told her sternly. ‘Not only is it extremely dangerous, but if the machine has to be stopped then the company loses money.’