The Sugar Girls
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| Author | Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Tate & Lyle, The East End |
| Published | 2012 (Collins) |
| Pages | 352pp (paperback) |
| ISBN | |
| Followed by | GI Brides |
| Website | http://www.thesugargirls.com |
The Sugar Girls: Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle's East End is a bestselling work of narrative non-fiction based on interviews with women who worked in Tate & Lyle's East End factories in Silvertown from the mid-1940s onwards. Written by Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, the book was published by Collins in 2012. The authors were inspired to write it by Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife.
In the East End of the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of girls left school every year at fourteen and went to work in the factories that stood alongside the docks in Silvertown, in the East End of London. The stretch of factories running between Tate & Lyle’s refineries for sugar and syrup was known as the 'Sugar Mile', and also included Keiller's jam and marmalade factory. Tate & Lyle's two factories had been built in the late nineteenth century by two rival sugar refiners, Henry Tate and Abram Lyle, whose companies had merged in the 1920s.
Of all the factories in Silvertown, Tate & Lyle's offered the best wages and social life for girls leaving school. There were various jobs available to women workers at Tate & Lyle's factories, including printing and packing the bags of sugar, and making the tins of Lyle's Golden Syrup. Women who worked there showed great 'loyalty' and 'pride'. They were, however, very tribal, and depending on which factory they worked at, workers would speak of themselves as coming from 'Tates's' or 'Lyles's', competing against each other at netball, athletics, football and cricket in the company sports day, which was held once a year.
Although the book is based on interviews with over fifty former workers, the four main characters featured are:
As well as these four main women, the book features various other individual stories, such as:
Nuala Calvi, one of the co-authors of the book, characterised the female workers at Tate & Lyle – known colloquially as the 'Sugar Girls' – as 'glamorous', at least by the standards of teenagers leaving school in the East End in the 1940s and 1950s. They would take in their dungarees, making them figure-hugging, and stuff their turbans with underwear to make them sit high up on their heads, which was considered fashionable. But she also claimed that the women shared a common confident ‘attitude’ and were 'no pushovers', likening them to the striking workers at Ford’s Dagenham plant featured in the popular movie Made in Dagenham.
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