Liverpool and the Sugar refining industry

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LIVERPOOL'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF SUGAR REFINING
- Neville H. King

Beginnings in Liverpool.
The first 'sugar house' in Liverpool was reputedly established in about 1673, by Allyn Smith (a notable sugar refiner of London), possibly on the bankside of 'the Pool' where it entered the River Mersey (near the present Redcross Street) as shown on the conjectural map for 1705 prepared by Henry Peet in 1905. Another sugar house is shown by Peet at Redcross Street/Preeson's Row on the south side of the castle then still in existence. This is known to have been built in 1670-3 by Richard Cleveland and Daniel Danvers - the latter originally came to Liverpool, in 1670, aged 23, on behalf of Allyn Smith, a relation by marriage.

Progress in the 18th century.
By 1768 there were 8 sugar houses. Five of these are shown on George Perry's map of 1769:

1. 'Sugar House Yard' - north of the Old Dock and east of Old Strand Street - this is obviously the site of the presumed first sugar house although by 1769 a long way from the water's edge with Salt House Dock built in front of it. By 1900 it had been redeveloped.
2. 'Sugar House near the Pig Market' - this is on the same site as the second sugar house in 1705 in Redcross Street although the castle has now been demolished and replaced by St George's Church. Both church and works had disappeared by 1900.
3. 'Sugar House in John Street' - now North John Street, it was on the corner of Harrington Street which was as far as John Street then extended. By 1900 the works had been replaced by office buildings which still exist.
4. 'Sugar House in Argyle Street' - which ran off Hanover Street southwards to the west of Duke Street. Redeveloped by 1900.
5. 'Sugar House in the Hay Market' - roughly where Victoria Street now meets the tunnel entrance. In 1900 this was a goods depot.

Sugar firms in mid-Victorian Liverpool.
By the mid Victorian era sugar refining was expanding into an industry on a much larger scale. None of the sites previously identified were then in existence.

Gore's Directory for 1872 (and Watson's book of 1982) lists the following sugar refiners:
1. Fairrie & Co - 253 Vauxhall Road (started 1847?)
2. George Jager & Co - Black Diamond St (off Vauxhall Road) & 77 Burlington St.
3. Henry Tate & Sons - 12 Love Lane.
4. James Leitch & Co - 14 Blackstock St (between Vauxhall & Scotland Rd) & 19 Wellington Rd.
5. Edward Crossfield & Co - 20 Blackstock Street.
6. MacFie & Co - Bachelor Street & Vernon Street.
7. Crosfield, Barrow & Co - 32 Vauxhall Road.
8. Sharp & Galloway - no address.
9. Sankey Sugar Co - 6 Dale Street (not the refinery).
10. Joseph Heap & Sons - Upper Pownall Street, Park Lane.
11. Liverpool Sugar Refining Co - Victoria Street.
12. The Liverpool's 'Saccharine' Co (Manbre's glucose)

In Gore's Directory of 1899 the following names had appeared as sugar refiners: (probably dealers)
13. Bostock & Co - Cook Street.
14. William E Criddle - 245 Vauxhall Road.
15 Freeman, Lloyd & Co Ltd - Limekiln Lane.
16. Reynolds Bros Ltd - North John Street.

Henry Tate & Consolidation in the 20th century.
John Wright & Co had a sugar refinery in Manesty Lane (to the east of Paradise Street) probably since 1809. In 1859, Henry Tate, a successful grocer in Liverpool, joined the firm as a partner, a relationship which lasted ten years. But Henry Tate also started his own refinery in 1862 at 1 Earle Street (east of Old Hall Street), and 2 years later added a molasses refinery at 1-3 Edmund Street (which crosses Earle Street). Moving to Love Lane in 1872, future expansion was achieved by buying out their major competitors, partly to eliminate competition and partly to acquire their sites for extensions. The dates of acquisition are:
1925 George Jager & Co
1929 Fairrie & Co
1938 MacFie & Son
In 1921 Tate's amalgamated with Lyle's of Greenock.

Growth of the Sugar Industry.
In 1704, some 27 years after the start of the industry in Liverpool, only 760 tons of raw sugar was imported through the port. By 1785 this had risen to 16,600 tons shared between up to a dozen sugar houses.
The abolition of the slave trade (by British ships) in May 1807 might have been expected to affect trade with the West Indies and United States, but this was not so and the growth of trade continued apace. Cotton imports from the American plantations became a greater proportion of the total imports but sugar imports were still on the increase.
When Henry Tate started his new refinery in 1872, production at this one plant alone was 20,000 tons a year. It reached at peak of 550,000 tons in 1972 and this had declined to 300,000 tons per year by the end of production in 1981. At its peak sugar consumption in Britain reached 2.6 million tons per year.

The Early Processes of Sugar Refining.
Sugar originally arrived in this country as a brown sticky substance. The production of the white crystalline sugar we know today is the result of a long period of development in sugar refining.
In early Victorian England sugar would have been bought in lump form broken from 'sugar loaves' - granulated sugar did not exist. Sugar tongues were used to break up the lumps for adding to a cup of tea. 'Sugar loaves or lumps' as dispatched from the sugar house (refinery) were conical shaped and weighed from 25 to 150 pounds. The colour (and cost) depended on the number of stages of refining it had gone through. A great deal of water and steam was used in the boiling, casting, reboiling and baking to increase the purity and whiteness of the sugar. Temperatures up to 140°F were to be endured in parts of the refinery. From the first stage treacle was drained, and from later processing, syrup.

The German connection.
Work in the sugar house was heavy, hot and subject to a degree of hazard. Illness was common, and life expectancy short. It was not attractive to the English worker and was even shunned by the Irish labourers (although they eventually made up the largest proportion of unskilled workers). It was because of this refiners recruited German workers in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. In fact, some of the refiners themselves were of German origin. This firstly applied to the large sugar industry in London and then progressed to Liverpool in the middle of the 19th century with the opening of Jager's refinery.
It was usual for batches of about 2 dozen men to be brought over mainly from the Hamburg area. The pay was high, particularly if you were a skilled sugar boiler. The hours were long but there were perks - gallons of beer to replace the body moisture lost in the terrific heat!
In Liverpool there was a large German immigrant population in the second half of the 19th century, some being connected with the sugar industry. In 1851 census there were 44 German born sugar workers. By 1881 this had risen to around 200.

Family connections with sugar.
My great great grandfather, John Phillips, was a sugarbaker in Liverpool in 1849, a few years after he arrived from his birthplace in Hesse-Darmstadt - one of the many German Duchies & Principalities which eventually formed modern Germany in 1871. (Incidentally, there was a beet sugar industry in H-D). He became a 'sugar boiler' and a 'sugar refiner' and rose to be 'foreman in a sugar refinery' by 1871. From the various addresses, I suspect he started his career with Leitch's, went to Jager's, and then returned to Leitch's (as foreman?) by 1868. It was in that year the my great grandfather started as a warehouseman with Leitch's and, in the following year, married John Phillips's daughter. Was 'Johannes Philippi' brought over by one of the refineries? - or was he an economic migrant escaping famine in Europe following the failure of the potato crop? - both are possibilities. John Phillips died in 1878, aged 55, from a lung complaint, probably due to the working conditions.

Summary.
The sugar refining business started in London in the middle of the 16th century. In Liverpool the first sugar house was established in 1667. It was carried out in a modest way for some 40 years but really took off with the growth of the slave trade shipping operations from Liverpool after 1709. The abolition of the slave trade by British ships in 1807 did not halt the expansion of the business. Because of fierce competition from the Continent in the 1860's, Henry Tate, a successful Liverpool grocer, realised more efficient production on a much larger scale was needed if British sugar refining was to survive. By firstly, in 1872, building a new refinery using the latest technology, and later (by his descendants), taking over a number of their rivals and then amalgamating with Lyle's, the Tate family created the giant sugar company known today around the world.
It took the EEC's Common Agricultural Policy to bring to an end, in 1981, Liverpool's 314 year connection with the cane sugar refining business.

........Neville H King: Feb 1997; Revised Oct 2000.

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THE BOYS AND GIRLS FROM THE WHITESTUFF
- Ron Noon

Liverpool's history is inextricably linked to the politics and power of a taken for granted everyday commodity. The white stuff in the packet, technically termed sucrose, is a simple dissacharide carbohydrate, containing a mix of fructose and glucose molecules and popularly known as sugar. Its main source before the nineteenth century, was a reed which Pliny the Elder claimed, "produced honey without the intervention of the bees"! Sugar cane, the quintessential slave crop, the "white gold" that assuaged Europe's seemingly insatiable cravings for sweet things, was arguably then and now, the major commercial source for the most political of all foodstuffs. "Strange that an article so sweet and necessary for human existence should have occasioned such crimes and bloodshed." That lucid indictment of sugar's nefarious history, by the Oxford scholar and former Prime Minister of Trinidad, Dr Eric Williams, evokes terrible images of transatlantic trade in human cargo, the African Diaspora and less obviously, the lubricating role played by eighteenth century Liverpool, which unequivocally developed as a "slave city first" !

Five hundred yards up from the Liverpool waterfront is the splendid town hall whose corridors are still adorned by busts of blackamoors and elephants. It was built in the late eighteenth century when powerful slave trade interests were coming up against popular agitation to end this evil trade, and in the decade when a drunken actor was cruelly booed by an audience of rich merchants inside Liverpool's Theatre Royal. George Cooke's response as he coruscated off stage, was scathing. "I have not come here to be insulted by a set of wretches, every brick of whose infernal town is cemented with an African's blood." Arguably in a city with one of the oldest indigenous black populations in Britain, it is not just thespian echoes that resonate in its outstanding civic buildings.

Liverpool's infamous history as the capital of the slave trade has belatedly been addressed, but 65 years after Britain's part in that opprobrious trade ceased, the city took on another leading role. Love Lane refinery was established in 1872 as the mother plant and refining heart of Henry Tate's sugar dynasty. Tate & Lyle, the "Sugar Giant", has operations spread over five continents and over fifty countries but for ex-employees from Love Lane, historical consciousness is what counts today. 109 years after the ex-grocer set up shop in the Lane, an act of matricide was perpetrated. The tragically misnamed site, despite years of struggle to keep the plant open, was closed down in April 1981. Ostensibly this was because of the surplus capacity in cane sugar refining, caused by Britain's commitment to the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Economic Community, which heavily subsidised rival sugar beet production. The threat of closure indecently hung over the plant for ten years and a Liverpool Daily Post article in 1975 summed up what was at stake. "The loss of 2000 jobs near the city centre would be more than the end of a business enterprise - it would obliterate a community."

Tragically the city which had been renowned internationally in the 1960s for the sound of the Mersey Beat and the Beatles was to become the first main victim of the sugar beet! "We have been living in an atmosphere of crisis for eight years, but when the blow comes it's like a sledgehammer in the solar plexus" declared John McLean on January 22nd 1981, in response to the issuing of the 90 day redundancy notices. McLean was secretary of the Workers Action Committee and known in the local press as "the scribe". That accolade was justified by his numerous letters and pamphlets and a moving valediction which concluded how "part of the structure of the city is being thrown to the wolves in the name of profit, in the name of the Common Market, and in the name of very greedy people". A solution to overcapacity in the port refining industries, and a definite lifeline for Liverpool, was cut off in 1980 when the Government rejected the EECs moderate proposals for reducing its structural sugar beet surplus. That would have meant reducing the British quota, which the Government, strongly influenced by the National Farmers Union, was loath to do. Margaret Thatcher, and Peter Walker the Minister of Agriculture, (now Lord Walker and non-executive Director of Tate & Lyle), emphasised that the closure of Love Lane was "entirely a commercial decision", which they would not interfere with. That said the chances of staving off closure in 90 days were remote to impossible.

The valiant resistance by a genuine "Congress of Merseyside", that included workers, local MPs, councillors, and prominent church leaders, could not arrest the spate of rationalisations and redundancies which had tagged the region as "the Bermuda Triangle of British Capitalism". Generations of workers had refined raw sugar cane from predominantly African, Caribbean and Pacific countries but those historic links were terminally severed on April 22nd, when the Tate's workers joined one of the longest dole queues in Europe. "When the 'decline and fall' of Liverpool is eventually written, let it be said of the Tate & Lyle Action Committee that there was no disgrace in failure. Disgrace comes in not having tried. And by God they tried." That comment by Peter Leacey, one of the company's transport drivers, summed up a struggle that had actually lasted over 3000 days and culminated in "glorious defeat".

In 1982 a year after closure, powerful thespian echoes resonated loudly, not just in Liverpool but throughout Britain. They articulated like a lorry into the national consciousness, not just of the best of British drama, but of the baneful effects of mass unemployment. The unemployment blackspot depicted in Alan Bleasdale's magisterially bleak, "Boys from the Blackstuff", was of course Liverpool, and his final scenes were filmed to the accompaniment of bulldozers flattening both the comically labelled Love Lane site and the Crystal Club which had been the social centre for Tate's workers. It was hard to conceive that the recruitment policy of this one time "family firm" had been that children followed parents into their employ, meaning that sometimes three generations would be working at the same time for Tate & Lyle.

This seemingly permanent landmark that had dominated economically and physically the area just north of the City Centre exemplified how "all that's solid eventually melts into air". Indeed it was more than that. Community can be a warmly persuasive word and feeling, but not when it is blatantly blighted. TV screens now depicted that theatre of paternalism being physically deconstructed, as Bleasdale used the actual violence of Love Lane's demolition as stage prop for his fictional characters. Perhaps accidentally representations of "Tate & Lyle in the Community" were being tested for the first time by the most famous of Liverpool playwrights.

The award winning series demonstrated more effectively than the unemployment demonstrations of the early 1980s, the sheer waste, futility and demoralisation of being without work in Thatcher's Britain. In the closing scene Chrissy, Logo and Yosser (Gis a job) Hughes, are seen leaving a manic "pub redundancy party" in the Green Man and tramping disconsolately alongside the refinery walls. Despite Bleasdale's impeccable craft skills, the irony was that the writer was only subliminally aware of the proxy voices of the boys and girls from the Whitestuff, when he wrote that last compelling piece of dialogue. "What's going wrong Logo?" asks the dejected Chrissy. "Everything La, everything." There were no smiles. This was the real Tate & Lyle, the soulless global corporation that Henry Tate, the entrepreneur and philanthropist had unintentionally bequeathed to the world.


...... Ron Noon, 10 January 2001.

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