London sugar bakers
SUGAR production has a long tradition in east London. Today, Tate & Lyle, with its Silvertown works, is the only cane sugar refiner in the UK.
But a century ago things were very different. In 1864 there were 74 refineries in the country, and the home of sugar refining was in the heart of the East End.
Paid in beer!
But it was a far cry from the hygienic, state-of-the-art factories of today. In 1876, James Greenwood was researching his book, The Wilds of London. His descriptions of the sugar bakers of Spitalfields describe a scene reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno.
The sugar firms employed several thousand men, and were so desperate for labour that they would offer unlimited beer as a bribe. Irish immigrants, the mainstay of much labouring work at the time, weren’t interested in such unpleasant work, and the firms ended up having to import labour from Germany.
To Greenwood, the East End was like a foreign country, the business a mystery to him, and it seems appropriate that his guide was a German missionary. Greenwood was revolted by what he saw… and smelled.
“Soon as I put my head in at the door of the bakery, the nature of the manufacture in progress was at once made apparent to my senses.
“Just as unmeasured indulgence in sugar is nauseating to the palate, so was the reek of it palling to one’s sense of smell. You could taste its clammy sweetness on the lips just as the salt of the sea may be so discovered while the ocean is yet a mile away,” he wrote.
Whitechapel provided sugar to the whole country. The raw cane would come in to the West India Docks, and countless backstreet sweatshops would set about the business of transforming the dark, rough raw material into a gleaming white confection.
Greenwood wrote: “In Backchurch Lane, in White-chapel, there are dozens of these baking, or, as they would more properly be called, boiling-houses.
“They are buildings enormous in size, usually occupying the whole of a street side, and so high that the massy ‘mats’
of sugar craned up to the topmost storey.”
Grim conditions
The conditions were as grim as you might have expected of a Victorian factory.
“Low-roofed, dismal place with grated windows, and here and there a foggy little gas-jet burning blear-eyed against the wall.
“The walls were black – not painted black. As far as one might judge they were bare brick, but basted unceasingly by the luscious steam that enveloped the place, they had become coated with a thick preserve of sugar and grime.”
And it quickly became apparent to Greenwood why the Irish wisely turned down work in the sugar bakers.
“The close, reeking, stifling place, the disgusting atmosphere, the incessant toil and the disgusting conditions of it… better a hod of bricks with a 60-round ladder to mount out in the open air than such mean, enervating drudgery as this.”
Greenwood’s guide remar-ked that without the generous helpings of beer, the labourers would be dead within weeks. It was common practice at the time for men in such dehyd-rating trades to continually refuel with ale, a diet that would have been slowly killing them anyway.
It is unlikely that the Whitechapel bakers would have passed any modern food standards tests, either. Spotting what appeared to be large heaps of mud, Greenwood was told that these were the scrapings from beams and the shovellings from the floors, gangways and workshops – once the stuff had been filtered through charcoal, it would be deemed fit to be sold to the public, as pure white sugar.
But even as Greenwood wrote, the East End trade was declining. In his book East and West London, the Reverend Harry Jones wrote: “In 1864 there were 23 producers of loaf sugar in London. Since then their trade has shrunk very seriously. A short time ago I believe only three survived, and the chief of them, in St George’s in the east, has ceased operations in the course of this year.”
And very soon the trade would move down river to Silvertown, where the two great rivals, Messrs Tate and Lyle, would vie for business.
The Wilds of London, by James Greenwood. Published in 1876 by Chatto & Windus.
East and West London, by Rev Harry Jones. Published by Smith, Elder & Co in 1875.