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Twenty years ago I was finishing off some “prep” for a Summer School at Liverpool University organised by one of my former Poly students Mick Boyle who was their Director of Go Higher. (The Poly was the People’s comprehensive and we had so many ace “mature” students like Boyley.) It was a three week event which included locals and a large number of African American students over from Birmingham Alabama. I was to be their go to SUGAR MAN so they got this specially commissioned ESSAY as a welcome to our city.
Posted by Ron Noon in on Tuesday, June 08th 2021
NERVE magazine did a feature on our TEAM’S success in securing that David win over Goliath on 28th April 2006, when the Sugar Goliath financed the wonderful REUNION bash for the girls and boys from the whitestuff at the Eldonians.
Posted by Ron Noon in on Friday, April 30th 2021
The Chief feature writer of the Echo for so many years was “furloughed” last year and then I found out was retiring. Not only a talented and empathetic writer and supporter of public history projects on his adopted city but he was also a BLUENOSE. What follows below are the pages he wrote to help make Friday 28th April 2006 a great night for THE GIRLS AND BOYS FROM THE WHITESTUFF. Thanks also to Tony McGann, Alan Bleasdale, Jimmy McGovern, Brian Reade, Jack Jones and Tony Benn. (Comment: Norra bad team to take on a SUGAR GIANT and win!)
Posted by Ron Noon in on Wednesday, April 28th 2021
This 90 day REDUNDANCY PART LETTER written to the CEO of TATE & LYLE in January 2006 certainly did. It started off as distinctly “VAINGLORIOUS” but culminated on a warm sunny evening on April 28th in a wonderfully memorable reunion of two hundred and fifty former Tate & Lyle workers at the Eldonian Village Hall. I’m pinching myself given it was exactly 15 years ago this very night as I type this out that I was also a BOUNCER on the door. (There were only 250 tickets and there were some gatecrashers trying to get into a reunion bash financed by Tate & Lyle. Oh what a night!.
Posted by Ron Noon in on Wednesday, April 28th 2021
It is hard for someone who never worked there to evoke the passion and drama of the closure of Henry Tate’s mother plant but this Love Lane Lives public history project has at least ensured that important memories and work and life experiences do indeed live on. We all experience the “cruel impartiality of time passing” but forgetting is not what we do here. WRITING and remembering is aimed at defeating time as in the words of Paul Theroux, “forgetting is much worse than failure”. Thanks to Joe Liasides his POEM below is a powerful evocation of community and friendships.
Posted by Ron Noon in on Thursday, April 22nd 2021