Love Lane Lives
The history of sugar in Liverpool and the effects of the closure of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, Love Lane
Some facts about the Matricide of Love Lane
Written by Ron Noon at 20:43 on Friday, December 05th 2008
An act of matricide was perpetrated when Tate & Lyle’s oldest and tragically misnamed Love Lane sugar cane refinery was junked. The internecine sugar wars between beet and cane sparked off by British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) appeared to have been the main cause of this and throughout the 1970s the amount of refining capacity was far in excess of the amount of raw cane allowed into the country under the new negotiated arrangements. A valiant ten year struggle by the Workers Action Committee, local MPs and church leaders, to keep open this prominent Liverpool landmark ended in defeat when the refinery officially closed on the 22nd of April 1981. For over a century the refinery had dominated physically and economically the Vauxhall and Scotland road communities, just north of the city centre. The other port refineries that purged and processed the raw cane imported by Tates from largely African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, (ACP) were in Silvertown London, and Greenock Scotland. Despite the general problems facing the industry they were regarded by Tates management as more economically viable than Love Lane.
In 1976 five years after the first rumours of closure leaked out, it was obvious that the greatest disadvantage in closing Love Lane would be social not economic. “The loss of 2,000 jobs near the city centre would be more than the end of a business enterprise - it would obliterate community.” That widespread view, expressed by the Liverpool Daily Post on its Business pages, failed however to influence Tate’s management decision making. Paying lip service to it did, and “imposed” plant “rationalisations” followed by the introduction of 12 hour shifts, brought the labour force down to just under 1600 by 1981. The fact that the British government was vigorously opposed to belated EEC proposals in 1980 to reduce beet quotas was ominous for Love Lane. Now the tidy arithmetic of overcapacity in the port refineries, (300,000 tonnes was almost exactly what Love Lane was then producing), was exacerbated by a British Sugar Companhy (BSC), hitherto hampered by the weather and poor crop returns, now reaching record output figures and squeezing sugar cane outlets even tighter.
Given the much greater refining margin afforded sugar beet, Tates could not win in any price wars. What ensued was an increasingly aggressive market share exercise by BSC, undercutting Tates, especially with larger buyers such as supermarkets. An Economist magazine article estimated the refining margin advantage of beet over cane at £20 per tonne. That was in the month that the closure of Love Lane was announced.
Entry into the EEC and the Government’s signal failure to negotiate an adequate refining margin for partially processed raw cane, had been a persistent handicap. Previously it had been the UK Treasury but now it was Brussels that fixed the refining margin at a much higher level for the raw beet grower and refiner. Beet imports and increased production from BSC compounded these difficulties. The problems of joining the EEC and securing supplies hitherto easily catered for under the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement, (CSW) had been dramatically overshadowed by the great sugar shortage and crisis of 1974 when prices went through the roof. Poor crops in the USSR in 1971 and then Cuba in 1972 meant the former buying increased quanties from the “free market” to meet its own requirements. World stocks were reduced and steeply rising prices and feverish speculative activity “brought chaos to the market, especially the special (preferential) arrangements”. Prices reached a short lived peak of £650 a tonne when even garages used sugar to lure “sweet toothed” motorists to their pumps. Inevitably consumption would level off and the premium on autarky and increasing production was primed by these extraordinary prices of 1974-75.
Autarkic means the pronounced desire for self sufficiency and as my friend Tony Hannah pointed out “sugar is one of the most autarkic of soft commodities”. The situation today is that “among countries with a significant capability of agricultural production, only New Zealand, Norway and the Republic of Korea are not producers of some quantity of sugar”. In 1974-1975 this resulted in a panic overreaction amongst governments, which unmistakably contributed to a number of negative long term consequences including not just a boost to the developing HFCS industries in America and Japan, but also the conviction that the world sugar economy was entering into a phase of permanent deficit. Increased support prices in the EEC and innumerable expansion programmes elsewhere lay the seeds of oversupply and plunging prices, soon after.
The beet lobby interest, so strong in Europe and particularly in France, trenchantly insisted on a massive expansion, which the commissioners willingly agreed to. They did so by increasing the tonnage which each country could grow, and as suggested above the raising of support prices. In Britain a Government White paper published in 1975, “Food from our own Resources”, gave BSC the green light to expand and to complete the processing of raw sugar in its own sugar beet factories by building on more “white ends”. The construction of white end capacity, meant that the refining and granulating of raw sugars which BSC had previously sent to Tates was now increasingly done “in house”. That erosion and eventual loss of supplies of raw sugar, compounded the problem of overcapacity in cane sugar refineries like Liverpool which historically had handled both cane and beet supplies. Another cruelly ironic fact was that once the panic of 1974/75 died down, Europeans were actually found to be eating much less sugar. That contraction in demand and the search for other sweeteners such as HFCS, was to take place alongside the building up of a “costly and embarrassing sugar mountain”. So when BSC eventually started to reach its generous EEC quotas in the late 70s the threat to the jobs of those in the cane sugar Port Refineries was acute.
A leader article in the Economist at the time when the 90 day redundany and closure notice announcement was made on January 22nd 1981, spotlighted “the problems created, because the European Economic Community has rejected the economics of comparative advantage in agriculture”! The World Development Movement (WDM) had used another important economic argument eight years earlier, by warning that “if production costs are compared…not in terms of money but by looking at what the land and labour in each country could produce if they were put to their most profitable other uses…then beet production, because of the far greater opportunities available to resources in rich countries is substantially more costly”. Anyone wanting to understand a subject far too important to be left to the sucrose experts would quickly grasp that the “Beat the Beet, Keep the Cane” campaign of the Love Lane refinery workers, was based on sound economic logic rather than “protectionist” instincts.
To use the jargon of the professional economist the “opportunity cost” was considerable. The egregious European Economic Community’s sugar policy meant that sugar beet producers were paid nearly three times the world sugar price in the late 1970s, which encouraged them to overproduce their inferior solar collector. Who were the beet producers? There is no such thing as a Beet Farmer because beet is a rotation crop and so already “rich” first world farmers were being subsidised to produce a crop that the “hunger crop” cane growers could not compete with under RIGGED market conditions. The basic sugar fact from Napoleon onwards when the ugly mangel wurzel beet appeared for the first time on the sweetener block was that cane (other things remaining equal or to use the latin language of some older economists, CETERIS PARIBUS) is by far the most efficient collector of solar engery! The International sugar economy is not a level playing field man.
This global misallocation of resources was compounded by the further misuse of EEC taxpayers money then used to subsidise the export of these huge surpluses. “Dumping” them onto the “free” world sugar market had a disproportionately deflationary effect on the prices which third world countries were so much more dependent on, than in the protected and regulated markets of Europe and North America. The conclusion for me is inescapable. “The EEC’s Sugar regime is fundamentally contradictory in the way in which it relates to the developing country cane producers. On the one hand it gives preferential trade to a handful of countries under the Sugar Protocol of the Lome Convention. On the other hand, in failing to exercise restraint over its own production of sugar beet, it has contributed directly to chronically low world market prices for sugar which have led to considerable hardship for many Third World Producers.” (February 1975 was Lome!)
Merseyside by the early eighties was suffering a similar if obviously milder version of the damage to Third World sugar cane countries caused by the economic madness of the EECs Common Agricultural Policy. (CAP or Mad CAP disease!). Accelerated job losses in other sectors of employment in the late 70s had suggested that the “Bermuda Triangle of British Capitalism” was in Merseyside. So tragically the city which had been renowned internationally in the 1960s for the sound of the Mersey Beat and the Beatles, was by the early 1980s, ostensibly Britain’s first internal “Third world” victim of the sugar beet. The EEC was however only one factor in the decline of Love Lane, a factor nonetheless which was skilfully and cynically magnified by management, to divert attention from their own reasons for wanting rid of the mother plant.
The skill and the cynicism was not necessarily that of local management, but the local roots of this Sugar Giant meant that the parent company were able to project a company spirit very different to that of the other Multi National Companies (MNCs) grafted onto the local economy post 1945. Phillipe Chalmin described the birth of that remarkable “company spirit” in the inter-war years. “On the whole the working conditions did not stand out against the norm.. were it not for the constant promotion of a ‘family-like company spirit’ (supported by numerous social and sporting activities encouraged among Tate & Lyle’s employees). On the long term this policy paid off, securing for the company the loyalty of many an employee…Tate & Lyle thus evolved. ..towards the most typical form of paternalism.” Generations of Tates employees, were very effectively “socialised” into accepting, relatively uncritically this perception of a soulful and paternalistic company. “It was a good company to work for” was the constant refrain of so many of its employees.
Arguably in Liverpool where casualism and insecurity were endemic, that feeling was even stronger. The recruitment policy of the old Tates had been that children followed parents into the employ of the company and “parallel to the Tate & Lyle dynasties, dynasties of employees emerged and sometimes three generations would be working at the same time for Tate & Lyle”. That selective recruitment policy aside, the firm’s ability to contrive and sustain the image of paternalism was achieved with very little expenditure in terms of actual effort. Indeed the culture of opposition that manifested itself amongst other groups of Liverpool workers in that era of company closures and rationalisations, did not manifest itself at Love Lane and its long established local roots meant that Tates effectively were able to project a company ethos very different to that of the other Multi-nationals that had operated branch plants on Merseyside post 1945. Down to the mid 1970s especially, it was an impressive and effective piece of local theatre. (What’s wrong with the concept of theatre when evaluating politicians and companies?)
Long service employment meant that in the 70s while the company was clearly not recruiting labour of all ages the consequence was “a seriously ageing labour force”. The Vauxhall Community Development Project (VDP) surveyed the age structure at the plant in 1973 and noted that over half were aged 45 years or more “and now each year a couple of hundred of the total labour force are presented with their long service retirement clock”. The most significant effect of rationalisations and job cuts was irreparable damage to the local community. This euphemistically named natural wastage was “another word for redundancy by proxy”. It meant that “you won’t be thrown out of work, but it means that your child or your neighbour, or your neighbour’s neighbour, won’t get a job when he wants one. And since job movement is something of a chain reaction it means that your own job chances will be that much slimmer at the end of the chain.”
The VCDP reported a typical example: “My father worked here for fourty four years. He retired when he was 58 with bronchitis, and died when he was 60. The furthest he ever went was to bed because he was tired, it was so hard here. You know we were born and bred for Tate’s.” Job prospects for older workers whose expertise and experience was very particular to sugar refining were very gloomy. Through family and home commitments they had less propensity to move elsewhere in search of work, and long term unemployment was the sickening reality for so many “sweet fighters” like Albert E Sloane. Indeed one of the sweeteners on the company pill of rationalisation was the offer to create new work in related though diversified new products, including even proposals for a sugar based detergent factory. The workers action committee on the basis of “half a loaf is better than none” were prepared to go along with job cuts as long as some form of presence was kept on the historic site. For a time it seemed as though a “job for job” policy was being pursued, but when TALRES (Tate & Lyle Research) went into partnership with an American chemical company to build a detergent plant it was on a green field site eight miles away from Love Lane. (Kirby or Z Cars?)
Those stark facts made it all the more nauseating to reflect back on the warmly persuasive references that were so often made about “Tate’s”, the local firm that for over 100 years had been well known for job security and paternalism. At one time no doubt it had reflected pride and perhaps the knowledge that Love Lane had been set up by the dynamic entrepreneur and former grocer Henry Tate in 1872, six years before he decided to build Silvertown in South London. The mother plant had been built on what had been a “des res” site where rich merchants once lived, and where their wives and daughters had perambulated along the “charmingly named Love Lane, Ladies Walk and Maidens’ Green”, glimpsing as they did eye catching views of the river. This rural idyll coincided with the opprobrious trade in human cargo that George Cooke railed against, but pre-dated the construction of the Leeds Liverpool canal and the general processes of industrialisation and urbanisation which transformed the enchanting landscape of Love Lane into coal yards, brick fields and glue factories.
During the nineteenth century a political essayist was to unintentionally emphasise the obstacles to “gender solidarity” when he referred to middle class “ladies” and “mere biological females”. By 1870 the residential requirements of the Victorian middle class and their daughters had changed more dramatically than that of their working class sisters. The former habitat of ladies was left with only the charming name which a 100 years later was thought to have been dreamed up by someone on the popular TV show, “The Comedians”!
“You have no idea how massive Love Lane refinery was. It was a city on its own. Huge and like Topsy it had just growd over a hundred years.” That was the pertinent description provided by John McLean, a former maintenance fitter, popular scribe, and secretary of both the Love Lane workers action committee, and the national Port Refineries Committee. Another former Tates employee, J A Watson, a company chemist and historian of the family, expressed its scale and magnitude in this way:
“For 109 years travellers approaching Liverpool by train from the North, knew they were near when they passed the refinery with its prominent sign: firstly Henry Tate & Sons and then Tate & Lyle Ltd. Soon however the refinery and its sign will be gone: just another seemingly permanent landmark that has vanished.”
The local firm had clearly exported its success elsewhere, and despite claims that its real heart would always continue to beat in Love Lane, by 1981 this was the most expendable plant. The destruction of the original site used by Love Lane ladies was of far less consequence than the demise of the “blue turbaned” biological females from Chisenhale, Eldon and Burly’ streets who had been employed in the packing sections of the refinery. Renowned for their famous headgear and distinctive trousered uniform, their “perambulations” around the packin’ and over “the bridge on the River Kwai”, (the canal separated the male process workers from the predominantly female packers), was of course historically much more significant in the collective memory of the blighted community.