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Love Lane Lives - the boys & girls from the whitestuff

Love Lane Lives

The history of sugar in Liverpool and the effects of the closure of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, Love Lane

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Another Eulogy to John Maclean

Written by Ron Noon at 17:01 on Saturday, March 07th 2009

A couple of days ago I received a beautiful card from the late John Maclean’s daughter, Julie, thanking me for the tribute I devoted to “The Scribe” at his funeral service on the 26th February. “We wondered if you would like Dad’s Frank Green painting of Tates refinery” as “it would seem appropriate either in your home or office”. I felt touched and honoured by Julie’s kind offer of a painting from one of Liverpool’s best known artists, one that my sugar mentor had gazed at with a mixture of nostalgia and pain over Tate’s “leaving of Liverpool”. It will be a gratifying reminder set in front of this computer in my home study, that the Love Lane lives film and website project owe a tremendous amount to the promptings and enthusiasms of John Maclean and his great friend, Albert E Sloane. 

I did n’t cry when I gave my speech, reminiscing John’s key role in the struggle to keep the lane open.  The family comes first and I was acutely aware that Julie’s words as older daughter and young Amy’s as one of John’s granddaughters were the precious ones. In their sadness and grief they nonetheless recounted witty and amusing episodes in John’s life which enabled me to talk and quote from the sweet fightin’ scribe’s account of the campaign to save the refinery and its workers livelihoods.  It was a wonderful humanist service and it provoked everyone in attendance to indulge those “delicious tears” later on in the White Horse in Woolton. John would have loved the craic and the pint!

John’s father was from Glasgow and it was a great source of pride and satisfaction for this life long socialist that his dad had named him after the famous labour leader and “revolutionary” John Mclean who had figured so prominently in 1917 in the events of “Red Clydeside”. Our John was born ten years later and in 1942 became an apprentice engineer building ships at Cammell Lairds over in Birkenhead before using his engineering skills away at sea. He was always a great reader and would be fittingly described as an “organic working class intellectual”. His university was life on land and sea and his quoting of Shakespeare in union leaflets and his inveterate letter writing reminded me of what a wonderful talent and facility he had with words as well as with the more orthodox tools of his craft.

When John returned from sea he lived in Speke, south Liverpool, with his lovely wife Jean and his son Duncan and daughters Julie and Sue. Working for Dunlops on Speke Industrial Estate, developing his reputation with the Amalgamated Engineering Union, John eventually ended up as a maintenance engineer in Love Lane, the giant sugar refinery that he described as “a city within a city”.

John was a life long member of the Labour Party and was elected as city councillor and then later county councillor so it was hardly surprising that his skills of organisation and oratory were in great demand when the first “action committees” were set up to defend the refinery from threats of closure. That’s how he got to know Albert E Sloane who like John was also a life long socialist and trade unionist. Albert worked on the B shift in the process and given the characters employed there he always called it the “Balmy shift”! Albert became joint Chairman of the Action Committee and John became its secretary.

Both sagely advised me that “if you get to understand sugar you will understand capitalism”. They also warned me about the archival task: When the refinery closed sacks of unsorted documents were “transferred to the home of John Maclean, the continuing Secretary of these changing bodies”. It was in that Bellairs council home off Queens Drive Liverpool that company historian J.A. Watson was allowed “to sort through some of it” before “the several hundred weight of papers” were eventually transferred to the archives of the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, now Liverpool Museums.

“What is most strikingly apparent is how the initial committee, starting with small beginnings eventually took upon itself the responsibility of having a finger in many pies, so much so that that eventually John Maclean and Albert Sloane, a future co-Chairman, were working practically full time on the affairs of the Committee or its associates.” 

John told me that in the plastic bags of documents, (subsequently decanted into brown museum boxes), I would find his “exercise books. They were my day to day diary, every meeting I went to I scribbled something in. It was my bible, I was able to refer to dates and times and places…Whenever we had conversations like we’re having now about the past, I never trusted me memory. I always said, right hang on a minute and flick back’.”  He then exhorted what he regarded as the “single biggest task” which is quite obviously “to collate all that material. Do it in date order so that it starts to make sense of the story. We changed our name on route quite a few times. It started off as a management trade union committee. We soon ditched the management… and they were a bit of a hindrance to us, so we formed an action committee”!

There is so much more that needs to be written about this struggle and the documents and sources have and will continue to generate many gems and insights that will appear on this web site. What I want to do finally in this second dedication to John is to leave people with a few more examples of the scribe’s insight:

“To me the closure triggers the end of Merseyside as a major connurbation, not only because the factory was such a central and large part, but because it was almost the last part…One consoling thought - if there can be one - is that we were the only factory on Merseyside which survived more than twelve months after an announcement of closure. Because they did tell me we were closing in 1971.” There is an amusing and poignant part in the film where you see John laughing and saying “We got ten years”. That was no mean achievement in a city that was described at that time as “The Bermuda Triangle of British Capitalism” and where tragically thousands and thousands were losing their jobs on account of rationalisations and closures.

This is a great letter from J Burton of Birkenhead dated the 29th March 1981

“Dear John and Albert, please accept my sincere gratitude for the untiring and sustained time and effort you and the Action Committee as a whole have put into the campaign to save our jobs over the last few years. I know that during this period you have had to put up with some bitter criticism if not downright opposition to your efforts, and it is easy to criticise whilst sitting back waiting for someone like yourselves to come up with a reward from an almost impossible situation. I am sure that I speak for the majority of people at Tate & Lyle, Love Lane, and certainly from my particular department when I say, ‘no one could have done more’ and I say once more thank you and I wish you good luck for the future.”

Albert never got a job again but John did say that he had some luck because after getting onto a degree course at my university he was then elected as a full time trade union official of AEU where he served until his retirement. His academic career was sacrificed for the trade union struggle that had always shaped his decisions.

“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,’ said Mr John Maclean, refinery worker, city councillor, self declared ‘Scouse Nationalist’ and national secretary of the port refineries trade union committee. ‘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. We have kept this place going but for the management we have had only a grudging and almost petulant assent to the idea that it would have gone long ago had it not been for trade union action. They have made the wrong commercial decision in wanting to close their best and original refinery although it should still be needed in future because the Third World is not going to go away. For the people of Liverpool it means the dole, a pathway to nowhere. But in the Commonwealth it means actual lives at stake, they are cutting off the outlet for the sugar output of one whole Caribbean island.”  Peter Hildrew Symbol of a sweet past and bitter future 23.1.81 Guardian

What a great example this is of how John, who worked for so long on the lane, was always keenly aware of, the lives beyond the lane, and how African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (ACP) could be threatened with far worse than redundancy and a longer dole queue. John was an internationalist and had sagely advised me right from the start of the project that the story of sugar was the story of global capitalism. It is also a story of brave, sage John Maclean. RIP