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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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It was ten years ago and a day that Tate & Lyle told the PR band to play…

Written by Ron Noon at 23:18 on Thursday, December 03rd 2009

Tate & Lyle’s Liverpool pensioners were eagerly anticipating the 1999 company-supported “biennial” Christmas party, in the Britannia Adelphi hotel, only to be shocked and saddened by the contents of a letter from John Walker, the Managing Director of the Sugar Giant’s European Division. “Regrettably, this reunion will be the last one held”. His final sentence, hanging ominously over Mr Cube, the famous sword and shield brandishing, company cartoon, stressed how “this has been an extremely difficult decision to take but I hope you will understand that the company has to continually review and reduce its costs”. 

Albert E Sloane, a sweet fightin’ man who had figured prominently in the ten-year struggle to prevent the closure of the comically misnamed Love Lane refinery, the mother plant in Henry Tate’s empire, was clearly very angry with this attempted “rationalisation”. He’d never lived his working life as a cost of production and yet history appeared to be repeating itself as another Tate & Lyle sponsored domestic tragedy for the feisty 77 year old. These were the thoughts that flicked through his mind as he and the surviving boys and girls from the whitestuff assembled for their last Christmas Party, beneath resplendent streamers strung across the banqueting hall of a once quite magisterial hotel. Cold business logic was matched by the weather outside on Thursday, December 2nd 1999.  Even wrapped up in sugar-coated mangement rhetoric the letter announcing their last Tango on Lime St. was perceived by the majority, who like Albert had devoted most of their working lives to this company, as nothing less than Scrooge like meanness of spirit. Smile, it’s Tate & Lyle. No thank you!
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There’s an earlier and more detailed blog entitled “A bitter sweet Christmas story from the last Millennium”! It’s dated 22nd December 2008 less than a month after our website went online.