Severity: Notice
Message: Only variable references should be returned by reference
Filename: core/Common.php
Line Number: 239
Written by Ron Noon at 22:48 on Thursday, January 29th 2009
The last blog was written on New Years eve, a time when there is always a premium on thoughts about absent friends, but also our hopes and ambitions for a brand new 2009 chapter of Love Lane Lives. When deciding upon the most appropriate name for our website we relied on the elasticity of the English language because the title and your commentaries are the best means we have for ensuring that those remarkable working and community lives LIVE on. So please use this website again and again to make suggestions for what you want to see included and don’t hesitate to SIGN OUR GUESTBOOK
“After a long absence I was recently in the area. The only thing I recognised was Burlington Street bridge and that was only because it was named. Pity there is n’t a forum on the site. It would be interesting to read other people’s recollections and stories.”
“I really enjoyed the film. It brought back so many memories for me…My dad (nicknamed Wiggy) worked at Tates for 27 years as a driver on the tankers and he loved every minute of it…It was a crying shame what happened. They took away Tates but they will never take away the memories.”
The comments made by Mike Greenall from Staffordshire a couple of days ago and the one’s from “Wiggy’s” son from Garston Liverpool, on the 16th January, are not only what this LOVE LANE LIVES website is intended to be about, but an opportunity to ask for much more in the way of commentary and opinions from as many other people who have memories of working in the Lane and in the Vauxhall community. Contrary to what some colleagues have suggested, I never worked there and therefore I do not have “property” in the stories and reminiscences of the real boys and girls from the whitestuff.
As a history teacher dedicated to ensuring that Love Lane lives and stories live on, I have been delighted over the last decade and “a bit” that my research into this amazing but too much taken for granted commodity and the role it has played in world history, has been stimulated by meeting up with and talking to so many former employees of a “Sugar Giant” that did more than sweeten the nation’s breakfast tables. The “craic” and conversations I have had in the Punch and Judy public house over the road from Lime Street Station, every four to six weeks over the last ten years, have never been congenial to taped interviews and films but in every other respect the venue has provided me with a knowledge and insight into Tate & Lyle refinery lives and the incredible characters and personalities that worked and lived in that Sugarland community just north of the city centre.
I’ve mentioned in earlier commentaries that it was the company decision in 1999 to scrap the biennial Christmas party that really galvanised me into “research action” and much greater involvement with the surviving refinery employees. (A bitter sweet Christmas Story from the last millennium Dec 22, 2008 “The company decision to continue the tradition of delivering a Christmas hamper to its non-executive employees was the last vestigial relic of what had once been a local family firm. But as the barman in the Beehive called out the very last orders from the partying but increasingly dejected looking pensioners, that token gesture looked about as substantial as the froth on Albert’s pint of bitter.”)
In April 2005 after issuing Tates with a 25th anniversary “90 day Redundancy party notice” on January 22nd, we were successful in persuading the company to finance the celebrations in the Eldonian Village Hall. It was like “Uncle Sugar” coming home to the Lane again, a flight of the Phoenix after the devastation of closure in 1981. The party was on the site of the now world famous Eldonian Housing Co-operative where Henry Tates mother plant and the FAIRIES refinery which Tates took over in the late 1920s, had been located.
200 places were not enough and many were disappointed at not securing a ticket for the re-union. The good thing to have come out of that flight of the Phoenix was the added momentum it gave the Love Lane Lives project and that is what we need to take advantage of in 2009.
In another letter written by Mike Greenall to the website email address earlier on in January, he comments: “I have n’t seen any of my former workmates since the factory closed so it was nice to see some of them in the film, though I was sorry to read that Paddy Brannigan had died recently.” Sadly that was where my last “blog” on December 31st left off. The PJ gang lost Paddy, Billy Price and Donny Milner but not their stories and their spirits. They live on.
That reminds me of a wonderful letter written by the late Peter Leacy in relation to the last Christmas party at the Brittania Adelphi on December 3rd 1999.
“Mr Richard Springford, the ‘human resources’ supremo from T&L London, for whom I had worked during my southern sojourn, was appointed to deliver the final address of welcome and farewell at the Adelphi. I was annoyed when no senior staff person or ex Love Lane bothered to reply either in gratitude for past Christmas dinners or to express regret at the ending of them. So I introduced Mr Springford to my old T&GWU shop steward, Bob Bannister who asked a very valid question…… ‘Would it spoil some vast eternal plan if these Christmas get-togethers were to continue every two years, after all in ten or fifteen years most of us will have left for greener pastures?’.”
Too many of those extraordinary ordinary lives have ended and Bob Bannister himself died two years ago. He has left for greener pastures but we have some great tales about him and Peter Leacy who was a remarkably talented letter writer as well as Tate & Lyle tanker driver. (Wiggy was a driver and so too was the remarkable Jim Smith the 97 year old who tells his stories in our film.)