Love Lane Lives
The history of sugar in Liverpool and the effects of the closure of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, Love Lane
Mr Cube: July 28th 1949 to ?
Written by Ron Noon at 14:28 on Tuesday, July 21st 2009
Before Mr Cube’s appearance on this letter I knew a little about “History’s most famous sugar lump” but was immediately prompted into conducting intensive research by a comment from Albert E Sloane, that by stealing Christmas from the Liverpool boys and girls from the whitestuff, Mr Cube ought to be stripped of his sword and shield and made to wear a Scrooge hat with matching ball and chain!
Not long after my vainglorious campaign to bring back Christmas for the Liverpool Tate’s pensioners began, I serendipitously discovered how after Cube’s first appearance in the Evening Standard on July 28th 1949, the command from the President of Tate & Lyle, Leonard Lyle, a former Conservative MP and close friend of Conservative Opposition leader Winston Churchill, was that he “must always be a knight in shining armour” and never “a psalm singing little bugger”.
On holiday in Vancouver with my wife there’s little time for me to put a big blog together (the weather’s fantastic) but it was this psalm singing littler bugger that actually buggered Labour’s plans for a Jubillee Party in February 1950 the election month in which “election expenses” would be vigilantly scutinised and when much to the chagrin of Clem Atlee and his deputy, Herbert Morrison, the labour landslide of 186 registered in 1945 was reduced to 6.
It was Mr Cube’s mean spirited Christmas Carol to the Liverpool pensioners in 1999 that was the genesis of this website and the Love Lane Lives project so my encounters with this animated product of the fertile imagination of former Daily Express cartoonist, Bobby St John Cooper are not all negative.
In fact blog readers can reflect on why the theme of my essay in HISTORY TODAY October 2001 was GOODBYE MR CUBE. Why was he put into premature retirement at 50? Why was he replaced by Lyle the Lion? Next Tuesday Cube can reflect on ten years of retirement. Did he get a better deal than the Love Lane refinery workers did in 1981? Silly question but behind what might seem a quaint little chapter in business iconography, and Britain’s post-war version of Asterix the Gaul, are many unresolved issues and questions about a swashbuckling champion of free enterprise and Tate & Lyle.
Paraphrasing the words of August Cochin Mr Cube’s 60th birthday next Tuesday is a great opportunity to reflect on some lessons in political economy, in politics, and also in morality.
There is also an essay in the North West Labour History Journal for 2006 on the Litigious Consequences of Mr Cube.