Love Lane Lives
The history of sugar in Liverpool and the effects of the closure of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, Love Lane
Our film was shown at the Tate three years ago LAST NIGHT, but BIG SUGAR loves TONIGHT best!
Written by Ron Noon at 15:55 on Sunday, October 31st 2010
“Historian Ron Noon’s decade-long obsession with the Liverpool sugar industry led to the making of the film Love Lane Lives: The Boys and Girls from the White-stuff, which is to be screened tonight at the Tate.” That was Vicky Anderson’s take on my “sugarcentricity” in an essay she wrote in the Liverpool Daily Post on October 30th 2007. All the hard work and effort that Leon Seth, Maggie Skilling and I had invested in the project, culminated in a great night three years ago last night! TONIGHT as I write these words I am keenly aware of other more taken for granted anniversaries and the fact that HALLOWEEN in the twenty first century has become in North American a $4 billion sugar festival which in the words of another film maker, Brian McKenna, has made tonight “a marketing dream for the sugar industry”.
Sadly since this picture was taken Tommy and Billy have passed away.
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More about Brian McKenna and his amazing 2005 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation film BIG SUGAR, later.
Our more modest film funded by the Heritage Lottery and not CBC explores how Henry Tate became Britain’s Rockefeller not with oil but white gold, and how after 109 years of refining in the Lane, and the devastation of the Vauxhall community just north of the city centre, the phoenix eventually rose from the ashes in the guise of the Eldonian Housing Cooperative! This model of community-led sustainable urban regeneration received the accolade of a World Habitat Award in 2003. When I mentioned the award to Albert just before introducing him to the main man behind the Eldonian project, Tony McGann, he retorted bitterly that a WORLD UNINHABITED AWARD would have been more fitting in describing the HOLE that Tate & Lyle had left in the Vauxhall Community with the closure of Henry Tate’s mother plant. Our film also captured footage of the historic 25th anniversary re-union of the Tate pensioners at the Eldonian Village in April 2006 and set the scene for our recurring theme of LOVE LANE LIVES LIVE ON. So three years ago YESTERDAY there were three very excited but very anxious sugar project people just hoping that everything would go right on the night!
I’d gone as a “fan” in 2000 to a Jimmy McGovern film premiere of LIAM, but while I know that the slightly younger brother of one of my best mates is a brilliant scriptwriter, (albeit a pretty mediocre footballer compared with the once lightning fast and jinky Joey), I’d never thought at the start of the new millennium that I’d ever be involved in the scripting, “making” and celebrating of a film, especially one about SUGAR! It turned out to be a wonderful evening and drinks of sugar in solution were quaffed back by everyone it seemed but me. I had to introduce the film and did not want to be under the influence of the fermented stuff so I just ratcheted up my sobriety. I thought this is the Tate and what a supremely ironic venue it was for a film focussed on the former SUGARLAND just north of the city centre. This was the setting of a Modern art gallery on the Albert Dock named after Henry the 19th century sugar baron, and well stocked on the night with wine and nibbles and the “craic” of over 100 people. I belatedly discovered that the only way to relax a little before the “curtain went up” was to go to the back of the building and look out over the historic and world famous River Mersey and see the flickering lights from Birkenhead illuminate where the great ships had made passage. I thought about another Henry, a mid 20th century seaman who was my dad and my wonderful mum Julia and what would they have thought if they’d been “at ar Ronnie’s opening film night”! My dad had lived in Burlington Street in the heart of the Love Lane community and had gone to school at Our Lady’s Eldon Street so there were a couple of circles being completed on OCTOBER 30TH 2007.
Anyway I need not have worried so intensely because as the pictures below show it was a great night and LOVE LANE LIVES LIVE ON.
Shock, horror in the last hours of Halloween 2010! The technology of placing the photographs is letting me down. It’s got to be the technology. It can’t be me! I’ll have to leave this space and come back to it with the missing pictures and move on to Brian McKenna! (Anyone more technically minded might be interested to know that this is the frustrating message that is threatening to send me into Basil Fawlty rant mode! [“This error (HTTP 500 Internal Server Error) means that the website you are visiting had a server problem which prevented the webpage from displaying.
For more information about HTTP errors, see Help.] SEE HELP!!!!
(Twenty four hours on I’ve added the pictures below. It must have been the technology!)
That’s Christy examining our colourful Love Lane Lives Poster
That’s ar sugar gang with Jimmy Mc
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Our talented young film director, Leon Seth
Dave McGowan and Bill
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Big Sugar is a two part documentary made by CBC for 2005 and scripted, directed and narrated by Brian McKenna. It explores the sinister history and contemporary clout of the world’s sugar barons! I used clips from it with my students a couple of years back and most found it compelling viewing not least because of the way it reveals how so many today are “slaves to a sugar based diet” and also because of McKenna’s use of dramatic reenactments of sugar’s blood stained past. Today it would seem there is a different kind of “slavery” being fought and there is no doubt in my mind that the Big Sugar diet enslaves the poor. “Payola-sweetened scientists and politicians deny Big Sugar is behind another form of sugar slavery: the soaring consumption of pop and sugar junk food, which has created a worldwide obesity crisis.” How “natural” is that? Why have we got a new word in the lexicon called GLOBESITY?
I tried to answer that question in public yesterday. The reason for the public venue was very much to do with Black History month and how National Museums Liverpool have held a series of events including performances, talks, music, dance, craft activities across several venues to promote and celebrate Black people’s contributions to British society, and to foster an understanding of Black history in general. So yesterday at the Anthony Walker Education Centre inside the wonderful International Slave Gallery pioneered by National Museums Liverpool, I gave a talk about Liverpool, sugar and slaves and tried to plug the present into the past and the past into the present. It was a great audience and in the question and answer session we ranged over a wide range of issues that demonstrated that sugar and slavery is tragically not just an historical theme, (the work of Father Hartley in demanding justice and fairness for his former parishioners used and abused on the sugar bateyes of the Dominican Republic), but also the importance of harnessing the formidable pester power of the children to fight back against the drug like dependency on this “pimp product” that is sugar! There is clearly much to be done in that area but what has been achieved at Trinity School and at Hillside is a clear demonstration of how new generations of “sugar busters” can be educationally equipped.
The teaching room I was in is of course dedicated to that wonderful young 18 year old student Anthony Walker, who was brutally murdered in 2005 in a vicious racist attack in Huyton. His remarkable mother Gee Walker, his father, Steve Walker, his two sisters and one brother.have had to cope with that devastating hole in their lives and hearts, Racism kills and demeans us all and the frictions and tensions in times of economic turbulence and insecurity are clearly exacerbated. Education, Education, Education is a sad old refrain without Resources, Resources, Resources, but it has never been more important than it is now. Education for citizenship, education because it is intrinsically good of itself for itself and not just because it services the world of work or WOW as it is mimicked in some educational institutions that ought to know better, has never been more vital to the health of our society and polity than it is today. The story of slavery depicted in the galleries and teaching rooms of National Museums Liverpool is only one part of that investment in education that is intrinsically good of itself for itself. Tragically it too will be subjected to cuts in funding and resources. When will some politicians ever learn the lesson that the Edinburgh Review of the early 19th century exhorted? “We either build more schools or we build more prisons”. Precisely.
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More photographs of our FILM NIGHT at the TATE.
There’s Jim at 97 years young with his son and daughter in law
Hey my name is Jim Smith. Can anyone tell me how I will get back to the future? I’ve heard a rumour that my firm MacFies is going to be taken over by Tate & Lyle ***
Albert and Christy.
The guys testing the sugar in solution with Bill supervising!
http://www.lovelanelives.com/images/uploads/TateandLylefilmlaunch5.jpg
Amy Trego and smiling on her right is Whiz kid Warren Keith who subsequently set this web site up
Leon and Jimmy with Maggie and Andy in the background.
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*** What a crackin’ photograph of Jim driving a MacFie’s wagon. Jim started off at McFies with horses and this picture has to be Jim in his early to late 20s because it was not until 1938 that Tate & Lyle bought “the oldest of the British refineries, Macfie and Sons of Liverpool from United Molasses”. The Merton Grove company in Bootle was a Macfie subsidiary. Is there anyone out there who can give me any more information and memories about the Bootle branch of the sugar industry? I know it was a manufacturer of syrups but pictures and stories as always would be very welcome.