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Written by Ron Noon at 12:20 on Thursday, May 14th 2009
VIVA BOBBY AUSTIN
It’s after 12 midday and I’ve not long got off the phone to a former Tate & Lyle sugar boiler who knows more about making sugar than anyone I’ve ever spoken to since my “damascene” conversion to sucrose history! There will not be many who read this blog or visit this site as “sugar-centric” as Bobby and I, who both have family members who when they discern the now “tell tale signs” of sugarcentricity, remonstrate, “don’t start talkin’ sugar again dad”! I consider my children as unlucky to have a student as a dad rather than a real “professor” of sugar stories.
The amazingly lively and charismatic Bobby the sugar boiler from Skelmersdale, was 83 years of age when I first met him in April 2006. That was a quarter of a century after Love Lane had been closed down and on that wonderful 25th anniversary re-union night for the surviving boys and girls from the white stuff, an event which I had great pleasure in helping to bring about,I met up with my future sucrose supervisor. My real apprenticeship into the mysteries of sugar making began with the beer and the craic of that celebratory night. .
There are a number of my family on my dad’s side who live out in Skem so they should start checkin’ out the real sugar don who started his studies into the arcane mystery of sugar making in Liverpool Love Lane in 1946. Like everyone else they can check out the new film we have on our website with Professor Bobby being interviewed the year after the 25th anniversary re-union bash.
Viva is a word used to express enthusiastic support for somebody, like say viva le Presidente or viva Bobby Joe as in the old Equals, Eddie Grant song. It’s also an elastic word that I’m familiar with in my job as a University teacher because viva also means an oral examination, taken as part of a degree in which the student is asked and answers questions in a spoken interview, instead of on paper. So in that sense I am very much the student and Bobby the main examiner on a subject which is not only vitally important to this website and LOVE LANE LIVES, but needs a much more positive press! Why?
Well this next extract is taken from a Polish born British novelist who in The Inn of the Two Witches not only used his characters to write about reaching 60 but made this damning comment on sugar treatises!
“It was a dull-faced manuscript – A Treatise on Sugar Refining (the dreariest subject I can think of) could have been given a more lively appearance…!
Yea I like Joseph Conrad’s books but if I had some ghostly interviewing techniques available I would say to him “Hey Joe I heard you shot my sugar site down, but you’ve got it wrong man. That mild and innocent looking sugar lump is not dull faced or dreary, it’s sparkling and bright and once upon a time it was made by Bobby Austin and skilled sugar boilers just like him, whose working lives and experiences deserve to be written about in manuscripts. And ‘hey Joe’, great writer though you were, did you make it in the film world? What’s that I hear? Well ar Bobby did. Viva Bobby Austin.”