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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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Where is History’s most famous sugar Lump on his 61st birthday?

Written by Ron Noon at 14:05 on Wednesday, July 28th 2010

Mr Cube’s first appearance was in the Evening Standard on July 28th 1949 and the command from the President of Tate & Lyle,[1]  was that this powerfully symbolic cartoon character, (an ally of both the Conservatives and Fleet Street), “must always be a knight in shining armour. He must never be a psalm singing little bugger”. You can see from earlier blogs on this iconic sugar lump that he subsequently did just that! Mr Cube appeared on the famous “kill Chrismas letter” of October 1999 announcing the last ever Christmas party for the surviving boys and girls from the whitestuff. You may remember what my dear friend Albert E Sloane said about Mr Cube not only in December 1999 after “the last supper on Lime Street” but way back in Albert and Cube’s youth when the bosses at Love Lane asked workers for slogans to help in the campaign to prevent Clem Atlee’s Labour Government from nationalising the refineries.


At the end of last Millennium Albert accused Mr Cube of a scooge like meanness of spirit and suggested that he ought to have been depicted with a Scrooge like hat and matching ball and chain! In 1949 just after the birth of Mr Cube the young Albert who had registered his postal vote for Clem Atlee in 1945 from Burma where he had been with the Royal Air Force, suggested that “Tate & Lyle have made a pile, give it to the rank and file”!

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That’s ar Albert in uniform ready to vote for Clem Atlee’s Labour

Not long after the “kill Christmas letter” Mr Cube was retired from public engagements and the company website made that fact very evident when they announced that he was being replaced by Lyle the Lion! Where is Mr Cube today on his 61st birthday?

[1] The former Tory MP Leonard Lyle who following Churchill’s resignation Honours list, became Lord Lyle of Westbourne, or Lord Cube to journalists!
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As readers of this website are now keenly aware, on July 1st Tate & Lyle announced the sale of its sugar business to the American Refining Company, ARC.  That news aroused comment about what had happened with Cadbury’s and Kraft and the loss of yet another iconic British brand name to the Americans but no references in the media were made about the fact that ARC is owned by two Cuban Americans, Alfy and Pepi Fanjul!

In my corporate watch over Tate & Lyle I first came across the Fanjuls in 2001 when they purchased from Tates, its American Domino Sugar brand, itself an iconic image which still hovers in neon on an historically preserved building in Brooklyn overlooking the East River and the most expensive real estate in the Cosmos! The Fanuls announced to the Brooklyn workers that they were there for the long haul but in 2003 they closed the refinery down. There is a lot to be researched in terms of the ARC but the key question today on the 61st birthday of Mr Cube is what is ARC going to do about Mr Cube? Bring him out of retirement? Or is Mr Cube now officially dead?

Finally on what ought to have been a happy birthday for history’s most famous ever sugar lump what will Tate & Lyle now do about its Royal Crest? I’ll leave readers with the Royal Crest which appeared on the letter sent to Albert in October 1999 and the Mr Cube logo which appeared at the bottom of the page. The representation is very much at variance with reality!.

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