Bitter-sweet film on Liverpool’s 300 years of sugar trade screened at the Tate

Oct 30 2007 by Vicky Anderson, Liverpool Daily Post

The Vauxhall Tate Refinery, January 1967 _320

THEY were called “boys from the whitestuff” – the generations of families who enjoyed jobs for life at the Vauxhall’s Tate & Lyle sugar refinery.

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.

Produced and directed by local film maker Leon Seth, it explores how Henry Tate – who introduced the sugar cube to Britain and went on to found the Tate Gallery – became “Britain's Rockefeller”.

It traces how after 109 years of refining in Liverpool’s Love Lane, and the devastation of the Vaux-hall community following the closure of the refinery, the phoenix eventually rose from the ashes in the guise of the Eldonian Housing Cooperative. The film also captures the historic 25th anniversary re-union of the Tate pensioners in April 2006.

“Beat the beet, keep the cane” had been the unsuccessful mantra of the refinery workers involved in the ten-year struggle to keep Henry Tate's mother plant open. Its closure in April, 1981, was the end of over 300 years of sugar cane refining on Merseyside.

Ron Noon said: “The remark-able thing about this project was not just sugar, but the extra-ordinary lives of ordinary refinery workers who star in the film.

“This project has lots of histor-ical curiosity value but it has wider ramifications for ongoing debates on the politics of food and globalization. It's also a vital record of the people who struggled against a major multi-national to protect not just their own liveli-hoods but a whole community. It’s an amazing story and Liverpool is right at the heart of it.”

Mr Noon and his team plan to keep the momentum going and make a second film, talking to older relatives of pupils at Trinity Primary School, opposite the Eldonian Village and the former Tate & Lyle refinery.

Mr Noon, of Liverpool John Moores University history department, was awarded £50,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to develop the film.

It will also feature on Granada’s Inside Out programme on November 7.

vickyanderson@dailypost.co.uk