‘Delightful … brings vividly to life a fascinating part of East End life before it is lost forever.’ – Melanie McGrath, author of Silvertown and Hopping

‘Vivid and richly readable … If it doesn’t become a TV series to rival Call The Midwife, I’ll take my tea with ten sugars.’ – Bel Mooney, The Daily Mail (Book of the Week)

During the Blitz and the years of rationing, the Sugar Girls kept Britain sweet. Every year, thousands of women left school at fourteen to work in the bustling factories of London’s East End. Of all the factories that lined the docks, it was at Tate and Lyle’s where you could earn the most generous wages and enjoy the best social life. The work was hard, but Tate & Lyle was more than just a factory, it was a community, a calling, a place of love and support and an uproarious, tribal part of the East End.

Sunday Times bestseller The Sugar Girls (Collins, 2012) weaves together tales of adversity, resilience and youthful high spirits. From young Ethel to lovelorn Lilian, irrepressible Gladys to fun-loving Joan – and Miss Smith, who tries to keep a workforce of flirtatious young men and women on the straight and narrow – this is an evocative, moving story of hunger, hardship and happiness. It provides a moving insight into a lost way of life, as well as a timeless testament to the experience of being young and female.

The Sugar Girls Blog

Click here to have the Sugar Girls blog delivered to your email inbox

  • Sugar Girls at Goldsmith’s Row book market (5/16/2012) - The Sugar Girls took part in a brand new East End book market on the weekend. Goldsmith’s Row Book Market, just off Hackney Road and near Columbia Road Flower Market, is a great new addition to the area and features stalls selling everything from second hand novels to limited edition art books, every Sunday from [...]
  • Sheila Oakley – a sugar girl in Canada (5/1/2012) - One of our most pleasurable experiences since The Sugar Girls hit the shelves over a month ago has been reading the many letters and emails we have received from readers who also worked at Tate & Lyle, and who have their own memories to share. Sometimes we feel like kicking ourselves that we didn’t encounter [...]
  • The Sugar Girls at the Redbridge Book Festival (4/23/2012) - Last Friday, we were delighted to be speaking at Wanstead Library, as part of the fabulous Redbridge Book Festival.  Joining us on the stage were Gladys and Eva, two of the sugar girls featured in the book, who shared their stories with an audience of more than 120 people. Gladys recalled how she had originally [...]
  • Lilian’s suitcase of memories (4/18/2012) - At the weekend we paid a visit to Lilian, one of the four main women featured in The Sugar Girls, to take a look at her photo collection. Previously, Lilian had told us that she didn’t have many pictures of her childhood or her time at Tate & Lyle, as she didn’t consider herself a [...]
  • The Sugar Girls book signing at Tate & Lyle (4/14/2012) - Earlier this week, we attended a very special book-signing in the canteen of Tate & Lyle’s Thames Refinery in Silvertown. Community Affairs Manager Ken Wilson had organised a display board of pictures of the sugar girls, and had invited Colin Lyle – son and nephew, respectively, of former factory directors Philip and Oliver Lyle – [...]
  • Four generations of one family at Tate & Lyle! (4/11/2012) - We always knew that Tate & Lyle was a family firm, in more ways than one. Not only did the Tate and Lyle families used to run their two old East End factories, but many generations of workers within a single family would often work there side by side. Even so, the story we heard [...]
  • The Sugar Girls is a Sunday Times bestseller! (4/9/2012) - We’re very pleased to announce that The Sugar Girls has entered the Sunday Times bestseller list this weekend. We never thought we would be on the same list as Jennifer Worth’s Call The Midwife, which was a big inspiration to us while writing our book and one of the first things that got us interested [...]
  • The Sugar Girls make the Robert Elms podcast (4/7/2012) - If you missed the Sugar Girls on the Robert Elms show on BBC London last week, you can now listen to the interview on the programme’s podcast, here: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] On air with Robert were Duncan Barrett and former Sugar Girls Gladys Hudgell and Eva Rodwell, who made quite an [...]
  • The Second World War at Tate & Lyle (4/7/2012) - Today, we received this fascinating email about Tate & Lyle during the war years from a woman called Val Connelly, whose grandmother used to run a ship’s laundry in Constance Street, Silvertown: “During the war, people were told to shelter in Tate & Lyle’s factory – sitting on the bags of sugar! They were lifted [...]
  • More radio for the Sugar Girls (4/6/2012) - Yesterday it was BBC Radio 4′s Woman’s Hour, and this morning the Sugar Girls were being beamed out around the world to the 50 million listeners of the World Service. The piece was recorded earlier this week at Tate & Lyle’s Plaistow Wharf Refinery and went out as part of the World Update programme at [...]
  • Listen to the Sugar Girls on Woman’s Hour! (4/5/2012) - The Sugar Girls took to the airwaves today, appearing on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 with the lovely Jenni Murray. If you missed the broadcast, you can listen to it here: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Gladys Hudgell and Eva Rodwell, who worked at Tate & Lyle’s Plaistow Wharf Refinery as teenagers, [...]
  • The sugar girls go back to the factory (4/4/2012) - Earlier this week, we took sugar girls Gladys and Eva on a tour of the Plaistow Wharf Refinery, where they used to print the sugar bags over sixty years ago. The BBC World Service were there to find out what they made of the experience, and to learn more about what it was like at [...]
  • Am-dram at Tate & Lyle (4/3/2012) - This wonderful photo comes to us courtesy of Pat Griffiths, who worked in the laboratory at the Thames Refinery from 1945 to 1954. Pat was very involved with Tate & Lyle’s amateur dramatics scene and in the photo you can see a production of J.B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner at the Thames Refinery. Pat is playing [...]
  • The Sugar Girls’ Blitz spirit (4/1/2012) - At our book launch this week, Colin Lyle, a manager at Tate & Lyle’s Plaistow Wharf refinery until 1982 and son of former refinery director Philip Lyle, read a remarkable letter written by his father to a friend in America on May 20, 1941. The letter describes the incredible Blitz spirit of the Sugar Girls [...]
  • Tea, cake and sweet memories: the Sugar Girls book launch (3/31/2012) - We were thrilled to see 100 former Sugar Girls and their guests at our tea party and book launch at the Hub in Canning Town this week. As well as Gladys Hudgell, Lilian Clark and Ethel Colquhoun – three of the main women from the book – lots of people we interviewed last year came [...]
  • The Sugar Girls in today’s Sunday Express (3/25/2012) - Today’s edition of the Sunday Express features an article by Nuala about The Sugar Girls.  Here is a picture of the piece in the paper.  Alternatively, you can read it online at the Express Website. To whet your appetite, here are the first few paragraphs: ASK ANY 14-year-old to get up at 4.30am and work [...]
  • Our first review! (3/23/2012) - We are very excited that today marks the first official review of The Sugar Girls – and it’s been made ‘Book of the Week’ in the Daily Mail.  Here’s some of what Bel Mooney had to say about the book: What were the ‘good old days’? Were they when people left school knowing there would [...]
  • Book talk at the Bishopsgate Institute (3/22/2012) - On Monday evening, The Sugar Girls was unveiled to the public for the first time, in a pre-launch event hosted by the Raphael Samuel History Centre at the Bishopsgate Institute in London. We were very excited that over sixty people had turned up to find out about the book, and to buy advance copies. Among [...]
  • Fifties beauty queens from Tate & Lyle (3/17/2012) - This vintage pamphlet from 1953 shows the beauty queen hopefuls who entered a competition to become that year’s Miss Tate & Lyle. The company’s beauty contest, unsurprisingly now consigned to the dustbin of history, was once a highlight of the annual Sports Day, when hundreds of Tate & Lyle workers and their families thronged the [...]
  • John Bentley (3/17/2012) - Today we spoke to a man called John Bentley, who worked at Tate & Lyle’s Thames Refinery in Silvertown for forty years, starting in August 1953 at the age of 16. When he began working for Tate & Lyle, John was an apprentice electrical engineer. He lived in Stratford and would travel to the factory [...]