Greenford residents visiting this post from some group or other on Facebook. It’s a shame so few of you could be bothered to read last year’s post https://positivegreenford.com/2021/11/11/dales-field/ or sign the petition https://www.change.org/p/peter-mason-preserve-dale-s-field-in-greenford-as-a-memorial-to-lance-sergeant-dale-mccallum These posts are about remembering our war dead, not a trip down memory lane for everyone who’s moved away.

There is an intriguing arch over the entrance to a track that leads from Greenford Road at Sudbury Hill to the David Lloyd Health Club and housing alongside it. Few new residents can have noticed it over the years without wondering why it is there, next to an attractive lodge, or what it once led to. The road itself is unremarkable, sometimes strewn with litter, crossing a small stream and running parallel to the Piccadilly Line. At one point it passes a tennis court that has been left to itself, the angle of ground between it, the road and the railway tracks overgrown and returned to nature. Those with sharp eyes may notice conifers amongst the scrub. A closer look discovers concrete lumps and metal fixings in the long grass. The arch, the lodge, the tennis court and a road that is the closest thing you will find to a country lane in Greenford are what is left of corporate generosity on the part of a brand that was a household name in the United Kingdom. This was once the sports grounds of J. Lyons and Company, opened to provide facilities for a growing workforce and presented as a memorial to those of them who had died in the Great War.

The brand name “Lyons” has all but disappeared from our consciousness and from the shelves of British shops. If we recognise it at all it is secondhand from literature that mentions its “corner houses”, where generations were served tea processed in vast quantities at the factory in Greenford. J. Lyons and Company has been described as the first food empire, but its origins were in the import and sale of tobacco, at a time when the UK’s shipping links and colonies enabled profitable trade with its producers. That and the possibility of manufacturing food that could be packaged and sold at a later date rather than while fresh created enormous possibilities. This coincided with the development of railways within the UK. It was at this time that brands like Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer were born and developed, but none had the status and command of the market that Lyons had at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This was also the era of exhibitions when the general public travelled to centres, such at the one at Olympia in west London, using affordable and reliable transport links. Thousands flocked to similar venues around the country, fed by caterers who were either existing restaurateurs or providers specialising in the provision of refreshments at these events. By the 1880s the families behind Salmon and Gluckstein, a successful tobacco business, had grown and sought new ventures. Joseph Lyons was a member of the extended family with some experience of catering who had contacts within the industry and it seems he fitted the bill when it came to fronting a company of that nature. There was a reluctance to associate the family’s tobacco business with anything as lowly as catering. Officially J. Lyons and Company was founded in 1894 but it was operating almost ten years before that, its first catering contract was at the Newcastle Exhibition in 1887. Dissatisfaction with the quality of the food bought in for these events led the company to begin making its own at premises at Cadby Hall in Hammersmith, near Olympia. Lyons began to open tea houses, restaurants and hotels, as well as shops that sold its cakes, confectionary and tea. In 1899, the year the company was awarded a Royal Warrant by the Prince of Wales, the directors sent Christmas puddings to British troops in South Africa.

The job titles of those members of staff who fell in the First World War reflect the operations of the company in the years that led up to it. There were clerks like Morris Wass, a Private in the 1st/7th Battalion of the London Regiment, who was killed aged nineteen in 1916 and is remembered on the Arras Memorial in France, and Ernest Raynor, a Private in the Buffs (8th Battalion, East Kent Regiment), who died of wounds in Belgium in 1917. Perhaps the saddest case is that of the Mungeam brothers, Ernest and Richard, who lived in Wandsworth. Ernest’s date of entry into a theatre of war, to France, was March 1915, so he was a volunteer, well before conscription was introduced. He prospered in his new role, promoted to corporal, then sergeant and commissioned in August 1917. A year later he died of wounds aged twenty-eight, a 2nd Lieutenant in the 17th Battalion of the Machine Gun Corps, nine days before his nineteen year old brother Richard, a Gunner in the Royal Field Artillery, was killed in action. Their father is described as a storekeeper for a refreshment contractor on the 1911 census, and it is likely that they all worked for Lyons.

Rifleman Harry Timberlake of the 8th Battalion, Rifle Brigade had been a kitchen porter, as had Rifleman William Meinke of the 18th Battalion London Regiment (London Irish Rifles). Harry was killed in action in France in 1916. William died of wounds in Belgium in 1917. Another kitchen porter was Robert Gigg, a gunner in the 133rd Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery who died of wounds in France at the age of twenty-two. Private Thomas Warman of the 6th Battalion The Buffs (East Kent Regiment), killed in action in France in 1917, was a restaurant attendant who volunteered in 1915. He was thirty-seven years old and the father of three children. One role most associated with the hospitality industry, even today, is that of the waiter and in the case of Conradine Donatz it is a reminder of the long tradition of hiring them from mainland Europe. Conradine was Swiss but became a naturaised British citizen in 1915. The father of four children died at the Somme, serving with the 13th Battallion Essex Regiment in 1916. He is remembered on the Thiepval Memorial as he has no known grave.

The variety of professions within the company reflect its tendency to keep everything inhouse rather than relying on outside contractors, for instance, I was surprised to find that printers were employed by Lyons because the company had its own presses to provide promotional literature, advertising and packaging. Arthur Death is described as a printer compositor’s apprentice in the 1911 census and he may well have worked with his father for Lyons. He rose to the rank of Corporal with the 24th Battalion Royal Fusiliers before he fell in March 1918. He is remembered on the Arras Memorial. Albert Exworthy was a printer’s errand boy in 1911 and his sister worked as a waitress for Lyons. He was a driver with the Royal Field Artilllery in 1918 when he died, aged twenty-two, and is remembered on the Pozieres Memorial.

By the end of the war manufacturing was being carried out on sites along the Grand Union Canal to the west of London, and the transport infrastructure had begun to develop a little more slowly. When Lyons chose to buy Grove Farm in 1919, a property with agricultural land and some housing in Greenford, the Lyons directors and others must have been aware of these developments, such as the extension of Western Avenue. The Aladdin Factory was completed before the road was. Lyons also bought land once used by William Perkin’s dyeworks between Oldfield Lane and the canal with the intention of building a tea factory, deliveries to be brought by horse drawn barges to a canal basin with bonded warehouses. When it opened officially in 1921 the site included private railway sidings that connected with main networks, its own roads and landscaped grounds. The factory and surrounding operations was visited in 1928 by the then Prince of Wales, an event recorded by Pathe News that shows him meeting three veterans of the Great War.

Alongside its profitable activities Lyons provided substantial sports facilities for its employees at a number of sites. An athletic club had existed since 1903 and in 1913 it was decided to launch an Athletic and Social Club as well as a house journal, the “Lyons Mail”. Its publication was suspended for the duration of the war but the first edition produced in 1919 had a centre page devoted to a Roll of Honour of war dead. The journal and the extensive new sports grounds at Sudbury Hill were envisaged as a memorial to those employees who had given their lives in the service of the country. The company architect, Charles Oatley, designed a granite obelisk with their names inscribed on it, and this was installed near the entrance to the grounds, unveiled on the seventh of October 1922 by General the Lord Horne.

Following the Second World War a second memorial in the form of a screen was placed behind the obelisk inscribed with the names of those employees who had lost their lives between 1939 and 1945.

The sports grounds continued to be enjoyed by company staff and many of Greenford’s residents until they were sold on, with some of it used for housing. Both memorials were moved to the factory grounds and stayed in place until operations were reduced on the Greenford factory site and then closed for good in around 2002. The obelisk and screen were put into storage until they were placed in a new site in the Margravine Cemetery in Hammersmith.

It is hard to believe that such a significant part of Greenford’s industrial past could have disappeared so completely and that the war dead of a company could be so easily forgotten.

Sources:

“The First Food Empire – a history of J. Lyons and Co.” by Peter Bird, a comprehensive and well illustrated history of the company with many photographs of the Greenford factory.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Ancestry

Imperial War Museum record of Lyons War Memorial

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