Unitarian minister's son Henry Tate was born on the 11th of March 1819 in White Coppice, a hamlet near Chorley, Lancashire. When he was 13 he became a grocer's apprentice to his elder brother Caleb in Liverpool where, following a seven-year apprenticeship, he was able to set up his own grocery store aged 20 at Old Haymarket, Liverpool. He married Jane Wignall on the 1st of March 1841 in Liverpool and by the age of 36 he had become a successful businessman, with a chain of six shops in the Liverpool area. His first venture into cane refining was in 1859 when he became a partner in John Wright & Co. Sugar Refinery, a small sugar refinery in Manesty’s Lane (just off Hanover Street), before selling his grocery business in 1861 to a brother-in-law. Henry bought out Wright’s stake in 1869 and his two sons, Alfred and Edwin joined the business and thus Henry Tate & Sons was born.
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| Tate & Lyle's 'Sugar Girls' at the Love Lane Refinery |
Henry Tate had an eye for innovation and technological advances and during the construction of the Love Lane Refinery in Liverpool in the early 1870s, he adapted the plans to accommodate a new refining technique that would increase the yield of white sugar. Purchasing the patent from German Eugen Langen for making sugar cubes the refinery became operational in 1872 and using the new techniques yielded increased levels of white sugar, producing 400 tonnes a week. The Tate & Lyle factory dominated the skyline north of Liverpool city centre for 109 years and its demise would mark the end of a strong Vauxhall community. Women were central to Tate & Lyle’s workforce and it was said if you got a job in Tate's you’d got a decent job as they were known as good employers. The Liverpool operations continued to grow in the inter-war years, acquiring Fairrie & Co, of Vauxhall Road, in 1929 and then the Macfie & Sons business from United Molasses in 1938 with the Love Lane sugar refinery seeing production peak at 550,000 tons in 1972.
Keen to extend his business, he had seen London as a potentially profitable market so in 1877 he opened the Thames Refinery at Silvertown in East London, which at the time was predominantly still marshland, acquiring a derelict shipyard where Tate & Lyle-branded sugar is still made there today. The Liverpool plant produced hard sugar and the London plant produced soft sugar. At the turn of the century the factories in Silvertown and Liverpool employed between 2,000 and 3,000 people.
Henry was a modest, rather retiring man, well known for his concern with workers' conditions. He built the Tate Institute opposite his Thames Refinery, with a bar and dance hall for the workers' recreation.
He rapidly became a millionaire and contributed generously to charity. Donating in 1889 his collection of 65 contemporary paintings to the government, it was on the condition that they be displayed in a suitable gallery so he built, at the cost of £500,000, the Tate Gallery for the people of Britain. The National Gallery of British Art, nowadays known as Tate Britain, was opened on 21 July 1897 on the site of the old Millbank Prison. He made many donations, often anonymously and always discreetly, and was also a significant benefactor, building the Hahnemann Hospital on Hope Street, providing funds for Liverpool University's Library block plus significant donations to the Royal Infirmary and Liverpool Institute.
At the age of 76, when asked why he did not retire, he replied, "when you pull on a string and gold sovereigns come tumbling down, it’s very difficult to stop pulling that string". However he finally did retire the following year and was created a baronet in 1898 before he died on the 5th of November 1899 at his home in Streatham, Park Hill after a long illness, and was buried at Norwood cemetery. Ironically, the opening of the Tate Liverpool Gallery came only a few years after the closure of Love Lane.
The company adopted its full name, Tate & Lyle, in 1921 when it merged with golden syrup makers Lyle's of Greenock.
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