138 SUGAR 



grocery sugars. But these wholesale grocers had also 

 another market to attend, and a very important one 

 the refined market. All the refined sugar consumed in 

 the country practically came from British refiners, so 

 that, in the case of London, a buyer from every whole- 

 sale grocer or dealer had to make a tour of the East End 

 early every morning to call on some twenty refiners and 

 buy their goods. In Mincing Lane work began at 

 9 a.m., public sales to value ; then a visit to every 

 private saleroom where West Indian sugar was on 

 show ; then the public sales at 1 o'clock, which often 

 lasted for an hour or more ; so that the industrious 

 buyer often did not get his work done till 3 p.m. 



The Mincing Lane sugar market of to-day * is a very 

 different thing. The public sales are a mere nothing, 

 West India brokers have nearly disappeared, the advent 

 of the merchant at noon is a thing of the past, and you 

 can buy a thousand tons of sugar in five minutes. This 

 transformation is all the result of the beetroot sugar 

 industry. Beetroot came into Mincing Lane at first 

 in pill boxes, carried furtively by the seller in his waist- 

 coat pocket and shown in a deprecating way as being 

 a very impertinent intrusion. Only one or two refiners 

 would try the experiment, but they did not regret it. 

 In Greenock one wide-awake sugar refiner informed his 

 broker that he did not want to buy hundreds of tons, 

 he wanted to buy thousands. Here was a grand oppor- 

 tunity for some intelligent and enterprising foreigner to 

 develop a new business. He came exactly at the right 

 moment, and at the end of his career he was one of the 

 greatest sugar-brokers of the world. He not only 

 supplied the refiners with their raw material but, 

 eventually, had every kind of foreign refined ready for 

 the wholesale grocer. One of the oldest established 



1 Before the war. 



