DOES anyone remember the Sugar Buildings on Whitehaven’s Catherine Street? One of our readers does because he was born there, in 1937. They were flats then, and John MGuire’s family lived in a basement flat of the three-storey buildings which he reckons were demolished in about 1958.

He is now 81 and still searching for an old photo of the Sugar Buildings. A recent check with The Beacon’s excellent photographic archive has failed to turn one up.

The flats were near to where the modernist style telephone exchange stands now and had their origins in a much earlier time, when Whitehaven had its own sugar refineries. As far back as 1712, a sugarhouse was erected at the harbour end of Duke Street after Sir James Lowther had persuaded a chap called Richard Barwise to go into business refining small amounts for local consumption. Never one to miss an opportunity, Sir James had heard reports in London of huge profits being gained by entrepreneurs who had invested in sugar refineries.

Barwise lived at 39 Queen Street, and although he had little experience in refining sugar it seems he did have the major advantage of being related to Humphrey Senhouse, who was the local agent for the sale and distribution of imported sugar. He managed the business until the late 1720s and then moved to Workington to set up a similar enterprise.

Of course raw sugar was then being brought ashore in abundance from the plantations of the West Indies – on the harbour one of our quays is still known as Sugar Tongue. A list of Whitehaven vessels involved in the “triangular trade” reveals merchant Thomas Rumball’s ship Princess returning from Antigua on October 3 1719 bound for Whitehaven with 121 cwt of muscovado sugar for John Gilpin & Co. Similarly Thomas Lutwidge’s vessel Susannah returns from Barbados in June 1722 with a cargo of 10,000lb of sugar.

However the Lowther motives were, as ever, all about coal – quantities could be sold to Barwise to keep his sugar boiler in operation. By 1726 the refinery was taken over by William and John Gilpin, relatives of Lowther’s steward, William Gilpin. (This sugarhouse is depicted on several views of Whitehaven drawn during the 1730s by Mathias Read.)

In the 1750s, the Swedish industrial spy Reinhold Angerstein had reported sugar being processed in the town by a master refiner from Hamburg: “He knows his job well,” reported the Swede. “Nevertheless sugar is much more expensive here than in Hamburg.” Apparently, while sugar was being sold for 12d in Whitehaven, it would cost only 9.5d in Hamburg.

To some extent this difference was caused by the customs duty on the raw sugar coming into Whitehaven, which amounted to 4s 9d per hundredweight, and left British refiners at a disadvantage. So sugar boilers nationwide got together to send a petition of complaint about the charges to Parliament, and Whitehaven was on the list of 129 refineries objecting.

Because the local sugar business hereabouts was small scale there was no encouragement for merchants to sell their large cargoes in Whitehaven and they soon headed to Liverpool instead.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that a sugarhouse was started in Catherine Street by two grocers, Edward Johnson and Thomas Manley. The Johnsons of Scotch Street appear in an 1829 list of the “principal inhabitants of Cumberland and Westmorland”. However the refinery wasn’t a success and despite Johnston’s best efforts to keep it going the business became bankrupt in 1826 and shut down in the early 1830s. It appears Edward Johnson Jr tried to salvage the situation but records reveal that a bankruptcy hearing was held on August 18 1863 at the Black Lion pub in King Street, at that time the go-to venue for formal hearings.

The sugar business had it seemed failed to bring about the sweet smell of success for those that tried it in Whitehaven. The whiff of tobacco, however, and the taste for rum – well that was another story.