Beatrice Sallowe

Mistress of the Southbank Preserving Works and the White Dock Tin Stores, the industrial face of old necessities, making meat, fish, broth and prepared suppers portable enough for barracks, ships, colonial depots and winter towns.

Beatrice Sallowe is Mistress of the Southbank Preserving Works, and her name is attached as well to the White Dock Tin Stores. Together they show the industrial face of old necessities: meat, fish, broth and prepared suppers made portable enough for barracks, ships, colonial depots and winter towns. Salt yards, smoke houses and river fish markets still feed most of the island, but the preserving works and canning factories of the stronger ports increasingly supplement them, and hers is among the best-known names in that trade.

She is regarded on the Southbank as a hard, unsentimental proprietor who inspects her own vats, keeps her own ledgers and trusts a pressure gauge over a foreman’s assurance. A spoiled tin may sit in a ship’s store for a year before it sickens a mess, and she is said to treat every batch as though she will be asked to answer for it. Quartermasters and victuallers rate her stores highly; her workers find her exacting and not unfair.

Companies meet her stock before they meet her: the tins in an expedition’s packs, a victualling contract for a long road. Some are engaged directly, to see a consignment safely to a depot, to trace a spoiled batch back to its cause, or to find out who has been selling counterfeit White Dock tins at a price no honest works could match.

In person

A stout, heavy-set woman of middle age, with dark blonde hair and a broad, heavy-featured face, practical and unsentimental in expression, Beatrice Sallowe looks every inch the industrial proprietor. She wears a sturdy working dress and coat with good boots, adding an apron on the factory floor, and carries the keys and badge of her works. She is at home among ledgers, inspection seals and packing-line records, and among the gauges and vats where her tins are made.