If you were a working girl of the newest and nicest variety β a secretary, teacher or shop assistant β you could eat an express lunch on your own in a Lyons without risking your respectability.
Back home, the stream of comforts continued as you sat down with a cup of Lyons tea while your children might get a Mivvi, a sumptuous ice-cream-lolly hybrid. Customers liked knowing that the firm that provided them with so many reliable treats was run by a family, although exactly who that family was and where it came from remained hazy. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In this satisfying slab of dynastic history, Thomas Harding draws attention to the way that the family business formed and conducted itself against successive spasms of racial hatred. Whitechapel proved only marginally more congenial. There may not have been pogroms, but wild fantasies about blood libel still lingered: members of the extended clan were still living there in when rumours circulated that Jack the Ripper was a demonic Jew intent on the ritual slaughter of Christian women.
Most insidious of all was the dog-whistle racism that appeared in the press every time some bit of the company was caught up in a little local difficulty β a strike, an accounting mishap, trouble with apprentices. Commentators always managed to hint that the Lyons dynasty was run by sticky-fingered immigrants who put Mammon above human, which is to say British, values. Naturally, the family redoubled its efforts to show that it was as patriotic as a nicely buttered scone.
Individual family members, meanwhile, progressed to the highest levels of public service by shedding cockney accents, acquiring university degrees and becoming Conservative MPs and knights of the realm. Harding, who is himself a scion of the family, reminds us of all the notable figures who have sprung from the same stock: Sir Keith Joseph, Nigella Lawson, Fiona Shackleton and George Monbiot, in addition to high court judges, physicians and scientists.
