Unlike our bees, the weird dead lion of the syrup tin was always dependably there - Laura Waddell

Each sturdy, sticky tin of Lyon’s syrup carried a deeper story of strength and sweetness, writes Laura Waddell.

I shall miss the bees surrounding the rotting corpse of a lion on the logo for Tate & Lyle’s Golden Syrup. RIP bees.

The lion, being deceased already, needs no further tributes. Besides, it was a martyr’s death regardless; a scene spotted by Samson of the Book of Judge, who took inspiration from seeing bees make honey from inside the hollow body of the creature he had earlier killed to pose the riddle ‘Out of the eater, something to eat. Out of the strong, something sweet’. Hence the words that form part of the logo, ‘Out of the strong, came forth sweetness’. The answer to Samson’s riddle stumped the audience of his intended bride’s family, who didn’t know about the lion or the honey Samson had gorged on, and he refused to tell them for days. If you haven’t read the Old Testament, unsurprisingly things go downhill from there for the proposed nuptials.

The lion has miraculously risen again on the syrup’s new packaging, which newly for 2024, announced in the run up to Easter, displays a more stylised big cat outlined in baroque gold droplets with a heart shaped nose. It’s nice but bland. There’s a hint of the Cheshire Cat in the new branding: a cat that’s there, but not. There’s none of the macabre reality of the original, with its slumped head, bee-colonised exposed ribcage and lolling tongue. There remains only one bee, tucked into the side of the design, which is apt, given the decline of pollinating insects in the syrup’s lifetime.

While the Lyle's syrup tin will live on in a modern guise, the future of our bees is far more precarious, writes Laura Waddell. PIC: James Johnstone.

According to a 2014 study by Professor Jeff Ollerton at the University of Northampton, of almost 500,000 records dating back to the 1850s from the Bees, Ants and Wasps Recording Society, 23 bee and flower-visiting wasp species have gone extinct in the UK - or 7.4% of species since 1900.

Extinctions are largely associated with intensive domestic agriculture and declining wildflowers during the world war periods, where the threat of cut off food supplies necessitated increased production, but local extinctions - where the insects exist elsewhere but have chosen to permanently vacate our isles - are recorded as far back as 1853, associated with strong imported fertilisers and interruption to crop rotation. Much has changed in manufacturing and carbon emissions since the 18th century; generally, the scale at which we do it. While the global scientific community has much more information now about how excessive consumption is daily rendering our planet inhospitable to beast and man, today’s besuited world leaders exercise little more concern or caution than the fat cats of the industrial revolution who directly profited from the fume-spewing factories.

The green tin and golden lion packaging of Lyle's Golden Syrup which was first launched in 1881 and holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s oldest unchanged brand packaging. It has now had its first re-brand since 1883. Lyle's Golden Syrup/PA Wire

It is perhaps no surprise the logo was designed by a Scot, Abram Lyle, an elder of St Michael's Presbyterian Church who wished his syrup to come with a moral.One guesses he would have loved salted caramel. The flipside of sweetness coming from strength is the implication the two are linked; first work, then reward. No treat without toil. No pleasure without effort.The golden syrup, originally known as ‘goldie’, was Lyle’s invention, an offproduct of sugar cane processing, and a natural fit for his later partnership with Henry Tate, where at Tate & Lyle the syrup became, alongside sugar and treacle, beloved by British bakers. Before that, Lyle had worked for his cooper father and in the shipping trade. Slavery had been abolished when both men were children, but the industry and the profits available had undoubtedly been carved out by it. Today manufactured in London, the company’s Greenock refinery closed down in 1997 after 250 years processing sugar on site, making 170 workers redundant as well as the area’s reputation for sugar and ships.Lyle’s Biblical reference is a glimpse of the curiously moralistic, Victorian-era social patronage that lurks in company histories of storied British brands - not typically lingering still on their contemporary packaging. But nothing about the tin is contemporary, it’s a pure relic, the stuff of childhood memories, an ingredient that was always around. Prising off the lid with a knife is a feast of nostalgia and so is twirling a spoon in the pool of gold inside, twisting the dripping cable of falling syrup to avoid - before inevitably failing - not to spill any of its sticky mass down the side of the tin. Without looking closely at it, it looked old fashioned, the key visual signifier of a product that had always been dependably there. The unexpected image on the tin was so familiar it managed to go under the radar.