From Downtown to Tate and Lyle

I was reading an interview in today's Daily Telegraph with actor Dan Stevens aka the late Matthew Crawley of Downton Abbey. He is 'Editor at Large' of online literary journal The Junket. In the July 12 2012 issue, contributor James Purdon wrote:

' At Greenock, for instance, there was until the mid-1990s a refinery operated by Tate & Lyle, a company now owned by an American multinational, but which had originated as two separate regional businesses: Henry Tate of Liverpool — who now lends his name to the Tate Galleries in London, Liverpool and St Ives — and Abram Lyle of Greenock. It was Lyle who first produced the impossibly viscous, cloying Golden Syrup which I remember as a staple of our family breakfast table in the 1980s, where it appeared in the same style of green and gold tin in which it had first been sold a hundred years earlier. Its distinctive livery incorporates a logo, or rather an emblem: a swarm of bees around a lion prone, after the biblical story of Samson who, having slain a lion on the road as he goes to claim his bride, returns to find that bees have made honey in the carcass."

'Out of strength came forth sweetness'

I bring this to your attention, because doubt was cast recently on the connection between the firm of Tate and Lyle, Scotland , and - by extension - the Tate family of art galleries.