London Socialist Feminist Reading Group
Women, capitalist exploitation and organisation: the example of the 1888 “Matchgirls” strike
Friday 28 September 2007, The Plough, Museum Street, London
Three initial questions to consider…
1. Are working class women always likely to be the “super-exploited” class and the main bulk of sweatshop workers
2. Do we need new kinds of unions today to organise working-class women?
3. Do socialist-feminists have a role to play in organising working class women “from outside” workplaces where women are employed.
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Background
1888 was the beginning of the great upsurge of unskilled workers, how the most exploited workers formed unions to fight for better wages and conditions, the start of what became known as “New Unionism”.
1887 saw the beginning of a trade boom. Often the workers would take advantage of these short lived booms to make a drive at unionising. This time when the drive to unionise started it was as part of a strike wave in London, centred around the East End and involving the people of the East End. The young women working at Bryant and May match factory started that strike wave. This strike wave, and the drive to unionise, was more extensive than ever before. It culminated in a successful 1889 strike of the dockers for their “tanner”, their 6d a hour and had a deep impact on London society. Successful unionising in London, and the magnificent struggle of the dockers, inspired attempts to unionise outside of London.
But the new organisations were built with the memory of older, defunct organisations in mind, followed other struggles — against unemployment for instance.
Socialists played key organising roles.
It all began at a June 1888 Fabian society meeting about “the sweated trades” — then a popular choice of drawing room discussion for concerned middle class people. Appalling conditions at Bryant and May matchmakers were mentioned. The firm had already been exposed in the “labour” paper, the Labour Elector and described in a popular pamphlet by union activist and socialist Tom Mann, about the eight hour day.
The young women workers (some as young as 13) at the factory in Bow suffered very long hours — 13 and a half in summer. They were paid just four shillings an hour but subject to arbitrary fines for trivial misdemeanours. Because they ate at their benches they ingested white phosphorus, causing a disease of the jaw (“Phossy Jaw). Disfigurement, brain damage and ultimately, without removal of the jaw, death would follow. (Eating in areas contaminated with white phosphorus was not banned until 1908).
Fabian socialist Annie Besant — a middle class eccentric and former star of the Secular Society, who in a few years will have embraced Theosophy — decided to go down to the factory and talk to the women. She wrote up their experiences in the radical paper she put together, The Link. Three women were sacked, accused by the boss of telling lies. The article and the sacking, brought home to the women, the injustice of their situation. They walked out.
Three weeks later, helped by Besant’s organising skills, but buoyed along by their own determination, the women won some concessions. Much more than this that had won the right to the union. Known forever rather diminutively as “The Match Girls”, they were the sisters, mothers, daughters and wives of other East End workers who would strike over the next year. This all could not have been more different to “old unionism”.
Tom Mann described them thus:
“The average unionist of today is a man with a fossilized intellect, either hopelessly apathetic or supporting a policy that plays directly into the hands of the capitalist exploiter.”
The leaders of Victorian craft based unions mostly tried to meet the expectations of Victorian employers, who in the last decades of the century had more or less accepted unions. The unions were seen to value skilled, responsible, steady workmen, (with an emphasis on men). In contrast unskilled, itinerant, casual and women workers were mistrusted and feared in more or less equal measure.
Some of the union leaders, the most ambitious of them, were integrated into political institutions. Alexander MacDonald and Thomas Burt of the Miners’ Union got themselves elected to Parliament in 1874.
But the performance of “Lib-Lab“ trade union MPs like Henry Broadhurst, the leader of the Stone Masons, helped turn trade unionists away from both the toadying policy of the old unions and reliance on the Liberal Party to deliver for the workers.Broadhurst ended up a Liberal minister in Gladstone’s post 1884 government, where he argued against the eight hour day. That stance eventually cost him his parliamentary seat.
Of course the “old unions” did win concessions for the workers. Equally there had been many attempts to organise unskilled workers. There had been attempts in the industries which became centres for the new unions — the gas industry and the docks. These were ultimately failures, but were important experiments in building up a culture of organising and militancy.
Some women however had been organised in the “old” unions.
Throughout the nineteenth century the highest concentration of women’s employment was in the textile industries: the Nottinghamshire hosiery workers, the woollen workers of the West Riding and the cotton workers of Lancashire. They were a cheap (being paid substantially less than men) and flexible workforce for the factory and mill owners.
Married women were especially preferred, as Marx pointed out:
“They have families at home dependent on them for support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried families and are compelled to use their utmost exertion to procure the necessaries of life.”
Despite opposition from some make trade uninists and protective legislation these women were never excuded from these industries for women’s wages were as important to working class families dependant on this industry, as their cheap labour was to the bosses.
By the end of the nineteenth century these women relatively well organised. Women were also involved in the early socialist organisations.
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The strike itself
On an early July afternoon in 1888 a crowd of 200, mainly teenaged girls, arrived outside a newspaper office in Bouverie Street, off Fleet Street in the City of London. They had left their work at the Bryant and May match factory at Bow in the East End in protest when three of their colleagues had been fired. Management had accused them of telling lies about their working conditions to a radical journalist, Annie Besant. They had come to her for help. In June Besant had heard at a meeting of socialists in Hampstead that Bryant and May, had announced monster profits with dividends of 22 per cent contrasted with paying wages of between 4 and 8 Shillings [20 - 40p] a week (see How Much is That Worth Today?)
Annie Besant went down to the factory to investigate. She stood by the gate till the women came out, persuading a small group to talk to her. Besant returned from the East End with a terrible story of cynical exploitation and disregard for the health and welfare of children and young adults. She had recently founded a weekly agitational paper, The Link, in which she wrote up her story of life in the match factory. It was entitled "White Slavery in London".
From the crowd of 200 women at the door, Besant brought a small group into her office where they set up an organising committee. Besant had been pessimistic about the organisation of unskilled women factory workers and shortly before the strike had criticised the Women's Trade Union League in The Link for espousing unworkable ideas.
Bryant and May tried to break the strike by threatening to move the factory to Norway or to import blacklegs from Glasgow. The managing director, Frederick Bryant, was already using his influence on the press. His first statement was widely carried. 'His (sic) employees were liars. Relations with them were very friendly until they had been duped by socialist outsiders. He paid wages above the level of his competitors. He did not use fines. Working conditions were excellent...He would sue Mrs Besant for libel'.
'Mrs Besant' would not be intimidated. The next issue of The Link invited Bryant to sue. Much better, she asserted, to sue her than to sack defenceless poor women.
She took a group of 50 workers to Parliament. The women catalogued their grievances before a group of MPs, and, afterwards, 'outside the House they linked arms and marched three abreast along the Embankment...' The socialist paper Justice reported that, 'A very imposing sight it was too, to see the contrast between these poor 'white slaves' and their opulent sisters'.
Besant's propagandist style was bold and effective and she had a fine eye for the importance of organisation. She addressed the problem of finance. An appeal was launched in The Link. Every contribution was listed from the pounds of middle class sympathisers to the pennies of the workers. Large marches and rallies were organised in Regents Park in the West End as well as Victoria Park and Mile End Waste in the east. The strike committee called for support from the London Trades Council. This body, formed in 1860, represented the skilled tradesmen of the capital. It had always behaved exclusively, rejecting contact with the poor and unskilled and cultivating respectability. But they responded positively, donating £20 to the strike fund and offering to act as mediators between the strikers and the employer. A strike HQ was set up in Bow Road. The strikers were asked to report and sign a register for the allocation of strike pay according to need.
Yet the element the middle class and especially the employers could not comprehend, was the degree to which these workers could help themselves. They were usually depicted as feckless or tragic victims of their own inadequacies tossed around by market forces. There is no doubt that extreme poverty, often reaching starvation for some was debilitating, nor that the vagaries of the market could wreak havoc upon individuals and families, but there was also resistance and mutuality. Match workers' open struggles went back at least to 1871, when the government had imposed a match tax which threatened jobs. Match workers, and the communities from which they came, surged out of the East End in a vast march on Parliament which ended with a brutal battle with the police in Trafalgar Square and the Embankment.
Then there was the story of the Gladstone Statue. Annie Besant said the girls had told her that the Director, Theodore Bryant, a prominent liberal, had deducted a shilling from their wages as a contribution to the erection of a statue to the Liberal Prime Minister on Bow Road, near the factory, by the ancient church. Some of the workers had revolted:
...many went to the unveiling with stones and bricks in their pockets...later on they surrounded the statue - "we paid for it", they cried savagely, - shouting and yelling, and a gruesome story is told that some cut their arms and let their blood trickle on the marble, paid for, in truth, by their blood.
The story was told in June 1888 as if it had happened 'the week before'. The statue was actually raised in August of 1882. Given the age, and the turnover of the employees, the 1882 participants were probably the mothers and sisters of many of the 1888 workers. But the story of resistance was alive in their collective memory. Short lived strikes had taken place in 1881 and 1886 over wages and conditions but they had been unsuccessful.
The Strike Register shows many workers had Irish names and lived in close proximity to each other. The Irish had built a network of cultural, religious and political organisations keeping identity and contact alive. This may have added an important ingredient to their mutuality and maybe even to their readiness to fight at that time. It was well known and recorded that communities of Irish immigrants shared a strong identity and were ready to defend it fiercely. Charles Booth, in his monumental survey of East London, pointed to a particular area as being noted for sending more police to hospital than any other block in London. Known as the Fenian Barracks, its men would not allow one of their number to be taken and would keep out 'invaders' with barricades. At least 23 match workers lived in the 'Fenian Barracks', five in Fern Street and Rook Street, Poplar - all predominantly 'Irish' Streets according to the 1891 Census.
The Match Workers stayed out for three weeks. The London Trades Council, at the Strike Committee's invitation, arranged a meeting with the employers. At that meeting, Bryant and May conceded almost all the women's demands. It was agreed that all fines and most deductions would be abolished, that the 'pennies' [a deduction made for the employment of girls to carry out material for the box-filling women which had continued long after the practice had died out] were to be restored, that 3d was to be restored to the packers and that there would be no victimisation and the firm would recognise a union formed by the women.
On 27 July 1888, the inaugural meeting of the Union of Women Match Makers was held. Clementina Black from the Women's Trade Union League gave advice on rules, subscriptions and elections. Annie Besant was elected the first secretary. With money left over from the strike fund, plus some money raised from a benefit at the Princess Theatre, enough money was raised to enable the union to acquire permanent premises. By October, 666 members had been enrolled [their numbers having swelled by the return of women from hop picking]. By the end of the year, the union changed its rules and name. It became the Matchmakers Union, open to men and women, and the following year sent its first delegate to the Trade Union Congress. Although the Matchmakers' Union continued to exist only until 1903, the action taken in 1888 had both immediate and long-term reverberations in the trade union movement.
It is easy to see how those women provided the inspiration. They were young. They were loud. They were confident. They charged about the area holding meetings and parades. They forced the Bryant and May bosses to climb down. And they won! The "Match Girls" have had an astonishing power to speak to us over the last century. The meeting at the factory gate that June, of the socialist activist and the group of angry young working class women, was a key moment in the birth of a vast social movement which would be celebrated in labour and socialist history as the New Unionism. Ben Tillett paid tribute to the Match Workers whose strike he called 'the beginning of the social convulsion which produced the New Unionism'.
But the strike is not just of historic interest. It is an absolutely critical example of how after decades of low struggle and disappointment a militant movement can revive. Its genesis could come from the most unpredictable and apparently unpromising source. Call centre personnel? Supermarket till staff? Well, not in 1888! It was 12 to 15 year old kids in the match industry!
This text has been extracted from It just went like tinder; the mass movement and New Unionism in Britain 1889: a socialist history, John Charlton, Redwords, 1999. ISBN 1 872208 118 £6.99
Extract from Annie Besant’s autobiograpy
As a step towards bringing about some such union of those ready to work for man, Mr. Stead and I projected the Link, a halfpenny weekly, the spirit of which was described in its motto, taken from Victor Hugo: "The people are silence. I will be the advocate of this silence. I will speak for the dumb. I will speak of the small to the great and of the feeble to the strong. I will speak for all the despairing silent ones. I will interpret this stammering; I will interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the complaints ill-pronounced, and all these cries of beasts that, through ignorance and through suffering, man is forced to utter . . . I will be the Word of the People. I will be the bleeding mouth whence the gag is snatched out. I will say everything." It announced its object to be the "building up" of a " New Church, dedicated to the service of man," and "what we want to do is to establish in every village and in every street some man or woman who will sacrifice time and labour as systematically and as cheerfully in the temporal service of man as others do in what they believe to be the service of God." Week after week we issued our little paper, and it became a real light in the darkness. There the petty injustices inflicted on the poor found voice; there the starvation wages paid to women found exposure; there sweating was brought to public notice. A finisher of boots paid 2s. 6d. per dozen pairs and "find your own polish and thread"; women working for 101/2 hours per day, making shirts - ' fancy best" - at from 10d. to 3s. per dozen, finding their own cotton and needles, paying for gas, towel, and tea (compulsory), earning from 4s. to 10s. per week for the most part; a mantle finisher 2s. 2d. a week, out of which 6d. for materials; " respectable hard-working woman" tried for attempted suicide, "driven to rid herself of life from want." Another part of our work was defending people from unjust landlords, exposing workhouse scandals, enforcing the Employers Liability Act, Charles Bradlaugh's Truck Act, forming "Vigilance Circles" whose members kept watch in their own district over cases of cruelty to children, extortion, insanitary workshops, sweating, &c., reporting each case to me. Into this work came Herbert Burrows, who had joined hands with me over the Trafalgar Square defence, and who wrote some noble articles in the Link. A man loving the people with passionate devotion, hating oppression and injustice with equal passion, working himself with remorseless energy, breaking his heart over wrongs he could not remedy. His whole character once came out in a sentence when he was lying delirious and thought himself dying. "Tell the people how I have loved them always."
In our crusade for the poor we worked for the dockers. "To-morrow morning, in London alone 20,000 to 25,000 adult men," wrote Sidney Webb, "will fight like savages for permission to labour in the docks for 4d. an hour, and one-third of them will fight in vain, and be turned workless away. We worked for children's dinners. "If we insist on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall be fed? If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and torture many of them to death. Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into their dim lives this new pang. 'Why not leave us alone?' ask the pathetically patient little faces. Why not, indeed, since for these child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food.'' We cried out against "cheap goods,'' that meant ''sweated and therefore stolen goods." ''The ethics of buying should surely be simply enough. We want a particular thing, and we do not desire to obtain it either by begging or by robbery; but if in becoming possessed of it, we neither beg it nor steal, we must give for it something equivalent in exchange; so much of our neighbour's labour has been put into the thing we desire; if we will not yield him fair equivalent for that labour, yet take his article, we defraud him, and if we are not willing to give that fair equivalent we have no right to become the owners of his product."
This branch of our work led to a big fight - a fight most happy in its results. At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black gave a capital lecture on Female Labour, and urged the formation of a Consumers' League, pledged only to buy from shops certificated "clean" from unfair wage. H. H. Champion, in the discussion that followed, drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant & May (Limited), while paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the value of the original £5 shares was quoted at £18 7s. 6d. Herbert Burrows and I interviewed some of the girls, got lists of wages, of fines, &c. "A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker she earns 4s. a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm, who 'earns good money, as much as 8s. or 9s. a week.' Out of the earnings 2s. a week is paid for the rent of one room. The child lives only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where 'you get coffee and bread and butter, and jam and marmalade, and lots of it.' "
We published the facts under the title of "White Slavery in London," and called for a boycott of Bryant & May's matches. "It is time some one came and helped us," said two pale-faced girls to me; and I asked: "Who will help? Plenty of people wish well to any good cause; but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but why should I?' is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. 'Some one ought to do it, so why not I? is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between those two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution."
I was promptly threatened with an action for libel, but nothing came of it; it was easier to strike at the girls, and a few days later Fleet Street was enlivened by the irruption of a crowd of match-girls, demanding Annie Besant. I couldn't speechify to match-girls in Fleet Street, so asked that a deputation should come and explain what they wanted. Up came three women and told their story: they had been asked to sign a paper certifying that they were well treated and contented, and that my statements were untrue; they refused. "You had spoke up for us," explained one, "and we weren't going back on you." A girl, pitched on as their leader, was threatened with dismissal; she stood firm; next day she was discharged for some trifle, and they all threw down their work, some 1,400 of them, and then a crowd of them started off to me to ask what to do next. If we ever worked in our lives, Herbert Burrows and I worked for the next fortnight. And a pretty hubbub we created; we asked for money, and it came pouring in; we registered the girls to receive strike pay, wrote articles, roused the clubs, held public meetings, got Mr. Bradlaugh to ask questions in Parliament, stirred up constituencies in which shareholders were members, till the whole country rang with the struggle. Mr. Frederick Charrington lent us a hall for registration, Mr. Sidney Webb and others moved the National Liberal Club to action; we led a procession of the girls to the House of Commons, and interviewed, with a deputation of them, Members of Parliament who cross-questioned them. The girls behaved splendidly, stuck together, kept brave and bright all through. Mr. Hobart of the Social Democratic Federation, Messrs. Shaw, Bland, and Oliver, and Headlam of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black, and many another helped in the heavy work. The London Trades Council finally consented to act as arbitrators and a satisfactory settlement was arrived at; the girls went in to work, fines and deductions were abolished, better wages paid ; the Matchmakers' Union was established, still the strongest woman's Trades Union in England, and for years I acted as secretary, till, under press of other duties, I resigned and my work was given by the girls to Mrs. Thornton Smith; Herbert Burrows became, and still is, the treasurer. For a time there was friction between the Company and the Union, but it gradually disappeared under the influence of common sense on both sides, and we have found the manager ready to consider any just grievance and to endeavour to remove it, while the Company have been liberal supporters of the Working Women's Club at Bow, founded by H. P. Blavatsky.
The worst suffering of all was among the box-makers, thrown out of work by the strike, and they were hard to reach. Twopence-farthing per gross of boxes, and buy your own string and paste, is not wealth, but when the work went more rapid starvation came. Oh, those trudges through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings, rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes, out of the tremulous hands of men. Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and ever louder sounded the question, ''Where is the cure for sorrow, what the way of rescue for the world?"
In August I asked for a "match-girls' drawing room." "It will want a piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no real homes, no playground save the streets. It is not proposed to build an 'institution' with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom - the atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter of a happy home, so strange, alas to too many of our East London girls." In the same month of August, two years later, H. P. Blavatsky opened such a home.
Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers, illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid by all public bodies; work for the dockers and exposure of their wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them, writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll. Such were some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing of scores of lectures - Secularist, Labour, Socialist and scores of articles written for the winning of daily bread. When the School Board work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman's strength could do.
