May 1, 2021 • 28 mins
This 2016 episode covers the London Match Girls Strike of 1888. This was an important labor rights event, when factory workers protested hazardous and unfair working conditions.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today is May one, which is International Labor Day,
so we thought we would bring out an episode related
to labor rights for today's classic. It is the London
Match Girls Strike, which originally came out on September. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
(00:25):
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. I'm'm Holly Frying. Today we have
a listener request we have gotten a few times before,
most recently from Maggie back in April, and that is
the London Match Girls Strike. Of This is an event
(00:48):
I had heard of. Had you heard of it? Oh? Yes, yes,
I knew it was really important to labor rights history
in Britain. That was the sum of my knowledge. Mine
doesn't go far past that, right. Uh. My knowledge was
so limited that I thought these girls who were striking,
we're girls who sold matches. That's because of the Sad
(01:11):
Christmas song, I would bet well, I I know it
more as a as a sad Christmas story with sad illustrations.
Yeah yeah, but it's not. Nope, it's not about girls
who sold matches and most of them not some of
them are women. Some of them are girls, the girls
who they made the matches. So that's just to clear
(01:33):
up the first misconception. Uh, And this is not quite
as jovial a story as maybe the tone of what
we just said might make it sound like, Yeah, Uh,
it's got some parts in it that are hard, as
much of history does, sadly. So we're going to talk
first a little bit about life in East London, because
even today the name the East End still conjures images
(01:55):
of poverty. And writer Charles Dickens died uh a little
more than a decade slightly less than two decades before
the event that we're talking about today took place, but
he was one of the most famous writers to write
about the Victorian East End of London. So think about
Oliver Twist and you will kind of get where we're
going with this. The East End as a term for
(02:16):
this neighborhood was actually coined near the end of the
seventeen hundreds, but it was really in the eighteen eighties
that it started to take on a more insulting connotations,
synonymous with poverty, overcrowding, illness, and crime. In eighteen eighty nine,
a book called Labor and Life of the people basically
surveyed and mapped East and South London, chronicling the incidents
(02:38):
of poverty and how people lived in these neighborhoods. And
from a review of the book is this quote quote.
Much has been written of late about the squalor and
vice of East London and of that seemingly vast horde,
the army of the unemployed. Most realistic pictures of starving
mothers and naked children have filled the newspapers. And that's
(03:01):
the end of the quote. So even though the book
itself reported that a lot of people living in East
and South London had their basic day to day meet
needs meant like they had enough to eat as kind
of a minimum standard, the area was notorious, even at
this time that we're talking about, for being uh synonymous
with poverty and crime, and this so called outcast London
(03:25):
didn't have its reputation simply because of the income level
and living conditions of its residents. Many of the area's
residents were immigrants and minorities, regarded with a certain degree
of suspicion and disdain by much of middle and upper
class Britain. Another culprit for the East ends reputation was
the industries that were headquartered there. Many of them were
(03:46):
so called sweating industries, so the types of places where
people worked long hours in windowless rooms doing work that
was sometimes dangerous and often looked down upon by the
people in most and the more affluent occupations. One of
these employers was Bryant and May Match Company. Most matchmakers
at this time were young women, and then the hierarchy
(04:08):
of working poor in Victorian England, these so called match
girls attended to be some of the lowest of the low.
People really looked down on girls who made matches and
women who made matches. In eight the Bryant and may
Match factories came to the attention of Annie Bessant. Uh.
Most American pronunciations of this seem to rime with crescent,
(04:29):
so we're going with that. She was a socialist, feminist
reformer who by this point had been advocating for social
change for decades. In the eighteen seventies, she had edited
The National Reformer along with Charles Bradlaw, which advocated for
things like labor rights, women's suffrage, and birth control. And
that last one got The two of them tried for obscenity,
(04:50):
but they were acquitted. Bessant was also a member of
the Fabian Society, founded in eighteen eighty four. The Fabian
Society is a socialist organization. Establ was to advocate non
violent political change, in particular to try to establish a
Great Britain as a democratic socialist state. Some of the
other famous members in the Fabian Society's early years where
(05:12):
George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Beatrice and City
Web The Famians. The Fabian Society helped form Britain's Labor
Party in nineteen o six and has continued to be
affiliated with the Labor Party since then. On June fifte
the Bryant and may Match Factory was discussed at a
Fabian Society meeting following a presentation by trade unionist Clementina Black.
(05:37):
The topic of the conversation was the fact that shareholders
in the factory received a dividend of more than twenty However,
the employees who made its boxes were paid two and
a quarter pence or pennies per gross for their work.
So to catch folks up really briefly on British money
at the time, there were twelve pence in a shilling
and twenty shillings in a pound, so this was basically nothing.
(06:01):
The members of the society pledged not to use Briant
and May matches or to buy any products from them.
Bessett wanted to investigate this a little further, so she
went to the factory to talk to these workers herself.
They weren't, however, actually the same people that had been
discussed at the meeting. There's people who were making the
two in a quarter pence for every hundred and forty
(06:21):
four boxes. Those are people that worked at home, often
with their whole families, making boxes as fast as possible.
Bessant met workers instead leaving from their shift. These are
people who did things in the factory itself, doing jobs
like taking the matches off of the frames and putting
them into their boxes, and the conditions that these people
described to her were pretty appalling. On June she published
(06:46):
the findings of her investigation in the Link, a journal
for the Servants of Ma'am. Some of Briant and May's
match girls were as young as eight years old. Many
were immigrants from Ireland whose families had moved to London
in the wake of the famine earlier in the century.
In the summer they started work at six thirty in
the morning and in the winter at eight am, and
(07:07):
either way the work day ended at six pm, although
in other accounts the days were often as long as
fourteen hours. I found a lot of sight of of
sources citing the fourteen hour number, which is a little
longer than was described in this particular article that sparked
this whole thing. Apart from these really long days, all
(07:28):
of the work was done standing, and the workers whose
job was emptying the frames of their matches also had
to run up and down flights of stairs every time
they needed a new frame, because they were only allowed
one frame at a time in their working stations. So
this meant that they had to run up and down
the stairs about three times an hour, and they were
(07:48):
running because all but a few married women were paid
by the piece, not by the day or by the hour,
so the more work they did, the more money they
got paid. Because the pay for each unit was tiny,
for example three quarter pence per gross for filling boxes
of matches, they were really motivated to work as quickly
as humanly possible because most of Bryant and May's products
(08:11):
were strike anywhere matches, which, as their names suggest, can
be struck anywhere. This led to problems of your work
spontaneously catching fire while you were handling strike anywhere matches
as fast as you possibly could. But the employees at
the factory didn't get to take home all of their
minimal pay. There was this long list of out of
(08:34):
pocket costs in which the workers had to pay for
the tools that they needed to do their jobs. On
top of that, there were fines. These are some of
the fines. The workers Besson interviewed reported dirty feet threepence,
leaving the area around the bench untidy threepence. I want
(08:54):
to clarify that the bench in the situation is like
the table or the counter that they're working on. It
was not a seat that you sat on. Putting matches
that had burned up during work onto the bench. One
or two sellings, leaving matches on the bench while going
to get a fresh frame threepence, talking threepence being late,
(09:14):
the loss of half a day's pay. This was due
to not being allowed in to work and a further
fine of five pence. Yes, so if you relate, you
lost your pay until like the break in the day
where they would let you in and then you also
had to pay a fine on top of your lost pay.
Workers whose matches caught fire while they were working, which
(09:35):
happened a lot because these were strike anywhere matches being
handled very quickly, they basically watched their pay burn up
in front of them because all that work they were
doing was now gone, and then if the frames were
damaged in the fire, they could be fined or sacked.
Bessant also described one girl who had been fined for
letting the web that was used to make the matches
(09:57):
wrap around a machine. She had done this as her
fingers were about to be caught, and she was told, quote,
never mind your fingers. Even so, another employee had lost
a finger in just such an incident and had been
given absolutely no support from the company while she recovered.
To add insult to injury and something that could just
go into a bad management journal as an example of
(10:19):
what not to do. Bessant also reported that Mr Theodore
Bryant of Bryant and May had decided to show his
respect to Prime Minister William Gladstone by putting up a
statue of him at the factory, and he docked a
shilling from every worker's pay to pay for the statue
that would go in their work area, and then he
(10:40):
gave them half a day off without pay as a
holiday to celebrate the unveiling of the statue they'd had
to pay for themselves. I just want to make grumbling noises,
Bessant ends her report quote, such is a bald account
of one form of white slavery as it exists in London.
(11:01):
With chattel slaves. Mr Bryant could not have made his
huge fortune, for he could not have fed, clothed and
housed them for four shillings a week each, and they
would have had a definite money value which would have
served as a protection. But who cares for the fate
of these white wage slaves born in slums, driven to
work while still children, undersized because under fed, oppressed because helpless,
(11:26):
flung aside as soon as worked out? Who cares if
they die or go on the streets, provided only that
the Brian and May shareholders get their twenty three percent
and Mr Theodore Bryant can erect statues and buy parks. Oh,
if we had but a people's Dante to make a
special circle in the inferno for those who live on
this misery and suck wealth out of the starvation of
(11:48):
helpless girls. Failing a poet to hold up their conduct
to the execration of posterity enshrined in deathless verse, let
us strive to touch their consciences i e. Their pockets,
and let us at least avoid being partakers of their
sins by abstaining from using their commodities. And with that
(12:08):
call to action to boycott Bryant and May, we will
take a brief Forard to talk about a sponsor to
get back to our story. Unsurprisingly, the Briant and maymatch company,
(12:29):
which was at this point the largest matchmaker in Britain,
was not happy at all by Annie Besson's report in
the link. They immediately started trying to strong arm their
employees into denying that the allegations were true. On July four,
an anonymous worker wrote a letter to Annie Bessent that said,
in part quote, they have been trying to get all
the poor girls to say that it is all lies
(12:50):
that has been printed, and trying to make us sign
papers that it is all lies. On July about two
workers walked off the job. Soon about twelve hundred of
the Bryant and May employees who made strike anywhere matches
had gone on strike, and another three hundred who worked
in the nearby wax match factory joined them. Accounts at
(13:13):
the time were all over the place about exactly why
they had stopped their work on that particular day. According
to one account, they were just tired of all the
fines and poor working conditions, And another two women had
been fired for talking to Annie Besset about her investigation,
and in a third it was one young woman who
had been fired for not following a foreman's orders to
(13:34):
fill a match box in a particular way, but her
friends at the factory had thought her firing was unfair,
and it was this last explanation that Brian and May
tried to claim when talking to the press. And for
decades this strike was positioned mostly as Annie Besset's work,
but she wasn't particularly involved in it. In Victorian England,
(13:54):
strikes did not have a good track record of leading
to reforms for workers, so Besset thought the best course
of action would be to press consumers to boycott Bryant
in May, which they did. Most of her involvement with
the strike itself was through raising funds and spreading the
word Donors included Frederick Ingalls and George Bernard Shaw became
a clerk for the fundraising effort. The striking workers themselves
(14:18):
were really the ones who actually organized the strike and
the protests that went along with it. They ultimately formed
the Union of Women Matchmakers, which was the largest union
of women and girls in Britain. They formed a picket line,
They arranged demonstrations and meetings with speakers at mile End Waste,
which was a nearby open area and mile End Waste
also served as the meeting point to distribute donations to
(14:41):
the people who needed them. About fifty workers went directly
to Parliament to discuss their grievances directly in person with
the MPs. Overall, the striking workers really got a lot
of support. One reason was that Annie Bessett was quite
good at the publicity side of it. She had titled
her original article on their working conditions White Slavery in
(15:02):
London and had closely tied the idea of these women's
terrible pay and poor working conditions to the idea of
chattel slavery. Britain had abolished slavery more than fifty years prior,
so the idea that there was slavery going on right
there in the East End really horrified a lot of
Victorian London, even though to be clear, what was happening
(15:23):
at the Match Factory was definitely not chattel slavery. That
was just a comparison that she had very articulately drawn. Yeah,
that's and I wanted to point that out because they're
definitely cases where people continue to use slavery as like
a one to one direct parallel with things that were
not slavery. So this was terrible. It was not chattel slavery.
(15:46):
The striking women also got the support of some of
London's skilled trade unions, including the London Trades Council. The
LTC had traditionally shunned the needs of unskilled labor. They
represented skilled workers and so pretty much all of the
unskilled labor in Britain. They're pretty much on their own,
but in this case it stepped in and tried to
(16:07):
negotiate with Brian and may On behalf of the striking workers. Initially,
the factory refused to budge, saying only that if the
women returned to work, all but the ringleaders could have
their jobs back. But the support was definitely not Universal.
There is a widely quoted piece from the Times quote
the pity is that the match girls have not been
(16:28):
suffered to take their own course, but have been egged
on to strike by irresponsible advisors. No effort has been
spared by those pests of the modern industrialized world to
bring this quarrel to a head. I tried really hard
to figure out exactly, like this quote comes up again
and again and stuff about the about the strike, and
(16:50):
I'm like, Okay, what is the context of this piece
and the Times? This is a quote that somebody said
that the Times printed, or was like in an editorial
in the Times, Like what actually, uh what what was it?
But I did not find the answer to that. Soon,
Social Settlement organization Toynbee Hall was investigating, and boycott was
rolling through the consumer market, and bad press was putting
(17:13):
an extreme amount of pressure on Bryant and May. So
after about two weeks the company started negotiating with the strikers.
That negotiations started on July six, and an agreement was
reached the next day, Bryant and May insisting to the
press that they surely would have addressed any complaints if
only they had known that anyone was unhappy about anything,
(17:36):
rehired all of the striking workers. I feel like that's
like a model that has happened so many times throughout
history when companies are like, we didn't know anybody was
miserable in their incredibly cruel jobs. People love that there
that nobody said anything. It was a problem that nobody
said it was a problem that we were docking them
(17:57):
threepence for dirty feet and not paying them any thing,
and like making them run up and downstairs with strike
anywhere matches. They were unhappy. As a result of the negotiations,
all of the fines were abolished, as well as all
deductions from the workers pay for the tools they needed
to do their job. There were also pay adjustments and
(18:19):
a policy was instituted in which grievances could be taken
to the managing director rather than having to go through
the foreman, and the union had to stay to advocate
for the workers. One last concession that the strikers got
was the establishment of a breakfast room, and the breakfast
dream was enormously important for reasons that we will talk
about after another brief sponsor break. So one of the
(18:50):
things that we haven't really talked about in terms of
the Bryant and May workers workplace hazards was risks to
their health. In addition to all the things Bessent docum
minted in her report, women working in match stick factories
were susceptible to a condition known as fossey jaw, sometimes
described at the time as phosphorus poisoning, and this was
(19:11):
because the strike Anywhere matches that they were making used
white phosphorus sometimes also called yellow phosphorus, and exposure to
white phosphorus can cause osteo necrosis, which is the death
of bone tissue. Here are the symptoms of fossy jaw, swelling,
tooth pain, swollen gums, swollen cheeks and jaws, tooth decay,
(19:34):
decay of the jawbones, festering sores that it's exposed, the
decaying bone, necrotic gangreeness tissue in the face and jaw,
and death. Up to of the time, Bryant and May
were in fact using half of all the yellow phosphorus
in the entire matchmaking industry, and this was a departure
(19:56):
from its original business plan, which was to use red phosphorus,
which does not cause osteo necrosis, to make those strike
on the box matches. These were more expensive, which made
strike anywhere matches much more popular. Often, workers who found
themselves displaying the early symptoms of this condition would try
to hide it because they knew that the factory, trying
(20:17):
to protect its own interests, would fire them if it
found out that they were sick. One of the reasons
that a separate space for food and eating was so
important to the strike negotiations was that without one, Bryant
and May workers had to bring their meals with them,
keep them next to their work area, and then sometimes
eat at their work benches. Eating in the working area
(20:39):
with the food having also been stored there in the
working area, increase their phosphorus exposure dramatically. Another thing we
haven't talked about it's a total surprise to me to learn,
is that William Bryant and Francis May, founders of Bryant
and May Match Company h were Quakers and based on
literally any other time we have ever talked about Quakers
(21:02):
in the podcast, ever, this might come as a surprise
to people. They had founded the business in eighteen fifty
and in eighteen sixty three, the Commission on the Employment
of Children in Industry investigated their business and found it
to be quote a very nicely conducted place. In eighteen
sixty one, though Wilberforce Bryant, William Bryant's oldest son, became
(21:23):
the general manager there. He wanted to expand the business
as much as possible over the objections of Francis May,
the younger Bryant forced May out in eighteen seventy five,
following the threat of a lawsuit that May was afraid
would tarnish the reputation of the Quaker religion. Obviously, May's
quiet departure from the company did not have the effect
(21:44):
he was hoping for at all, because without his more
tempering influence, the sons of William Bryant took the business
in a very different and a much more exploitive direction.
A lot of the pay and working conditions that the
striking workers were advocating to change had actually been illegal
for years following the passage of the Factory Acts in Britain.
(22:08):
For a couple of years after the strike, Bryant and
May tried to restore its reputation as being a socially
minded employer, as was expected of a Quaker business. It
took a more fair but perhaps somewhat paternal approach to
its workers. It also made charitable contributions to organizations that
would benefit the people who worked there, who continued to
(22:29):
be quite poor. Soon the press were describing Briant and
May as a model employer, offering jobs to British workers
and looking after the poor ladies who worked there. Yeah,
they're doing things like donating lots of food to the
soup kitchens where the people who worked for them eight
from time to time because they weren't being paid enough
(22:49):
to buy food elsewhere. Uh. It's a little unclear whether
whether the Bryant's sons continue to identify as Quakers or not.
I found contradictory uh evidence on that. But regardless, this
more philanthropic but sometimes definitely paternalistic way of running their
(23:14):
business did not last. The Star reported a case of
fossy jaw at the factory in eighteen nine two. A
subsequent investigation found numerous safety issues with how phosphorus was
being handled there, and then ten years after the strike,
Brian and May appeared in the in court following the
death of one of their workers from phosphorus poisoning, and
(23:36):
it was revealed that the factory had seventeen unreported cases
of phosphorus poisoning, which by law had to be reported
to health authorities whenever they occurred. Bryant and May had
not only failed to report these cases, but had also
actively concealed the fact that they had even happened and
six people had died. They were fined twenty five pounds
(23:59):
nine shillings. I laugh out of sadness, because that does
not sound like a lot of mona, even in late
nineteenth century dollars. The company ultimately had to merge with
other matchmakers to stay afloat because their reputation could not
really recover, and this strike of eight eight led to
(24:19):
increased awareness of the dangers of working with yellow phosphorus
and a push to ban its use. In one the
Salvation Army opened a competing match factory using only red
phosphorus and paid double what Briant and May did. Briant
and May stopped using yellow phosphorus in nineteen o one.
The International Association of Labor Legislation began advocating a global
(24:42):
ban on yellow phosphorus and matchmaking in the early nineteen
hundreds as well. An international agreement was signed in nineteen
o eight and Britain banned the import, sale, or manufacturer
of white phosphorus matches in nineteen ten. It's the strike
anywhere matches seem incredibly dangerous to me. Yeah, and so
(25:05):
it's like it surprised me as I was reading this
that like the people favored the cheapness of the strike
anywhere matches over the safety of a match that does
not just light on fire against anything with the most
minor friction, right, yeah. Uh. And this strike also had
a huge influence on organized labor in Britain. Following the
(25:27):
success of the match workers strike, there was a move
toward unionizing among other unskilled labor all across the nation.
It grew into the new Unionism movement, and as we
alluded to earlier, it eventually led to the establishment of
the Independent Labor Party. Yeah. Prior to this, as we
said earlier, like not, strikes hadn't traditionally been very successful
(25:48):
in getting workers uh changes in their working environment and
the time right around this and this, the success of
this strike shifted that a little bit um and the
the idea of unskilled labor having a union became a
much bigger deal because before that, most of the unions
(26:09):
were about more skilled trades. Uh. And Uh, the people
who were working in unskilled jobs a lot of times
with basically no protections, uh, weren't really seen as being
worthy of being in a union. And that changed after
this point. Yeah, is your listener male peppy this time around?
(26:32):
It's pretty peppy. Yeah. Anny Bessett was also a really
interesting person, and she went on to do other things
completely unrelated to this strike. And originally, as I started
researching this article or this podcast, was going to be
a lot more about her, and then I realized that
it's really a big misperception that the strike was all
her doing. Um. A lot of the writing about the
(26:54):
strike for decades was pretty dismissive and judgmental about women
who were striking and sort of made it like they
were unruly children who were goaded into a successful strike
by the heroic work of Annie Besson And that was
not true at all. No, they were on it. They organized,
(27:15):
they really they had a whole lot of solidarity, and
they organized a bunch of stuff and they got things
that they were after heay so much for joining us
on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook, U
r L or something similar over the course of the
(27:35):
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(27:56):
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H
Happy Saturday. Today is May one, which is International Labor Day,
so we thought we would bring out an episode related
to labor rights for today's classic. It is the London
Match Girls Strike, which originally came out on September. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
(00:25):
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. I'm'm Holly Frying. Today we have
a listener request we have gotten a few times before,
most recently from Maggie back in April, and that is
the London Match Girls Strike. Of This is an event
(00:48):
I had heard of. Had you heard of it? Oh? Yes, yes,
I knew it was really important to labor rights history
in Britain. That was the sum of my knowledge. Mine
doesn't go far past that, right. Uh. My knowledge was
so limited that I thought these girls who were striking,
we're girls who sold matches. That's because of the Sad
(01:11):
Christmas song, I would bet well, I I know it
more as a as a sad Christmas story with sad illustrations.
Yeah yeah, but it's not. Nope, it's not about girls
who sold matches and most of them not some of
them are women. Some of them are girls, the girls
who they made the matches. So that's just to clear
(01:33):
up the first misconception. Uh, And this is not quite
as jovial a story as maybe the tone of what
we just said might make it sound like, Yeah, Uh,
it's got some parts in it that are hard, as
much of history does, sadly. So we're going to talk
first a little bit about life in East London, because
even today the name the East End still conjures images
(01:55):
of poverty. And writer Charles Dickens died uh a little
more than a decade slightly less than two decades before
the event that we're talking about today took place, but
he was one of the most famous writers to write
about the Victorian East End of London. So think about
Oliver Twist and you will kind of get where we're
going with this. The East End as a term for
(02:16):
this neighborhood was actually coined near the end of the
seventeen hundreds, but it was really in the eighteen eighties
that it started to take on a more insulting connotations,
synonymous with poverty, overcrowding, illness, and crime. In eighteen eighty nine,
a book called Labor and Life of the people basically
surveyed and mapped East and South London, chronicling the incidents
(02:38):
of poverty and how people lived in these neighborhoods. And
from a review of the book is this quote quote.
Much has been written of late about the squalor and
vice of East London and of that seemingly vast horde,
the army of the unemployed. Most realistic pictures of starving
mothers and naked children have filled the newspapers. And that's
(03:01):
the end of the quote. So even though the book
itself reported that a lot of people living in East
and South London had their basic day to day meet
needs meant like they had enough to eat as kind
of a minimum standard, the area was notorious, even at
this time that we're talking about, for being uh synonymous
with poverty and crime, and this so called outcast London
(03:25):
didn't have its reputation simply because of the income level
and living conditions of its residents. Many of the area's
residents were immigrants and minorities, regarded with a certain degree
of suspicion and disdain by much of middle and upper
class Britain. Another culprit for the East ends reputation was
the industries that were headquartered there. Many of them were
(03:46):
so called sweating industries, so the types of places where
people worked long hours in windowless rooms doing work that
was sometimes dangerous and often looked down upon by the
people in most and the more affluent occupations. One of
these employers was Bryant and May Match Company. Most matchmakers
at this time were young women, and then the hierarchy
(04:08):
of working poor in Victorian England, these so called match
girls attended to be some of the lowest of the low.
People really looked down on girls who made matches and
women who made matches. In eight the Bryant and may
Match factories came to the attention of Annie Bessant. Uh.
Most American pronunciations of this seem to rime with crescent,
(04:29):
so we're going with that. She was a socialist, feminist
reformer who by this point had been advocating for social
change for decades. In the eighteen seventies, she had edited
The National Reformer along with Charles Bradlaw, which advocated for
things like labor rights, women's suffrage, and birth control. And
that last one got The two of them tried for obscenity,
(04:50):
but they were acquitted. Bessant was also a member of
the Fabian Society, founded in eighteen eighty four. The Fabian
Society is a socialist organization. Establ was to advocate non
violent political change, in particular to try to establish a
Great Britain as a democratic socialist state. Some of the
other famous members in the Fabian Society's early years where
(05:12):
George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Beatrice and City
Web The Famians. The Fabian Society helped form Britain's Labor
Party in nineteen o six and has continued to be
affiliated with the Labor Party since then. On June fifte
the Bryant and may Match Factory was discussed at a
Fabian Society meeting following a presentation by trade unionist Clementina Black.
(05:37):
The topic of the conversation was the fact that shareholders
in the factory received a dividend of more than twenty However,
the employees who made its boxes were paid two and
a quarter pence or pennies per gross for their work.
So to catch folks up really briefly on British money
at the time, there were twelve pence in a shilling
and twenty shillings in a pound, so this was basically nothing.
(06:01):
The members of the society pledged not to use Briant
and May matches or to buy any products from them.
Bessett wanted to investigate this a little further, so she
went to the factory to talk to these workers herself.
They weren't, however, actually the same people that had been
discussed at the meeting. There's people who were making the
two in a quarter pence for every hundred and forty
(06:21):
four boxes. Those are people that worked at home, often
with their whole families, making boxes as fast as possible.
Bessant met workers instead leaving from their shift. These are
people who did things in the factory itself, doing jobs
like taking the matches off of the frames and putting
them into their boxes, and the conditions that these people
described to her were pretty appalling. On June she published
(06:46):
the findings of her investigation in the Link, a journal
for the Servants of Ma'am. Some of Briant and May's
match girls were as young as eight years old. Many
were immigrants from Ireland whose families had moved to London
in the wake of the famine earlier in the century.
In the summer they started work at six thirty in
the morning and in the winter at eight am, and
(07:07):
either way the work day ended at six pm, although
in other accounts the days were often as long as
fourteen hours. I found a lot of sight of of
sources citing the fourteen hour number, which is a little
longer than was described in this particular article that sparked
this whole thing. Apart from these really long days, all
(07:28):
of the work was done standing, and the workers whose
job was emptying the frames of their matches also had
to run up and down flights of stairs every time
they needed a new frame, because they were only allowed
one frame at a time in their working stations. So
this meant that they had to run up and down
the stairs about three times an hour, and they were
(07:48):
running because all but a few married women were paid
by the piece, not by the day or by the hour,
so the more work they did, the more money they
got paid. Because the pay for each unit was tiny,
for example three quarter pence per gross for filling boxes
of matches, they were really motivated to work as quickly
as humanly possible because most of Bryant and May's products
(08:11):
were strike anywhere matches, which, as their names suggest, can
be struck anywhere. This led to problems of your work
spontaneously catching fire while you were handling strike anywhere matches
as fast as you possibly could. But the employees at
the factory didn't get to take home all of their
minimal pay. There was this long list of out of
(08:34):
pocket costs in which the workers had to pay for
the tools that they needed to do their jobs. On
top of that, there were fines. These are some of
the fines. The workers Besson interviewed reported dirty feet threepence,
leaving the area around the bench untidy threepence. I want
(08:54):
to clarify that the bench in the situation is like
the table or the counter that they're working on. It
was not a seat that you sat on. Putting matches
that had burned up during work onto the bench. One
or two sellings, leaving matches on the bench while going
to get a fresh frame threepence, talking threepence being late,
(09:14):
the loss of half a day's pay. This was due
to not being allowed in to work and a further
fine of five pence. Yes, so if you relate, you
lost your pay until like the break in the day
where they would let you in and then you also
had to pay a fine on top of your lost pay.
Workers whose matches caught fire while they were working, which
(09:35):
happened a lot because these were strike anywhere matches being
handled very quickly, they basically watched their pay burn up
in front of them because all that work they were
doing was now gone, and then if the frames were
damaged in the fire, they could be fined or sacked.
Bessant also described one girl who had been fined for
letting the web that was used to make the matches
(09:57):
wrap around a machine. She had done this as her
fingers were about to be caught, and she was told, quote,
never mind your fingers. Even so, another employee had lost
a finger in just such an incident and had been
given absolutely no support from the company while she recovered.
To add insult to injury and something that could just
go into a bad management journal as an example of
(10:19):
what not to do. Bessant also reported that Mr Theodore
Bryant of Bryant and May had decided to show his
respect to Prime Minister William Gladstone by putting up a
statue of him at the factory, and he docked a
shilling from every worker's pay to pay for the statue
that would go in their work area, and then he
(10:40):
gave them half a day off without pay as a
holiday to celebrate the unveiling of the statue they'd had
to pay for themselves. I just want to make grumbling noises,
Bessant ends her report quote, such is a bald account
of one form of white slavery as it exists in London.
(11:01):
With chattel slaves. Mr Bryant could not have made his
huge fortune, for he could not have fed, clothed and
housed them for four shillings a week each, and they
would have had a definite money value which would have
served as a protection. But who cares for the fate
of these white wage slaves born in slums, driven to
work while still children, undersized because under fed, oppressed because helpless,
(11:26):
flung aside as soon as worked out? Who cares if
they die or go on the streets, provided only that
the Brian and May shareholders get their twenty three percent
and Mr Theodore Bryant can erect statues and buy parks. Oh,
if we had but a people's Dante to make a
special circle in the inferno for those who live on
this misery and suck wealth out of the starvation of
(11:48):
helpless girls. Failing a poet to hold up their conduct
to the execration of posterity enshrined in deathless verse, let
us strive to touch their consciences i e. Their pockets,
and let us at least avoid being partakers of their
sins by abstaining from using their commodities. And with that
(12:08):
call to action to boycott Bryant and May, we will
take a brief Forard to talk about a sponsor to
get back to our story. Unsurprisingly, the Briant and maymatch company,
(12:29):
which was at this point the largest matchmaker in Britain,
was not happy at all by Annie Besson's report in
the link. They immediately started trying to strong arm their
employees into denying that the allegations were true. On July four,
an anonymous worker wrote a letter to Annie Bessent that said,
in part quote, they have been trying to get all
the poor girls to say that it is all lies
(12:50):
that has been printed, and trying to make us sign
papers that it is all lies. On July about two
workers walked off the job. Soon about twelve hundred of
the Bryant and May employees who made strike anywhere matches
had gone on strike, and another three hundred who worked
in the nearby wax match factory joined them. Accounts at
(13:13):
the time were all over the place about exactly why
they had stopped their work on that particular day. According
to one account, they were just tired of all the
fines and poor working conditions, And another two women had
been fired for talking to Annie Besset about her investigation,
and in a third it was one young woman who
had been fired for not following a foreman's orders to
(13:34):
fill a match box in a particular way, but her
friends at the factory had thought her firing was unfair,
and it was this last explanation that Brian and May
tried to claim when talking to the press. And for
decades this strike was positioned mostly as Annie Besset's work,
but she wasn't particularly involved in it. In Victorian England,
(13:54):
strikes did not have a good track record of leading
to reforms for workers, so Besset thought the best course
of action would be to press consumers to boycott Bryant
in May, which they did. Most of her involvement with
the strike itself was through raising funds and spreading the
word Donors included Frederick Ingalls and George Bernard Shaw became
a clerk for the fundraising effort. The striking workers themselves
(14:18):
were really the ones who actually organized the strike and
the protests that went along with it. They ultimately formed
the Union of Women Matchmakers, which was the largest union
of women and girls in Britain. They formed a picket line,
They arranged demonstrations and meetings with speakers at mile End Waste,
which was a nearby open area and mile End Waste
also served as the meeting point to distribute donations to
(14:41):
the people who needed them. About fifty workers went directly
to Parliament to discuss their grievances directly in person with
the MPs. Overall, the striking workers really got a lot
of support. One reason was that Annie Bessett was quite
good at the publicity side of it. She had titled
her original article on their working conditions White Slavery in
(15:02):
London and had closely tied the idea of these women's
terrible pay and poor working conditions to the idea of
chattel slavery. Britain had abolished slavery more than fifty years prior,
so the idea that there was slavery going on right
there in the East End really horrified a lot of
Victorian London, even though to be clear, what was happening
(15:23):
at the Match Factory was definitely not chattel slavery. That
was just a comparison that she had very articulately drawn. Yeah,
that's and I wanted to point that out because they're
definitely cases where people continue to use slavery as like
a one to one direct parallel with things that were
not slavery. So this was terrible. It was not chattel slavery.
(15:46):
The striking women also got the support of some of
London's skilled trade unions, including the London Trades Council. The
LTC had traditionally shunned the needs of unskilled labor. They
represented skilled workers and so pretty much all of the
unskilled labor in Britain. They're pretty much on their own,
but in this case it stepped in and tried to
(16:07):
negotiate with Brian and may On behalf of the striking workers. Initially,
the factory refused to budge, saying only that if the
women returned to work, all but the ringleaders could have
their jobs back. But the support was definitely not Universal.
There is a widely quoted piece from the Times quote
the pity is that the match girls have not been
(16:28):
suffered to take their own course, but have been egged
on to strike by irresponsible advisors. No effort has been
spared by those pests of the modern industrialized world to
bring this quarrel to a head. I tried really hard
to figure out exactly, like this quote comes up again
and again and stuff about the about the strike, and
(16:50):
I'm like, Okay, what is the context of this piece
and the Times? This is a quote that somebody said
that the Times printed, or was like in an editorial
in the Times, Like what actually, uh what what was it?
But I did not find the answer to that. Soon,
Social Settlement organization Toynbee Hall was investigating, and boycott was
rolling through the consumer market, and bad press was putting
(17:13):
an extreme amount of pressure on Bryant and May. So
after about two weeks the company started negotiating with the strikers.
That negotiations started on July six, and an agreement was
reached the next day, Bryant and May insisting to the
press that they surely would have addressed any complaints if
only they had known that anyone was unhappy about anything,
(17:36):
rehired all of the striking workers. I feel like that's
like a model that has happened so many times throughout
history when companies are like, we didn't know anybody was
miserable in their incredibly cruel jobs. People love that there
that nobody said anything. It was a problem that nobody
said it was a problem that we were docking them
(17:57):
threepence for dirty feet and not paying them any thing,
and like making them run up and downstairs with strike
anywhere matches. They were unhappy. As a result of the negotiations,
all of the fines were abolished, as well as all
deductions from the workers pay for the tools they needed
to do their job. There were also pay adjustments and
(18:19):
a policy was instituted in which grievances could be taken
to the managing director rather than having to go through
the foreman, and the union had to stay to advocate
for the workers. One last concession that the strikers got
was the establishment of a breakfast room, and the breakfast
dream was enormously important for reasons that we will talk
about after another brief sponsor break. So one of the
(18:50):
things that we haven't really talked about in terms of
the Bryant and May workers workplace hazards was risks to
their health. In addition to all the things Bessent docum
minted in her report, women working in match stick factories
were susceptible to a condition known as fossey jaw, sometimes
described at the time as phosphorus poisoning, and this was
(19:11):
because the strike Anywhere matches that they were making used
white phosphorus sometimes also called yellow phosphorus, and exposure to
white phosphorus can cause osteo necrosis, which is the death
of bone tissue. Here are the symptoms of fossy jaw, swelling,
tooth pain, swollen gums, swollen cheeks and jaws, tooth decay,
(19:34):
decay of the jawbones, festering sores that it's exposed, the
decaying bone, necrotic gangreeness tissue in the face and jaw,
and death. Up to of the time, Bryant and May
were in fact using half of all the yellow phosphorus
in the entire matchmaking industry, and this was a departure
(19:56):
from its original business plan, which was to use red phosphorus,
which does not cause osteo necrosis, to make those strike
on the box matches. These were more expensive, which made
strike anywhere matches much more popular. Often, workers who found
themselves displaying the early symptoms of this condition would try
to hide it because they knew that the factory, trying
(20:17):
to protect its own interests, would fire them if it
found out that they were sick. One of the reasons
that a separate space for food and eating was so
important to the strike negotiations was that without one, Bryant
and May workers had to bring their meals with them,
keep them next to their work area, and then sometimes
eat at their work benches. Eating in the working area
(20:39):
with the food having also been stored there in the
working area, increase their phosphorus exposure dramatically. Another thing we
haven't talked about it's a total surprise to me to learn,
is that William Bryant and Francis May, founders of Bryant
and May Match Company h were Quakers and based on
literally any other time we have ever talked about Quakers
(21:02):
in the podcast, ever, this might come as a surprise
to people. They had founded the business in eighteen fifty
and in eighteen sixty three, the Commission on the Employment
of Children in Industry investigated their business and found it
to be quote a very nicely conducted place. In eighteen
sixty one, though Wilberforce Bryant, William Bryant's oldest son, became
(21:23):
the general manager there. He wanted to expand the business
as much as possible over the objections of Francis May,
the younger Bryant forced May out in eighteen seventy five,
following the threat of a lawsuit that May was afraid
would tarnish the reputation of the Quaker religion. Obviously, May's
quiet departure from the company did not have the effect
(21:44):
he was hoping for at all, because without his more
tempering influence, the sons of William Bryant took the business
in a very different and a much more exploitive direction.
A lot of the pay and working conditions that the
striking workers were advocating to change had actually been illegal
for years following the passage of the Factory Acts in Britain.
(22:08):
For a couple of years after the strike, Bryant and
May tried to restore its reputation as being a socially
minded employer, as was expected of a Quaker business. It
took a more fair but perhaps somewhat paternal approach to
its workers. It also made charitable contributions to organizations that
would benefit the people who worked there, who continued to
(22:29):
be quite poor. Soon the press were describing Briant and
May as a model employer, offering jobs to British workers
and looking after the poor ladies who worked there. Yeah,
they're doing things like donating lots of food to the
soup kitchens where the people who worked for them eight
from time to time because they weren't being paid enough
(22:49):
to buy food elsewhere. Uh. It's a little unclear whether
whether the Bryant's sons continue to identify as Quakers or not.
I found contradictory uh evidence on that. But regardless, this
more philanthropic but sometimes definitely paternalistic way of running their
(23:14):
business did not last. The Star reported a case of
fossy jaw at the factory in eighteen nine two. A
subsequent investigation found numerous safety issues with how phosphorus was
being handled there, and then ten years after the strike,
Brian and May appeared in the in court following the
death of one of their workers from phosphorus poisoning, and
(23:36):
it was revealed that the factory had seventeen unreported cases
of phosphorus poisoning, which by law had to be reported
to health authorities whenever they occurred. Bryant and May had
not only failed to report these cases, but had also
actively concealed the fact that they had even happened and
six people had died. They were fined twenty five pounds
(23:59):
nine shillings. I laugh out of sadness, because that does
not sound like a lot of mona, even in late
nineteenth century dollars. The company ultimately had to merge with
other matchmakers to stay afloat because their reputation could not
really recover, and this strike of eight eight led to
(24:19):
increased awareness of the dangers of working with yellow phosphorus
and a push to ban its use. In one the
Salvation Army opened a competing match factory using only red
phosphorus and paid double what Briant and May did. Briant
and May stopped using yellow phosphorus in nineteen o one.
The International Association of Labor Legislation began advocating a global
(24:42):
ban on yellow phosphorus and matchmaking in the early nineteen
hundreds as well. An international agreement was signed in nineteen
o eight and Britain banned the import, sale, or manufacturer
of white phosphorus matches in nineteen ten. It's the strike
anywhere matches seem incredibly dangerous to me. Yeah, and so
(25:05):
it's like it surprised me as I was reading this
that like the people favored the cheapness of the strike
anywhere matches over the safety of a match that does
not just light on fire against anything with the most
minor friction, right, yeah. Uh. And this strike also had
a huge influence on organized labor in Britain. Following the
(25:27):
success of the match workers strike, there was a move
toward unionizing among other unskilled labor all across the nation.
It grew into the new Unionism movement, and as we
alluded to earlier, it eventually led to the establishment of
the Independent Labor Party. Yeah. Prior to this, as we
said earlier, like not, strikes hadn't traditionally been very successful
(25:48):
in getting workers uh changes in their working environment and
the time right around this and this, the success of
this strike shifted that a little bit um and the
the idea of unskilled labor having a union became a
much bigger deal because before that, most of the unions
(26:09):
were about more skilled trades. Uh. And Uh, the people
who were working in unskilled jobs a lot of times
with basically no protections, uh, weren't really seen as being
worthy of being in a union. And that changed after
this point. Yeah, is your listener male peppy this time around?
(26:32):
It's pretty peppy. Yeah. Anny Bessett was also a really
interesting person, and she went on to do other things
completely unrelated to this strike. And originally, as I started
researching this article or this podcast, was going to be
a lot more about her, and then I realized that
it's really a big misperception that the strike was all
her doing. Um. A lot of the writing about the
(26:54):
strike for decades was pretty dismissive and judgmental about women
who were striking and sort of made it like they
were unruly children who were goaded into a successful strike
by the heroic work of Annie Besson And that was
not true at all. No, they were on it. They organized,
(27:15):
they really they had a whole lot of solidarity, and
they organized a bunch of stuff and they got things
that they were after heay so much for joining us
on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook, U
r L or something similar over the course of the
(27:35):
show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address
is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our
old health stuff works email address no longer works, and
you can find us all over social media at missed
in History. And you can subscribe to our show on
Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and
(27:56):
wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
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