September 5, 2016 • 34 mins
The London Match Girls Strike of 1888 was an important labor rights event in Britain. Women working in a match factory took a stand against hazardous and unfair working conditions, and impacted organized labor in the process.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I'm'm Holly Frying. Then we have
a listener request we have gotten a few times before,
most recently from Maggie back in April, and that is
(00:23):
the London match girls strike of This is an event
I had heard of. Have 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,
(00:47):
we're girls who sold matches. That's because of the sad
Christmas song, I would bet well, I I know it
more as a as a sad Christmas story with sad illustrations.
Oh yeah, 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,
(01:08):
the girls who they made the matches. So that's just
to clear up the first misconception. Uh, and this is
not quite as jovial a story is. Maybe the tone
of what we just said might make it sound like, Yeah,
it's got some parts in it that are hard, as
much of history does. Family. So we're going to talk
(01:29):
first a little bit about life in East London, because
even today the name the East End still conjures images
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
(01:50):
Oliver Twist and you will kind of get where we're
going with this. The East End as a term for
this neighborhood was actually cooling 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
(02:13):
surveyed and mapped East and South London, chronicling the incidents
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
(02:36):
mothers and naked children have filled the newspapers, and that's
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
(03:00):
with poverty and crime, and this so called outcast London
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
(03:22):
the industries that were headquartered there. Many of them were
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
(03:44):
at this time were young women, and in the hierarchy
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 eight the Bryant and
May Match factories came to the attention of Annie Bessant.
(04:04):
Uh most American pronunciations of this seemed to rhyme with crescent,
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
(04:27):
that last one got The two of them tried for obscenity,
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 established to advocate non violent
political change, and in particular to try to establish a
great Britain as a democratic socialist state. Some of the
(04:48):
other famous members and the Fabian Society's early years where
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 fIF
the Bryant and May Match factory was discussed at a
(05:10):
Fabian Society meeting following a presentation by trade unionist Clementina Black.
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.
(05:30):
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.
The members of the Society pledged not to use Bryant
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.
(05:53):
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
four boxes. Those are people that worked at home, often
with their whole families, making boxes as fast as possible.
Beessn't met workers instead leaving from their shift. These are
people who did things in the factory itself, doing jobs
(06:13):
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
the findings of her investigation in the Link, a journal
for the Servants of Ma'am. Some of Brian and May's
match girls were as young as eight years old. Many
(06:35):
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
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 site of sources
(06:56):
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 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
(07:16):
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 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,
(07:39):
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
were strike anywhere matches, which, as their names suggest, can
be struck anywhere. This led to problems of your work
spontaneously schng fire while you were handling strike anywhere matches
(08:03):
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
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,
(08:29):
leaving the area around the bench untidy threepence. I want
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,
(08:54):
the loss of half a day's pay. This was due
to not being allowed in to work and the for
they're fine of five pence, So if you relate, you
lost your pay until like the break in the day
where they let you in, and then you also had
to pay a fine on top of your lost pay.
Workers these matches caught fire while they were working, which
(09:14):
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
(09:36):
wrap around a machine. She had done this because 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
(09:59):
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
(10:19):
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.
(10:41):
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,
all still children, undersized because under fed, oppressed because helpless,
(11:05):
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 tent, 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 helpless girls.
(11:29):
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 call to
action to boycott Bryant and May, we will take a
(11:51):
brief word talk about sponsor to get back to our story. Unsurprisingly,
the Briant and May match company, which was at this
point the largest matchmaker in Britain, was not happy at
all by Annie Bessent's report in the link. They immediately
(12:13):
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 that has been printed,
and trying to make us sign papers that it is
all lies. On July about two hundred workers walked off
(12:36):
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 the time were all
over the place about exactly why they had stopped their
work on that particular day. According to one account, they
(12:57):
were just tired of all the fines and poor working condition.
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 fill a matchbox in a
particular way, but her friends at the factory had thought
her firing was unfair. And it was this last explanation
(13:18):
that Brian and May tried to claim when talking to
the press. And for decades this strike was positioned mostly
as Annie Bessett's work, but she wasn't particularly involved in it.
In Victorian England, strikes did not have a good track
record of leading to reforms for workers, so Bessett thought
the best course of action would be to press consumers
(13:38):
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 were really the ones who actually organized
the strike and the protests that went along with it.
(13:59):
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 the people who needed them.
About fifty workers went directly to Parliament to discuss their
(14:22):
grievances directly in person with the MP's. Overall, the striking
workers really got a lot of support. One reason was
that Annie Bessent was quite good at the publicity side
of it. She had titled her original article on their
working conditions white Slavery in London and had closely tied
the idea of these women's terrible pay and poor working
(14:43):
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 at the match factor
was definitely not chattel slavery. That was just a comparison
that she had very articulately drawn. Yeah, that's and I
(15:06):
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. The striking
women also got the support of some of London's skilled
trade unions, including the London Trades Council. The LTC had
(15:30):
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 negotiate with
Brian and may on behalf of the striking workers. Initially,
the factory refused to budge, saying only that if the
(15:51):
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
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
(16:14):
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
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?
(16:37):
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
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 it
(17:00):
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,
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
(17:22):
in their incredibly cruel jobs. Don't people love that they're fine,
But nobody said anything. It was a problem that nobody
said it was a problem that we were docking them
threepence for dirty feet and not paying them anything and
like making them run up and downstairs with strike anywhere matches.
They were unhappy. As a result of the negotiations, all
(17:46):
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 the
policy was instituted in which grievances could be taken to
the managing director right and having to go through the foreman,
and the union had to stay to advocate for the workers.
One last concession that the striker's got was the establishment
(18:09):
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 things that we
haven't really talked about in terms of the Bryant and
may Workers workplace hazards was risks to their health. In
(18:32):
addition to all the things Bessent documented 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 because the strike Anywhere
matches that they were making used white phosphorus, sometimes also
called yellow phosphorus, and exposure to white phosphorus can cause
(18:55):
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, decay of the jawbones,
festering sores that it's exposed, the decaying bone, necrotic gang greenness,
(19:16):
tissue in the face and jaw, and death. Up to
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 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.
(19:40):
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 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
(20:02):
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 workbenches. Eating in the
working area with the food having also been stored there
in the working area, increased their phosphorus exposure dramatically. Another
thing we haven't talked about, it's a total surprise to
(20:25):
me to learn, is that William Bryant and Francis May,
founders of Bryant and May Match Company, h we're Quakers,
and based on literally any other time we have ever
talked about Quakers 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
(20:45):
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 the general manager there. He wanted to expand the
business as much as possible over the objections of Francis May.
(21:05):
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 the parts are from the company did not have
the effect he was hoping for at all, because without
his more tempering influence, the sons of William Bryant took
(21:26):
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. For a couple of years after the strike,
Bryant and May tried to restore its reputation as being
(21:48):
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 be quite poor. Soon the press were describing Briant
and May as a model employer, offering jobs to British
(22:10):
workers and looking after the poor ladies who worked there.
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
to buy food elsewhere. Uh. It's a little unclear whether
(22:32):
whether the Bryant's sons continued 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
business did not last. The Star reported a case of
(22:52):
fossy jaw at the factory in a subsequent investigation found
numerous safe the 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 it was revealed
that the factory had seventeen unreported cases of phosphorus poisoning,
(23:17):
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 nine shillings. I laugh
out of stadness, because that does not sound like a
(23:39):
lot of exactly even in late nineteenth century dollars. The
company ultimately had to merge with other matchmakers to stay
afloat because their reputations cannot really recover, and this strike
of eight eight led to increased awareness of the dangers
of working with yellow phosphorus and a push to ban
(23:59):
its use. In 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 ban on yellow phosphorus and matchmaking
(24:19):
in the early nineteen hundreds as well. An international agreement
was signed in eight and Britain banned the import, sale,
or manufacturer of white phosphorus matches in nineteen ten. The
strike anywhere matches seem incredibly dangerous to me. Yeah, and
(24:39):
so 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, And this strike also had
a huge influence on organized labor in Britain. Following the
(25:02):
success of the matchworkers 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 in getting
(25:25):
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 were about
more skilled trades uh, and the people who were working
(25:50):
in unskilled jobs a lot of times with basically no
protections UH, weren't really seen as being worthy of being
in an union. And that changed after the point. Yeah,
he's your listener, male peppy this time around, it's pretty peppy. Yeah.
(26:12):
Annie 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 strike for decades was pretty
(26:32):
dismissive and judgmental about the 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, Yeah, they really. They
had a whole lot of solidarity, and they organized a
(26:53):
bunch of stuff and they got things that they were after,
which included not being forced to pay for their own
work tools to do their work that they were making
almost no money for us. So anyway, now I'll get
to them much more cheery listener mail. Uh, this listener
mail is from Ali. I'm gonna skip ahead a little
bit because she said that she had written to us
(27:16):
really recently, really recently, and she's writing again because she
just listened to the episode on and Bonnie and Mary
reid um. I'm sure, she says. I just had to
write in again after yesterday's and Bonnie and Mary read episode,
because guess what, I'm a pirate historian. Yay, and boy
do I feel your pain when it comes to a
(27:36):
general history of the pirates. Although my own history with
pirates really begins a long time ago when my mom,
an anthropologist, and my dad, a marine archaeologist who brought
the first Emerald up from the shipwreck Atocha, instilled me
and my brother with an early love for pirates by
teaching us how to say something I'm not going to
repeat because it has a word we don't normally say
(27:58):
on the show Small Children. It is a very priraty
saying that, uh, I'll start with grad school. When I
first entered my history program, I had no idea wanted
what I wanted to study, which put me way behind
the rest of my classmates at the beginning. A lot
of them introduced themselves with either a specific period or
a region of interest where I would go. I'm Ali,
(28:20):
and I guess I like pirates. Before before too long,
my wonderful adviser helped me hammer out a primary field
with a little more specificity, which ended up being Atlantic
Piracy from fifteen hundred to seventeen fifty, with a focus
on British and Spanish perceptives perspectives, but it was rough
getting there, and part of that is absolutely the fault
(28:43):
of a general history. Originally, I had wanted to focus
on Atlantic pirates and gender, using a body Mary Read
and other pirate women as specific examples of the masculine
image of pirates, but that very quickly proved to be impossible.
There really is is not enough evidence of Reading Bonnie
to do anything with them in a scholarly fashion, or
(29:04):
at least nothing new. Because plenty of scholars Marcus Hddicker
is first to come to mind, have tried. They always
end up being these kind of weird, nebulous examples you
can only talk about theoretically, so they end up being
much more interesting and almost a fictional sense than a
real one. I had to abandon gender and pirates pretty quickly, uh,
though that remains a facet of piracy that I am
(29:27):
still very interested in. UH. And so then all it
goes on UH to recommend as a future episode topic
a a podcast on Captain William kidd Um because the
I'm gonna read this bit. In the end, I focused
on the fine line between pirates and privateers, using Captain
(29:48):
William Kidd as a primary example. Kid is also in
A General History in a much Romandi sized fashion, and
like pretty much everybody who studies pirates, my thesis had
to include Johnson's book has more of a friends than
a real source, and my bibliography A General History is
even attributed to Daniel Defoe, simply because the published version
that I had in my personal library listed him as
the author and no one else. My adviser and I
(30:11):
went back and forth a lot on that point, and
I think I mentioned somewhere that A General History probably
wasn't written by de Foe. But all in all, that
book is sometimes more trouble than it's worth as a
scholarly source. So I absolutely responsible for the world's fascination
and romanticization of pirates, but its existence makes it twice
as hard to verify the facts of piracy, because so
(30:31):
much of it is based in history that is then
embellished beyond recognition. It's a pain, but unfortunately we can't
ignore it either. Thankfully, for me, Kid's life and death
are well documented elsewhere, and if you want to put
another pirate on your suggestions of why highly recommend him,
if only for his trial transcripts, which at times are
unintentionally hilarious because he continuously interrupts the officials and they
(30:55):
hate it. I love these transcripts because documents from pirates
the selfs simply do not exist. So we pirate historians
have to take what we can get from official documents
that frequently twist pirates words to suit their own needs.
See the Last Dying Speeches of pirates and other criminals
published on broadsides. It's pretty rare to see any personality
(31:15):
from a pirate in historical documents that isn't a barbaric,
profanity spewing monster. But kids personality is so clear in
the transcripts that it's pretty remarkable. If you're interested, they
happen to be online, they're well worth a read. Anyway,
the suffage pretty significantly from Bonnie and read, so I
guess I'll end this note with a thank you, thank
you for tackling a podcast what I couldn't in thesis,
(31:37):
and thank you for reminding me why I studied pirates
in the first place. I was pretty pirated out by
the time I finished grad school, but listening to yesterday's
episode reignited my love for these disruptive or manticized rebels
of the sea. Pirate history is a pretty small niche
in a wider history of the Atlantic and the Caribbean,
but I'm glad part of me knew that's what I
wanted to study before the rest of me did. Pirates
are pretty great. Thanks again for all you do. Ali.
(31:59):
Thank you so much Ali for reading this, for for
sending us this letter. Yes number one, it's great. Number two.
Past hosts already did a podcast on Captain William Kidd,
which uh robs me of the chance to read their
hilarious uh court transcripts online. Uh, but I might read
(32:20):
them anyway for fun someday when I have time. But yeah,
that's that is one that past hosts tackled already. But
we will put the link to them in our show
notes so other people can read them. To Thank you
again so much, Allie. It was so good and actually
kind of validating to hear from a pirate historian that
that our our perception of a general history of the
(32:42):
pirates is pretty right on the money in terms of scholarship.
So if you would like to write to us word
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also
on Facebook. Uh well, let me do this the way
Holly does it. If you want to come find us
on social media. Missed in History is our name. That
is our name on Facebook and Twitter and Tumbler and Instagram.
(33:03):
And I might have missed another one, but it's missed
in History pretty much everywhere. And the only thing that
is different from missing history is our email address, which
is History Podcast at how stuff works dot com because
that was our address from way before. You You can
come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff
works dot com find all kinds of stuff about, all
kinds of fascinating information. And then you can come to
(33:25):
our website, which is missed in History dot com, where
you will find show notes to all of our episodes.
I will put the links to these, uh these trials
againscripts William Kidd and there. Uh you said, you can
do all that a whole lot more and how stuff
works dot com or missed in History dot com for
(33:47):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I'm'm Holly Frying. Then we have
a listener request we have gotten a few times before,
most recently from Maggie back in April, and that is
(00:23):
the London match girls strike of This is an event
I had heard of. Have 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,
(00:47):
we're girls who sold matches. That's because of the sad
Christmas song, I would bet well, I I know it
more as a as a sad Christmas story with sad illustrations.
Oh yeah, 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,
(01:08):
the girls who they made the matches. So that's just
to clear up the first misconception. Uh, and this is
not quite as jovial a story is. Maybe the tone
of what we just said might make it sound like, Yeah,
it's got some parts in it that are hard, as
much of history does. Family. So we're going to talk
(01:29):
first a little bit about life in East London, because
even today the name the East End still conjures images
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
(01:50):
Oliver Twist and you will kind of get where we're
going with this. The East End as a term for
this neighborhood was actually cooling 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
(02:13):
surveyed and mapped East and South London, chronicling the incidents
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
(02:36):
mothers and naked children have filled the newspapers, and that's
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
(03:00):
with poverty and crime, and this so called outcast London
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
(03:22):
the industries that were headquartered there. Many of them were
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
(03:44):
at this time were young women, and in the hierarchy
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 eight the Bryant and
May Match factories came to the attention of Annie Bessant.
(04:04):
Uh most American pronunciations of this seemed to rhyme with crescent,
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
(04:27):
that last one got The two of them tried for obscenity,
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 established to advocate non violent
political change, and in particular to try to establish a
great Britain as a democratic socialist state. Some of the
(04:48):
other famous members and the Fabian Society's early years where
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 fIF
the Bryant and May Match factory was discussed at a
(05:10):
Fabian Society meeting following a presentation by trade unionist Clementina Black.
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.
(05:30):
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.
The members of the Society pledged not to use Bryant
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.
(05:53):
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
four boxes. Those are people that worked at home, often
with their whole families, making boxes as fast as possible.
Beessn't met workers instead leaving from their shift. These are
people who did things in the factory itself, doing jobs
(06:13):
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
the findings of her investigation in the Link, a journal
for the Servants of Ma'am. Some of Brian and May's
match girls were as young as eight years old. Many
(06:35):
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
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 site of sources
(06:56):
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 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
(07:16):
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 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,
(07:39):
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
were strike anywhere matches, which, as their names suggest, can
be struck anywhere. This led to problems of your work
spontaneously schng fire while you were handling strike anywhere matches
(08:03):
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
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,
(08:29):
leaving the area around the bench untidy threepence. I want
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,
(08:54):
the loss of half a day's pay. This was due
to not being allowed in to work and the for
they're fine of five pence, So if you relate, you
lost your pay until like the break in the day
where they let you in, and then you also had
to pay a fine on top of your lost pay.
Workers these matches caught fire while they were working, which
(09:14):
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
(09:36):
wrap around a machine. She had done this because 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
(09:59):
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
(10:19):
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.
(10:41):
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,
all still children, undersized because under fed, oppressed because helpless,
(11:05):
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 tent, 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 helpless girls.
(11:29):
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 call to
action to boycott Bryant and May, we will take a
(11:51):
brief word talk about sponsor to get back to our story. Unsurprisingly,
the Briant and May match company, which was at this
point the largest matchmaker in Britain, was not happy at
all by Annie Bessent's report in the link. They immediately
(12:13):
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 that has been printed,
and trying to make us sign papers that it is
all lies. On July about two hundred workers walked off
(12:36):
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 the time were all
over the place about exactly why they had stopped their
work on that particular day. According to one account, they
(12:57):
were just tired of all the fines and poor working condition.
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 fill a matchbox in a
particular way, but her friends at the factory had thought
her firing was unfair. And it was this last explanation
(13:18):
that Brian and May tried to claim when talking to
the press. And for decades this strike was positioned mostly
as Annie Bessett's work, but she wasn't particularly involved in it.
In Victorian England, strikes did not have a good track
record of leading to reforms for workers, so Bessett thought
the best course of action would be to press consumers
(13:38):
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 were really the ones who actually organized
the strike and the protests that went along with it.
(13:59):
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 the people who needed them.
About fifty workers went directly to Parliament to discuss their
(14:22):
grievances directly in person with the MP's. Overall, the striking
workers really got a lot of support. One reason was
that Annie Bessent was quite good at the publicity side
of it. She had titled her original article on their
working conditions white Slavery in London and had closely tied
the idea of these women's terrible pay and poor working
(14:43):
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 at the match factor
was definitely not chattel slavery. That was just a comparison
that she had very articulately drawn. Yeah, that's and I
(15:06):
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. The striking
women also got the support of some of London's skilled
trade unions, including the London Trades Council. The LTC had
(15:30):
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 negotiate with
Brian and may on behalf of the striking workers. Initially,
the factory refused to budge, saying only that if the
(15:51):
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
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
(16:14):
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
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?
(16:37):
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
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 it
(17:00):
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,
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
(17:22):
in their incredibly cruel jobs. Don't people love that they're fine,
But nobody said anything. It was a problem that nobody
said it was a problem that we were docking them
threepence for dirty feet and not paying them anything and
like making them run up and downstairs with strike anywhere matches.
They were unhappy. As a result of the negotiations, all
(17:46):
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 the
policy was instituted in which grievances could be taken to
the managing director right and having to go through the foreman,
and the union had to stay to advocate for the workers.
One last concession that the striker's got was the establishment
(18:09):
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 things that we
haven't really talked about in terms of the Bryant and
may Workers workplace hazards was risks to their health. In
(18:32):
addition to all the things Bessent documented 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 because the strike Anywhere
matches that they were making used white phosphorus, sometimes also
called yellow phosphorus, and exposure to white phosphorus can cause
(18:55):
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, decay of the jawbones,
festering sores that it's exposed, the decaying bone, necrotic gang greenness,
(19:16):
tissue in the face and jaw, and death. Up to
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 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.
(19:40):
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 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
(20:02):
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 workbenches. Eating in the
working area with the food having also been stored there
in the working area, increased their phosphorus exposure dramatically. Another
thing we haven't talked about, it's a total surprise to
(20:25):
me to learn, is that William Bryant and Francis May,
founders of Bryant and May Match Company, h we're Quakers,
and based on literally any other time we have ever
talked about Quakers 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
(20:45):
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 the general manager there. He wanted to expand the
business as much as possible over the objections of Francis May.
(21:05):
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 the parts are from the company did not have
the effect he was hoping for at all, because without
his more tempering influence, the sons of William Bryant took
(21:26):
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. For a couple of years after the strike,
Bryant and May tried to restore its reputation as being
(21:48):
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 be quite poor. Soon the press were describing Briant
and May as a model employer, offering jobs to British
(22:10):
workers and looking after the poor ladies who worked there.
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
to buy food elsewhere. Uh. It's a little unclear whether
(22:32):
whether the Bryant's sons continued 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
business did not last. The Star reported a case of
(22:52):
fossy jaw at the factory in a subsequent investigation found
numerous safe the 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 it was revealed
that the factory had seventeen unreported cases of phosphorus poisoning,
(23:17):
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 nine shillings. I laugh
out of stadness, because that does not sound like a
(23:39):
lot of exactly even in late nineteenth century dollars. The
company ultimately had to merge with other matchmakers to stay
afloat because their reputations cannot really recover, and this strike
of eight eight led to increased awareness of the dangers
of working with yellow phosphorus and a push to ban
(23:59):
its use. In 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 ban on yellow phosphorus and matchmaking
(24:19):
in the early nineteen hundreds as well. An international agreement
was signed in eight and Britain banned the import, sale,
or manufacturer of white phosphorus matches in nineteen ten. The
strike anywhere matches seem incredibly dangerous to me. Yeah, and
(24:39):
so 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, And this strike also had
a huge influence on organized labor in Britain. Following the
(25:02):
success of the matchworkers 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 in getting
(25:25):
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 were about
more skilled trades uh, and the people who were working
(25:50):
in unskilled jobs a lot of times with basically no
protections UH, weren't really seen as being worthy of being
in an union. And that changed after the point. Yeah,
he's your listener, male peppy this time around, it's pretty peppy. Yeah.
(26:12):
Annie 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 strike for decades was pretty
(26:32):
dismissive and judgmental about the 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, Yeah, they really. They
had a whole lot of solidarity, and they organized a
(26:53):
bunch of stuff and they got things that they were after,
which included not being forced to pay for their own
work tools to do their work that they were making
almost no money for us. So anyway, now I'll get
to them much more cheery listener mail. Uh, this listener
mail is from Ali. I'm gonna skip ahead a little
bit because she said that she had written to us
(27:16):
really recently, really recently, and she's writing again because she
just listened to the episode on and Bonnie and Mary
reid um. I'm sure, she says. I just had to
write in again after yesterday's and Bonnie and Mary read episode,
because guess what, I'm a pirate historian. Yay, and boy
do I feel your pain when it comes to a
(27:36):
general history of the pirates. Although my own history with
pirates really begins a long time ago when my mom,
an anthropologist, and my dad, a marine archaeologist who brought
the first Emerald up from the shipwreck Atocha, instilled me
and my brother with an early love for pirates by
teaching us how to say something I'm not going to
repeat because it has a word we don't normally say
(27:58):
on the show Small Children. It is a very priraty
saying that, uh, I'll start with grad school. When I
first entered my history program, I had no idea wanted
what I wanted to study, which put me way behind
the rest of my classmates at the beginning. A lot
of them introduced themselves with either a specific period or
a region of interest where I would go. I'm Ali,
(28:20):
and I guess I like pirates. Before before too long,
my wonderful adviser helped me hammer out a primary field
with a little more specificity, which ended up being Atlantic
Piracy from fifteen hundred to seventeen fifty, with a focus
on British and Spanish perceptives perspectives, but it was rough
getting there, and part of that is absolutely the fault
(28:43):
of a general history. Originally, I had wanted to focus
on Atlantic pirates and gender, using a body Mary Read
and other pirate women as specific examples of the masculine
image of pirates, but that very quickly proved to be impossible.
There really is is not enough evidence of Reading Bonnie
to do anything with them in a scholarly fashion, or
(29:04):
at least nothing new. Because plenty of scholars Marcus Hddicker
is first to come to mind, have tried. They always
end up being these kind of weird, nebulous examples you
can only talk about theoretically, so they end up being
much more interesting and almost a fictional sense than a
real one. I had to abandon gender and pirates pretty quickly, uh,
though that remains a facet of piracy that I am
(29:27):
still very interested in. UH. And so then all it
goes on UH to recommend as a future episode topic
a a podcast on Captain William kidd Um because the
I'm gonna read this bit. In the end, I focused
on the fine line between pirates and privateers, using Captain
(29:48):
William Kidd as a primary example. Kid is also in
A General History in a much Romandi sized fashion, and
like pretty much everybody who studies pirates, my thesis had
to include Johnson's book has more of a friends than
a real source, and my bibliography A General History is
even attributed to Daniel Defoe, simply because the published version
that I had in my personal library listed him as
the author and no one else. My adviser and I
(30:11):
went back and forth a lot on that point, and
I think I mentioned somewhere that A General History probably
wasn't written by de Foe. But all in all, that
book is sometimes more trouble than it's worth as a
scholarly source. So I absolutely responsible for the world's fascination
and romanticization of pirates, but its existence makes it twice
as hard to verify the facts of piracy, because so
(30:31):
much of it is based in history that is then
embellished beyond recognition. It's a pain, but unfortunately we can't
ignore it either. Thankfully, for me, Kid's life and death
are well documented elsewhere, and if you want to put
another pirate on your suggestions of why highly recommend him,
if only for his trial transcripts, which at times are
unintentionally hilarious because he continuously interrupts the officials and they
(30:55):
hate it. I love these transcripts because documents from pirates
the selfs simply do not exist. So we pirate historians
have to take what we can get from official documents
that frequently twist pirates words to suit their own needs.
See the Last Dying Speeches of pirates and other criminals
published on broadsides. It's pretty rare to see any personality
(31:15):
from a pirate in historical documents that isn't a barbaric,
profanity spewing monster. But kids personality is so clear in
the transcripts that it's pretty remarkable. If you're interested, they
happen to be online, they're well worth a read. Anyway,
the suffage pretty significantly from Bonnie and read, so I
guess I'll end this note with a thank you, thank
you for tackling a podcast what I couldn't in thesis,
(31:37):
and thank you for reminding me why I studied pirates
in the first place. I was pretty pirated out by
the time I finished grad school, but listening to yesterday's
episode reignited my love for these disruptive or manticized rebels
of the sea. Pirate history is a pretty small niche
in a wider history of the Atlantic and the Caribbean,
but I'm glad part of me knew that's what I
wanted to study before the rest of me did. Pirates
are pretty great. Thanks again for all you do. Ali.
(31:59):
Thank you so much Ali for reading this, for for
sending us this letter. Yes number one, it's great. Number two.
Past hosts already did a podcast on Captain William Kidd,
which uh robs me of the chance to read their
hilarious uh court transcripts online. Uh, but I might read
(32:20):
them anyway for fun someday when I have time. But yeah,
that's that is one that past hosts tackled already. But
we will put the link to them in our show
notes so other people can read them. To Thank you
again so much, Allie. It was so good and actually
kind of validating to hear from a pirate historian that
that our our perception of a general history of the
(32:42):
pirates is pretty right on the money in terms of scholarship.
So if you would like to write to us word
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also
on Facebook. Uh well, let me do this the way
Holly does it. If you want to come find us
on social media. Missed in History is our name. That
is our name on Facebook and Twitter and Tumbler and Instagram.
(33:03):
And I might have missed another one, but it's missed
in History pretty much everywhere. And the only thing that
is different from missing history is our email address, which
is History Podcast at how stuff works dot com because
that was our address from way before. You You can
come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff
works dot com find all kinds of stuff about, all
kinds of fascinating information. And then you can come to
(33:25):
our website, which is missed in History dot com, where
you will find show notes to all of our episodes.
I will put the links to these, uh these trials
againscripts William Kidd and there. Uh you said, you can
do all that a whole lot more and how stuff
works dot com or missed in History dot com for
(33:47):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.