Match Girls' Strike

“A New Leaf in Trade-Union Annals”

On a June evening in 1888 a small group of people gathered at a house in Bloomsbury for the usual fortnightly meeting of their “Fabian” Society, a middle-class Socialist propaganda and research organization with a total at that time of forty members. Founded four years previously in 1884, the Society had taken its name from the Roman commander Quintus Fabius Maximus, who was known as “The Delayer” because he fought Hannibal during the years 217-214 B.C. by harassing his armies rather than risking a set battle. The Fabians hoped to attain their own objects in a similar way, with patient intellectual argument bringing about gradual political and economic reform. Their aim was to make Socialism respectable; and “Evolution, not Revolution” was their motto.

There were less than twenty members present at the meeting, and most of them knew one another well. They included the red-bearded music critic of The Star, George Bernard Shaw, who was then thirty-two and had written a number of unsuccessful novels but had yet to have his first play performed; a young Christian Socialist minister, the Reverend Stuart Headlam, whom Shaw was later to use as one of the models for his character of the clergyman-husband in his play Candida. Sidney Webb, a quiet young bachelor at that time in the Civil Service, and working in his spare time on a book about trade unionism; Herbert Burrows, a mild-looking, studious and enthusiastically revolutionary graduate recently down from Cambridge; Herbert Champion, a retired Army officer; and Mrs Annie Besant, a handsome forty-year-old woman already famous for her power as a public speaker, and her radical views not only on politics but also on birth-control and the emancipation of women.

The Fabians had gathered that evening to listen to the reading of a paper on the subject of “Female Labour in London” by Miss Clementina Black, who was the first woman ever to have been appointed a Factory Inspector. What she said to them is no longer known, but it is probable she mentioned the girls who worked in the match factories of the East End, since when she had finished speaking Herbert Champion struck a match with a flourish, puffed and sucked at his pipe until it was lit, and then asked those present if they knew that Bryant and May, the largest manufacturers of matches in London, paid their women workers only 2 1/4d. a gross for making match-boxes, but gave their shareholders an annual dividend of over twenty per cent? They did not; and a long and animated discussion followed. It ended with the passing of a resolution declaring that in future members of the Fabian Society would not buy or use matches made by Bryant and May.

When the meeting ended, Champion drew Annie Besant aside. A resolution bya small and little-known society that its members were going to boycott their goods would have little effect if any on the manufacturers, he said. But why didn’t Mrs Besant go into the subject thoroughly and write an article about it in The Link, a monthly magazine published by the Law and Liberty League and of which she was Editor? Mrs Besant thought it was an idea with possibilities…

Late the following afternoon she went with Herbert Burrows, who was working with her on the magazine, down to Bryant and May’s factory just off Bow Road, and they waited together outside the gates. When the whistle blew at the end of the working day and the factory girls began to stream out, some of them recognized her immediately, for Annie Besant with her red skirt and her tam-o’-shanter perched on top of her mop of dark curly hair was a well-known speaker at dock-gates and street corners in the East End. Jostling and crowding excitedly round her, few of the girls could understand what she was saying to them, for they were expecting a speech. Mrs Besant suggested they should all move away from the street to an open piece of waste land near-by; there she said she had not come to speak to them but to listen, she wanted to hear in detail about their work, and the conditions inside the factory.

Most of the girls were shabbily dressed in drab and tattered high-buttoned coats and old dresses, with kerchiefs knotted at their throats and shawls over their heads. Their boots were down-at-heel and shoddy, their faces pale and marked by poverty, their eyes red-rimmed and their hands discoloured and in many cases infected, as a result of working with the chemicals from which matches were made. But their voices were not affected; and so many of them began to talk, all at once, that Annie Besant could understand little at first of what they said. She was the first person they had ever met who was interested enough to give them a hearing; and their complaints poured out in a flood.

Legislation during the last quarter of the nineteenth century rectified many of the abuses common in industry, but had tended to be for particular industries rather than for all factories taken as a whole. As a result many of the malpractices which had been stamped out in large concerns still persisted in the “sweat shops” of smaller manufacturers, particularly in London.

Trade unionism was so far confined almost entirely to the skilled trades; it offered little to, and did little for, the great mass of workers who were unskilled. The picture that Annie Besant received from the girls that afternoon was therefore one which concerned a little-known and almost completely neglected aspect of working-life. Soon her note-book was almost filled with facts and descriptions of what it was like.

When they were in work they earned regular money, even though it was not very much: their pay varied from 4s. a week for a girl of thirteen to 13s. a week for older workers with more responsibility. But it was not the smallness of the pay that was their main complaint. Much more important were the primitive conditions in which they worked at their crowded benches in poorly lit and badly ventilated work-rooms, with no proper washrooms or toilets, an irregular and often shortened lunch-hour and no place to eat their food in; and, in addition, the constant aggravation of strict discipline under bullying charge-hands. Every week nearly every girl had money stopped from her wages as “fines”, for trivial offences like answering back, leaving burnt matches on the work-bench, or having dirty feet.

The charge-hands who reported these breaches of discipline were all men, and to keep their own jobs they sided with the management although they knew that levying of fines was illegal. The girls were not in any way organized amongst themselves; they stuck up for one another as much as they could, but there was little they could do to improve their own conditions, since anyone reported by the charge-hands as in any way “giving trouble” was always immediately dismissed.

Many of their complaints were, as Mrs Besant knew, breaches of the “Truck Acts” which regulated and controlled conditions of employment everywhere, and she promised the girls she would pass them on to the local Factory Inspector; she told them too that she would get her friend Charles Bradlaugh to take the matter up in parliament; and that she would make public all the facts they had given her, in her magazine. But they must do something to help themselves too, she said: they must elect among themselves a committee to put their complaints fully before the management of the factory. Only if they organized themselves in this way, and stood firmly together, could they ensure that something would be done.

Tired but exhilarated she went back to her office in Bourverie Street to write her article; and it was published a few days later, on 23 June, in the next issue of The Link. Headed “White Slavery In London”, it began: “Born in the slums, driven to work while still children, undersized because underfed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as soon as worked out, who cares if the Match Girls die or go on the streets, provided that the Bryant and May shareholders get their 23 per cent?”

But The Link was only a small and insignificant magazine with a tiny circulation, and her words could easily have been overlooked. To make sure that they were not, Annie Besant sent a copy to Mr Theodore Bryant, one of the company’s directors, and a letter asking if the allegations she printed were correct. A reply came immediately, by telegram: “Letter received this morning. Nothing but a tissue of lies. Article will receive legal attention. Bryant.”

But meanwhile the Factory Inspector at Bow had lost no time in investigating some of the complaints which he had received from Mrs Besant. The fining of the girls stopped immediately, and Bryant and May issued a statement to the Press saying that it had stopped, which was of course an implicit admission of its having taken place. Three days later three of the girls who had talked to Annie Besant on the waste land near the factory were dismissed for “disobedience”. Immediately she sent a letter to every national newspaper in the country, describing what had happened and appealing for funds for them; but with the exception of The Pall Mall Gazette and The Star, none of the papers published her letter. On the day after it appeared The Star published an answering letter from Bryant and May, denying that the girls’ dismissal had in any way been connected with the fact that they had talked to Mrs Besant. She received another letter too on that same day; scrawled on rough notepaper, and written in an almost illiterate hand…

“My dear Lady”, she read, “We thank you very much for the kind interest you have taken in us poor girls, and hope you will succeed in your undertaking. Dear Lady, they have been trying to get the girls to say that it is all lies that has been printing, and trying to make they sign papers that it is all lies. Dear Lady, nobody knows what it is we have to put up with, and we will not sign them. Dear Lady, we hope that if there be any meeting you will let us know it. With kind wishes to you Dear Lady for the kind love you have shown us girls.”

At first Annie Besant did not understand what the letter was telling her, but after inquiries she discovered that the management of the factory, hoping to be able to mount an action for libel against her as a result of her article in The Link, had told the charge-hands to make all the girls sign a statement saying that conditions in the factory were not as Mrs Besant described them, and they were happy to work there. The girls, as they said in their letter, refused. The next day there were further dismissals for “indiscipline”.

A deputation of six girls went to one of the managers and asked that those dismissed since the meeting with Mrs Besant should be re-employed. He refused their plea; half an hour later to his amazement he looked out of his office window and saw the whole staff of the factory walking out. Two hundred girls formed-up into a column and marched from Bow to Fleet Street, where they surged cheering down Bouverie Street to Annie Besant’s office, and sent in a deputation to tell her that all the girls at the factory were doing as she had said, standing firmly together and refusing any longer to be exploited by their employers.

Mrs Besant was excited; but she knew that at this moment she must remain calm. Unless the strike was properly controlled and organized, it would fail; and if it did, the match girls of the factory —fourteen hundred of them in all, would either lose their jobs or have to return to working conditions even more repressive than before. She helped them to form immediately a Strike Committee, empowered to draw up and submit to the management a complete list of the girls’ demands, and to negotiate on their behalf. When they heard of it from newspaper reporters who came to interview them and ask their comments, the Bryant and May directors made blustering statements asserting that if the girls persisted in staying away from the factory “under the influence of Mrs Besant’s twaddle”, train-loads of girls would be brought from Glasgow to fill their jobs.

At the end of the week a mass meeting of the girls at Mile End was addressed by Annie Besant, Clementina Black, Herbert Burrows and Cunninghame Graham, M.P. “Stand firm,” they were told: as knowledge of their action spread, public sympathy would be engaged. The next day The Star and The Pall Mall Gazette both opened subscription lists for a strike fund, and within another day or two other newspapers were paying attention to the strike, and giving publicity to the working conditions which had caused it. The match girls marched to the House of Commons, and a deputation of twelve was received in the Lobby by Cunninghame Graham and other M.P.s; in front of them and the assembled Press reporters one of them, a thin and undernourished girl of fifteen, pulled her shawl from her head. She was nearly bald; and this demonstration of the effects of working with chemicals in confined and insanitary conditions, wrote a newspaper reporter in his account next day, “profoundly affected all who saw it”.

As the Press publicity increased, so did the flow of public subscriptions to the Strike Fund. Under Mrs Besant’s guidance, the girls formed a properly constituted trade union, and soon the London Trades Council took up their case for them and approached the employers, demanding that they should negotiate. In the face of such obvious and growing public sympathy for the girls, the directors of Bryant and May capitulated; all the conditions for returning to work were accepted in full, and it was also agreed that regular consultations should take place between the newly formed union and the management so that further troubles could be avoided before they became serious. “The victory of the match girls”, wrote The Star in its leading article the next day, “is complete… and one feature which will make it a turning-point in the history of industrial development is the part which public opinion has played.”

A few years later, when Sidney Webb and his wife Beatrice completed and published their great History of Trade Unionism, they referred to the match girls’ victory as an incident which “turned a new leaf in trade-union annals. It was a new experience for the weak to succeed—and the lesson was not lost on other workers.”

It certainly was not. Within the following year there were successful strikes for better working conditions and higher wages among the cigarette-factory workers, the employees of the London Tramway Company, and the London gas-workers, the unrest culminating in the great Dock Strike of 1889, which finally established permanently the power and rights of trade unionism in England. The great mass of unskilled workers in ever-increasing numbers formed themselves under skilful leaders into organizations which protected their rights and their dignity as men; and as their unions grew in strength and gave the workers a voice, so political action on their behalf came to be recognized as necessary, and led to the founding of the Labour Party. The idea that every man was worthy of his hire, and had the right to civilized working conditions was a new one at the end of the nineteenth century; but it grew and spread, through parliament and books and the Press, into the public conscience.