Before Workers’ Rights: White Phosphorus and The East End Matchwomen

SPEAKER_00 0:00 The East London Match women made one of Victorian Britain's most important everyday products. But the working conditions were horrific.

SPEAKER_01 0:07 They saw you with a swollen jaw, they would sack you because they didn't want the bother of having a case on their books. So women would, although they knew what was possibly coming, it killed you less quickly than starvation did.

SPEAKER_00 0:22 Before the modern workers' rights we're used to today, employers could get away with things that would be unthinkable now. But in 1888, the match women decided to fight back and it changed everything. Their actions would be the catalyst for a wave of strikes and helped to inspire the modern Labour movement. I'm Ollie, and this is what we did before. And today I'm talking to Labour historian Dr. Louise Rohr, author of Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Match Women and Their Place in History. Louise has a background in the trade union movement and political campaigning, and what started as a short essay about the match women turned into a lifelong passion. And when you listen to this, you'll understand why. Enjoy. Louise Rohr, it's a pleasure having you on What We Did Before. Thank you so much for joining me.

SPEAKER_01 1:10 Thank you very much for having me. Delighted to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:12 First, I think it's kind of important, I suppose, to explain to people what a matchwoman was.

SPEAKER_01 1:18 Yes, exactly. So matches were vital in the Victorian period. You didn't have nothing really without matches. You couldn't, apart from not being able to light your cigarette or pipe or cigar, and a lot of people smoked in those days. You wouldn't have hot water, you wouldn't have heat, you wouldn't have light, you wouldn't have cooked food because you had to start a fire in the range or light the candles or light the gaslight. Matches were everything. It's funny because I teach students now, and a lot of them haven't grown up really seeing a match. They're not around in the household. But they would have been everywhere and they would have been sold on every street corner, in every pub, in every shop. So Bryant and May, Mr. Bryant and Mr. May, um were two blokes who were originally grocers and they tried various things to make their fortune. And eventually they hit on the idea of match production because it was super cheap and they bought some factories and converted them into match production. So a match woman or a match girl were um people in particular, they called themselves that, who worked in this big factory complex in Bow in the east end of London, and went in there and did a variety of jobs within the factory. The thing they had in common was they were all pretty horrible. But they formed this identity not as Bryant and May employees, but not as factory. Well, they were also factory lasses, which is also a terrible thing to be in the Victorian boot. Terrible, oh factory lass, oh no better than she should be, nudge nudge. But they called themselves um the match girls or the match women, and that became a massive sense of identity to them, and they used that to organize around, they used that to fight back, really. They were employed by one of the most powerful firms in Britain, and they were completely without rights, but they used that identity. We are match girls, and they used that to overcome religious device. There were Jewish and Irish Catholic match girls working together with Protestant match girls, but they didn't take any of that kind of religious discrimination into work, they were absolutely united and they stuck up for one another, so it was a really important identity, and in the East End they were very well known. You don't mess, don't mess with the match girls.

SPEAKER_00 3:51 So, how important was Bryant and May then to match distribution across the country or was it global as well?

SPEAKER_01 4:00 Huge, huge. They were they had become this massive, massive firm, and they had they were like one of our first huge companies. You know, imagine a kind of mini Amazon, really, the way that they operated. They were very, very modern and very early to go and gobble up rival firms who would often still operate under their original name, but actually they were owned by Bryant and May behind the scenes. And they were huge in the export market. They had factories in Glasgow, factories in Liverpool. They were the match firm in Victorian England. Very, very quickly, they managed to do that.

SPEAKER_00 4:39 Well, there's there's modern parallels, uh, it sounds to me. The bigger an organisation gets, the more it gobbles up, the um less it cares about its workers. And I and I think we should explain the working conditions for these women were absolutely atrocious, weren't they?

SPEAKER_01 4:56 It looked from the outside like a reasonable place to work. Um, and particularly um today, the remnants of the factory look, it's a huge looks like a Gothic palace because Brighton may pay great attention to their public image and they paid great attention to the outside of the factory. So you think this must be a fairly reasonable place to work, and they must be fairly reasonable employers because I mean their matches are everywhere. You couldn't go anywhere without seeing, and they had dozens and dozens of different, you know, covers and hundreds of types of different matches, but you'd see them everywhere, so you'd think, well, they're doing really well, they must be reasonable employers, right? I mean, this is what we're told. Um, uh Jacob Reese Mogg not long ago said we need to get back to the Victorian period when because there were no unions and no workers interfering, these lovely, kindly, benevolent Victorian employers were able to give a lot more of the profits to their workers. Historians have heart attacks all over um the country, but that's kind of the myth, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 5:59 And that's nice rose-tinted goggles there, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:01 Exactly. Well, very convenient as well, isn't it? Just sit down, don't do anything, be quiet, and wait for the nice rich people to shower the money upon you. Just behave, children.

SPEAKER_00 6:12 That sounds like the discussion around AI and universal basic income that's being have uh had right now, doesn't it? Sounds very simple.

SPEAKER_01 6:18 Round and round and round. Capitalism just recreates itself, but it's never really in art to art benefit. So once you walk through the gates, you were in a very different world. When you went into, particularly the areas that were near the white phosphorus, this awful, awful compound that they dipped the matches, the most popular kind of matches they made called the Lucifer match into. Some people going into that workspace would pass out straight away if you were particularly susceptible. Um, a lot of people would vomit. The girls would work, work, work, run outside, vomit, go back in, carry on working. Um, and it was a 12-hour day as well. So even if you weren't directly working near or with the chemicals, although they were sort of in the air, you'd be working 12 hours a day from 6 or 6 30 in the morning, and you'd be standing all day as well. And if you did anything wrong, you were hit sometimes. The four men who were who were men, it was a mostly female workforce, but there were some boys and there were some men working there, but they were generally in management, would hit you, clip you around the ear, and they would fine you too. They would dock your wages for things like the matches catching fire during the process. Now, I'm not an expert on industrial processes, but I do know matches tend to be a bit flammable. Just a little bit, yeah. Kind of their thing. That's their their USP. So yeah, you were blamed if matches caught fire in the process, which they often did, they were called burnts, and you were charged for them. So you started off with an incredibly low wage, even for the East End working class at the time. And then Bryant and May would sort of say, Well, what else can we take out of it? Were they talking, were they laughing? Um, we'll take, we'll find them. And so you ended up sometimes with a fraction of what you should have had.

SPEAKER_00 8:22 But they they also um were basically forced to work as fast as possible, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:27 Absolutely. And they were it unbelievable how fast they did work. Filling the boxes, they're just incredible. You'd throw different kinds of matches at them, they'd be able to tell by sight which boxes they went into, and they'd be their hands would be an absolute blur. The chopping down of the matches in uh the wooden splints into matches, making the match boxes, which was mostly done in in the homes around, but sometimes done in the factory, had to be unbelievably fast. You know, you had to produce hundreds of units in order to get any sort of pay. And I tried once on a on when when Barbara wins the blesser, when we did a Who Do You Think You Are? And and we tried to make a matchbox. We didn't even manage to make one. They cut it out of the final programme because we were so poor as it we would have starved to death because you had to make 144 to get paid.

SPEAKER_00 9:23 And were they making the matches so quickly because they were worried about the punitive measures, the hitting, the fines, or was it because they were on piecework?

SPEAKER_01 9:32 Peacework was definitely for the match boxes that were sometimes made outside the factory. But it's a bit of a blur how people were really paid inside, mostly because Bryant and May didn't really know or really care or really bother to keep records. But we think it was a bit of both. You had to make a certain quota to get paid, and also you were subject to just being booted out the door or hit or fined if you didn't. So a combination of really massive pressure. And they were doing certainly after a few weeks, they were unbelievably skilled and unbelievably fast at what they did, but it wasn't counted as skill because they were women. And work tends to be called skilled if men are doing it, and these are just uneducated flotsome, really dispensable working class girls. So it's not counted as skilled labour.

SPEAKER_00 10:29 Yeah, I I recently looked into um the lives of the bleach packers and also the the lives of those who worked with um white lead. Those were often women as well, who were sort of um tended to be seen as the lower rungs of society. They they might not be able to get any other work, so you know they're they're good for the pickings to introduce them to white lead, which could basically kill them over time. I think early chemical workers were lucky if they reached the age of 48. You know, it wasn't it was a gruelling life, and it wasn't necessarily a long one either. And here we're talking about white phosphorus, and you've mentioned some of the dangers, just passing out, vomiting. It could get even worse than that, though, as well. Just talk to me a bit about the the role of white phosphorus and what it would have been like working with it.

SPEAKER_01 12:19 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, now of course it's banned as a weapon of war used, but banned as a weapon of war, which gives you some indication. And it was used at the time, people used it to commit suicide, it was used as an insecticide. So this is not a lovely, kind of eco-friendly, you know, lovely organic sort of essential oil at all. It's a horrible, horrible thing to work with. And they did consider safety measures at Bryant and May, sort of PPE as we call it now, but it was a bit pricey, so I didn't really bother. And there was also a safer form of white phosphorus, red phosphorus, but that was more expensive, so we didn't bother. So, what it would do was um there would be a stench in the air from it, a sort of slightly rotten, eggy um smell. It would just get everywhere, um, the smell. And the particles in the air would settle. The women would bring in usually a bit of bread from home, put it on their workbench until they got a chance to eat it. So all day the particles are sort of settling on your little bit of stale bread, which was your lunch that's got this deadly seasoning to it. And then um they would eat it, obviously, and not having any NHS dentists in those days, I mean, there aren't that many left now, they would probably have missing teeth. So the particles on the bread straight into your mouth and into the jawbone, but they work their way into the jawbone, and then the phosphorus causes uh a necrosis, which is a rotting um of the flesh, and a decay of the bone. First of all, you would get toothache, and then your jaw would swell, your lower jaw would swell. And the management were on the lookout for this, and you might think, oh, that's nice, they wanted to help. No, if they saw you with a swollen jaw, they would sack you because they didn't want the bother of having a case on their books. So women would, although they knew what was possibly coming, it killed you less quickly than starvation did. So they would try to disguise the swelling, they would pull up little scarves and kerchiefs around their neck and they would try to keep on working. But what would develop was what they called fossil jaw or the foss, it was a necrosis of the jaw, and your skeleton would start to decay. This must have been pretty horrific because while you're still alive, you are bits of bone, bits of your own skeleton, are plopping into your mouth and you're spitting out bits of bone the size of peas, we're told. So you're you know, this is my skeleton that I'm I'm spitting out here.

SPEAKER_00 14:55 By the time they've got the symptoms, um, is it is it too late then? Or if they were to step away from the work?

SPEAKER_01 15:02 If they could, if you could step away from the work, you could stop halt it so it didn't progress too far. However, as you said yourself, if you were a match girl, that was sort of a blot on your copybook. You were looked down on for doing it. And also, what else were you going to get? Bryant and May had such a monopoly, they were the largest employer of female labour in the East End. So often the women took their chances. Like, I know what I'm doing here. I've gained a certain level of skill, I can work fast enough to not be fined and get at home. My family are waiting for me to bring home, you know, bread and tea, and they're they're dependent on me, often dependent or fairly dependent on their wages. So they keep working. Um, in the end, you would develop an abscess in your jaw. And it's quite gross, uh, by the way, but the the smell of that, the rotten flesh and bone from the abscess was apparently so appalling. And of course, you're living probably with your whole family in one or two rooms, literally one or two rooms in the east end sort of slums. So, say there's ten of you to a room, and you've got this awful smell of rotting flesh. Um, match workers in the final stages of the diseases often took themselves away so their family didn't suffer and made themselves homeless. And we find match workers in the final stages of the disease, sort of living under bridges, living, living out on the streets because they didn't want to put their family through it. And finally, um, you would die from hemorrhaging and inflammation of the brain. Horrific. And what makes it worse is when I did my um obsessive research, trawling through the Brighton and May archives, they said, Oh, we don't know anything about this. I mean, there was a there was a commission on sweated labour and and they were asked about white phosphorus and fossil, and they said, No, we don't have any of that in our factory. Um because they were gentlemen, top hats, respectable, rich by now, um, they were just believed. Oh, all right, then thank you. Sorry to bother you. Thanks for coming in. See ya. And off they went. And of course they knew about it, and they also knew, and I proved this because I found they had articles from the 1850s in their archives talking about the fact that this new disease of matchmaking, this new industrial disease has been discovered, and that the problem is the need for ventilation and and if possible to work with red phosphorus. And so they knew. They knew I've held that bit of paper in my hand. I know that they had it in their archives, I know that they knew what they were doing to these women. And instead of paying attention to ventilation, they built another floor on top of um, they they kept building upwards, which of course meant there was even less air supply, even less ventilation, and they did nothing to mitigate it because that would have been expensive. And by 1884, they had shareholders. We've got to buy the shareholders a new mansion, haven't we? So it was a lot cheaper to just boot out any woman who had a swollen face and just employ more because there were thousands of unemployed people in the streets of the East End. They were an infinite resource.

SPEAKER_00 18:32 And it really shows the societal divide that existed in the Victorian era. It was there was a gulf between the haves and the have nots. And it's really heartbreaking to think of these women who were working so hard, so skillfully to provide for their families, ending up under bridges on the streets, probably being denigrated and looked down upon by passers-by as, as you imagine, people perhaps in the past with leprosy were looked at, sort of stayed steered clear of and and um maybe made fun of, mocked perhaps in the street.

SPEAKER_01 19:04 And and shunned, and they were just for being match women and just for being poor. The the class ideology at the time is so unbelievably strong. And we're at the beginning of eugenics as well, another wonderful thing we didn't ask the Victorians for. Thanks. You know, Victorians, great steam trains, thanks, marvelous telephones, super handy, thanks for that. No one asked you for a new form of kind of turbocharged racism. No one asked you for eugenics. We didn't, we didn't need that. But this is at the time when eugenics is being dreamt of. And it starts on not people of colour so much as working class people. So we decide that working class women like the match women are a threat. All the stuff you hear now from the racists and the far right about replacement theory, you see it said about the working classes in the East End and other poor areas in the UK. So they're replacing us, they're breeding like rabbits, they're breeding like vermin, all this kind of Nazi type language that we see in Nazi Germany with eugenics later. We we've got to do something about them. We've got to do something about them. They are a threat. So they're not just looked down on as like, oh, you're poor. Um, they're they're ugh a criminal, they have bad blood, and no matter what you do with them, they have this in them. They are innately bad because they are poor. There's very little chance of them ever becoming respectable. The Uber Victorian virtue, respectability. So they're absolutely demigrational. I mean, to the extent where there are still people who remember that if you had an East End accent, you'd get followed around the store by the store detective. Barbara Windsor, in fact, said, you know, it's it's ironic that I had to have elocution lessons because my mum was like, you'll never get any work with an East End accent. And then East Enders kind of, you know, rebooted my career. So I'm going back to the way I spoke. But even when she was growing up, such was the shame and stigma of being an East Ender. People, if you were poor, visibly an East Ender, visibly poor, and you walked in, you strayed into posh parts of London, people would throw things at you. People would boo and hiss and say, get back to the East End.

SPEAKER_00 21:27 And was the white phosphorus the only workplace hazard? Or when you you mentioned the Lucifer match, which is an apt, I think, um, it could catch a light. Did those fires often cause burns and injury as well?

SPEAKER_01 21:43 Yeah, that would happen as well. There would be fires in the workplace. Um, they would be fairly quickly put out because obviously the workplace is important, but the machinery as well was extremely dangerous. And there's one case of a woman talking about why she got fined. And she said, Well, I sit and look at this machine all day for 12 hours. So, uh, and it was cutting our fingers. The webbing on this um machine was cutting our fingers. And I worked out a way, she's obviously a very clever girl with an engineering sort of brain. She worked out a way to fix it where it would still work, but it would not, it would be safe. So she did this when the foreman was on his break, and you'd think he'd come back and say, Thank you, Eliza. That's really good of you. But no, he he was furious, hit her, and said, How dare you interfere with the machines? The machine is more valuable than your fingers. Put it back how it was, and she was fined. So two weeks later, her friend, her workmate who she stood next to, lost two fingers, had two fingers severed completely by this webbing, and she was sacked because you're no good to Brighton and May without the full complement of fingers. So she was out the door, no sick pay, no compensation. The other girls would pass the hat, literally, they had big hats, which they absolutely loved. They would pass the hat, they would support you. They would raise money so that you didn't immediately starve or have to go into prostitution. So yeah, caring, sharing. I mean, when people say, oh, health and safety's gone mad, I think, well, the altern the alternative ain't great, to be honest.

SPEAKER_00 23:23 Yeah, yeah. It really puts it into perspective. Like, okay, yes, health and safety might seem like a little bit of an annoyance, but losing two fingers, uh, losing your jaw, potentially dying from work, I think it's worth the little form that you have to fill out.

SPEAKER_01 23:40 Yeah, also quite annoying having a massive abscess in your jaw and dying. That can be that can be really pretty irritating. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 23:48 And why was it that women were most often chosen for this work and also often very young, uh, children even? What why was that?

SPEAKER_01 23:58 Well, because it was considered to be unskilled work and because Bryant and May were not wanting to pay high wages. So if you wanted a really large source of available workers who weren't going to put up much of a fight about their conditions, then you went to women and children who needed to work. People often say, oh, the EastEnders were quite, or working classes were cruel, making their children work. They didn't make their children work. Children were often, you know, living in dire poverty, really glad for the chance to contribute to the family purse, and also quite liked to do stuff like eat food and you know, be able to pay the rent. It was everyone wanted to contribute. So we know that there were people working from the age of six making boxes for Bryant and May, one of the women whose um lovely grandson I interviewed at length. And yeah, they're a very available source of work. And we've got this Victorian kind of the Victorians were nuts, honestly. The Victorians, the Hippocristian, the double think and the double standards. Only partly explainable by their massive use of pharmaceuticals, I think, and the fact that everyone was going to the chemist and saying, I've got a bit of a cough, have some cocaine, you know, have some heroin. I think it really explains the Victorian upperclasses because the madness that's going on. Um, we are saying that women shouldn't be working because it's not respectable and you need to be at home looking after your family. But then we're not paying your husband enough. We're we're creating this myth that there's a breadwinner wage, and if you're respectable, you'll marry a nice guy who'll pay for everything. And then we know we're not paying your husband enough to support himself, let alone a family. But we're making we're sticking a little bit of ideology over that and saying decent women don't work. We know you need to, you know you need to, but we're pretending that women don't work and have never worked. It's a whole new thing, women working. It came with industrialisation. Meanwhile, we can trace it back to ancient Egypt since records began. But we're pretending decent women don't work because this is another thing we have to thank the Victorians for, a kind of elevated form of sexism called domestic ideology. This is where we get the idea that a woman's place is in the home and she will be again, you know, the kind of incel trad wife thing that we've got going on today. Thank you, the Victorians. Cheers for that. Yeah, they invent this idea, and it's a lot to do with Queen Victoria, who's pretending to be a submissive wife and mother whilst doing the odd bit of part-time work, like running an empire, but not working because my Albert, you know. Um, so this ridiculous double standard is created that women have to work but shouldn't work. Therefore, that employers can take advantage of that because you're so embarrassed, you're sort of, you know, oh no, I shouldn't really be working. And people are hiding. Married women are pretending they're not working when they are because they're disgraced because of it. So this means that employers can really take advantage.

SPEAKER_00 27:06 And if a decent woman doesn't work, then by proxy you mustn't be decent.

SPEAKER_01 27:10 You are a bad girl. You are a factory less. The old sort of slang working girl for prostitute, where do you think that comes from? It comes from a working girl, know what I mean, know better than she should be. Working alongside men, they're working the idea that in a factory where your jaws are rotting and your fingers are being cut off and you're working 12 hours a day, absolutely knackered from six in the morning having got up at full. The idea that you're having some kind of orgy in with the managers who you hate and they hate you. But this was the prurient Victorian obsession with working class women's sexuality. Oh, they're probably up to all sorts of stuff working alongside men. So shame, shame, shame. And no one is more shamed, really, at this period than a working class East End factory working, working class woman. Oh, bad, bad, bad. So why on earth should Brighton and May pay you decently or worry about your your welfare? You're nothing. You're absolutely nothing. You're the scum of the streets.

SPEAKER_00 28:14 And you did mention that you've actually managed to speak to some of the descendants of these women, which is just what an incredible privilege. Um, what was that like? What did you learn from them?

SPEAKER_01 28:24 It was incredible. When I started doing my research um initially for my little essay, I thought, well, how am I going to get close to the women? Because the way that history was written, as we talked about the great individual school of history, it was Annie Besant, massive letters, top billing, uh, and the match girls. Did the match girls have names? Apparently not. Only Annie Bescent has a name. They couldn't afford them. So I thought, well, how do I get close to these women? Because that was where my interests lie. I'd worked with women from the East End, you know, I'd worked in jobs where we weren't terribly well paid, and you know, I worked in pubs, I'd worked in shops, I've gone on stripes and been involved in that kind of thing. So that was my interest. I wanted to get inside their heads. I wasn't particularly bothered about the um establishment in this story. How do I do it? And I just thought, well, I don't know, maybe some of their descendants would be alive. And I I wrote pieces for the Irish Times, thinking maybe that would. And then I gave some talks thinking perhaps through that I could meet them. And I was giving a talk at the Ragged School Museum, and I said, and I'm desperate to find descendants. And these two blokes at the back went, Yeah, well, our grandma and our great-grandma were match written. I was like, wow. Lock the doors, do not let these men leave until I until I have their home addresses and an appointment to see them. They also taught me so much. I mean, a guy called Ted Lewis, who was the grandson, I mean, they were all fantastic. Um, Jim Best, Joan Harris, they were all invaluable, and that I couldn't have written the book or done any of it or done the PhD without them. They were the co-authors 100%. And Ted Lewis, what a guy. Um, he would take me round the East End. I mean, he'd been a fish porter at Billingsgate. He was a boxer, he was a really successful boxer. I have to point out at this point, this is not the Ted Lewis who was a boxer who was Mussolini's bodyguard. No, totally different Ted Lewis, completely different guy, not a fascist. And he would, but he was the most intelligent, most well educated, most well-read historian. And he would talk, walk me around the East End and go, so that's where my grandpa bought her jelly deals, and that's where there was a music hall. And that, by the way, is where the Romans had a Ford, and that's why it's called Old Ford. And I was like, Oh my god, it was a revelation. So he bought the kind of quite modern and urban and often quite concretey streets of the East End to life for me. And he showed me the old East End. The guy was a genius, genius storyteller, and told me all about his grandmother. And I was just in awe of these people. I thought they were fantastic. We became friends, we'd get together in the pub. They were just so generous to me with their time. And I was very embarrassed that I couldn't pay them like I would have liked to have done. But they explained to me that this was really validating what they knew about their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, that they were the most incredible women, strong, funny, resilient, resourceful, intelligent, loving. You know, they often raise their grandchildren as well as their own children, and they'd been looked down on. And I remember Ted Lewis saying to me, I know that people didn't regard our grandmothers as ladies, because ladies was the word, the Victorian word. You could be a lady or a woman, they were very different things. But to us they were, they were East End ladies. And wow, that just explained so much to me. And so, because of that, they were willing to be generous with their time, with their family, you know, scrapbooks and photos and mementos. And they brought them to life for me. And the idea that these were these little sort of passive, stupid, let's be honest, people thought they were quite stupid or uneducated, which means we think they're a bit thick, really, as well as uneducated. These women were unbelievable. You know, they were as strong as hell because they had to be. And yes, they were tough, and they got stigmatized for that as well because oh, they could fight. Well, you had to fight. You were walking around the East End, and upper class pailes were coming in trying to drag your children away. You were getting sexually assaulted because they didn't bother lighting the streets because it's only poor people. So you had to fight. Women had to physically fight, and then they got astigmatized for that. But they were just unbelievable. They were the people you'd want to go down the pub with, although you wouldn't be standing at the end of it because they'd drink you under the drink you under the table. So they, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, brought them completely to life for me. Yeah, and I still think today, if I'm having a really crappy day, I still think, come on, what would Martha Robertson have done? They would just, and yet these are not the people we're taught to look up to, are they? Well, they are not, we're we're given sort of, I don't know, Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria, Joan of Arc, there you go, girls, that's your historical heroes. Yeah. And yet, these women, there should be statues to them on every street in London. Never mind blokes on horses.

SPEAKER_00 33:40 Yeah, and I recently did a podcast series um with my grandma charting her um story of being deported from Gernton, the Channel Islands, during the war and sent to an internment camp. And um there's something really powerful that I learned during that process and that experience of like connecting with your grandparent and finding out about them, which I think so few of us actually do. You know, how many of us sit down and say, Grandma, tell me about what it was like when you were young and and really sort of immerse ourselves in their story. I think I don't think enough of us do that. And when I did it, it was so moving and so powerful. And I learned about this new woman, you know, this woman that I I thought I'd known all my life, and actually now I suddenly was discovering for the first time, and and I thought bloody hell, she's she was like so strong to get through that, come out the other end, raise a family that led to me, you know, what this is it's incredible, it's amazing. And I think sometimes like it can connect us to like the the reality of what it was like to the in the past in a way that doesn't make it feel distant. You know, you can look back at the the match women and say, Oh yeah, but that was the distant past, like we've moved on from there. But actually, you you're connecting through just a few generations uh with the people that you spoke to, and suddenly you go, Oh, this could happen again.

SPEAKER_01 35:06 Yes, exactly. And would actually there are quite a few people who would be very happy for it to happen again when we read about the huge corporations today where workers are not able to then sort of wait till their lunch break to have a heart attack because otherwise it's going to be docked from their pay. And we you know, we would there's always a pressure to push us back there. It absolutely, you know, we are we like to think when we hear about anything dreadful or anyone's awful hard luck stories. Oh, well, that would never happen to me because. And then you realise that purely by accident of where you were born, yes, it would have happened to you. You would have had very little choice unless you became a really expert criminal and didn't get caught, you were going to be working at that factory. And there was absolutely no way out, and there was no way out until death, really, for a lot of these women. It was endless work. I mean, Ted Lewis said, even after my grandmother was, you know, an elderly lady, when you went over to see her, she'd be right, come on then, and you'd be helping her with whatever work she was doing. While she made your cup of tea and sat and chatted to you, she'd be peeling onions for Cross and Blackwell. She'd be still making matchboxes sometimes. She was working constantly, your hands were always busy. If you were born a woman in that area, in many areas of the world, still today, you would be working from cradle to grave. And that was your life.

SPEAKER_00 36:32 Okay, so I think it's time now to really delve into what happened in 1888 then. This is sort of the the reason for you coming to this topic is this strike, which has been kind of disregarded in the annals of history, but it actually was momentous, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 36:52 It was. Um, and people sometimes think that it's perhaps the first strike by women, and perhaps we call it strike because of the match trade, but not at all. It's um people who've been going on strike since ancient Egypt that we know of. But this was a really important one, and it wasn't that these women had been on strike before, actually. The match women had been on strike before over the demand for the eight-hour day. But this was for a number of reasons, this sort of concatenation of circumstances that made it a really huge one. So Annie Bessant does enter the story, um, who's been often attributed of leading the match women's strike. Uh, not if you ask her, absolutely the last thing she would have wanted to do. But she's a few.

SPEAKER_00 37:32 She wasn't a matchwoman. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 37:34 She wasn't a matchwoman, she's a middle class woman, she's terribly interesting. Um, she's kind of friends with George Bernard Shaw, she's a Fabian, um, which is sort of socialist-ish society in the East End at the time, divorced from a clergyman, big scandal, huge scandal. Kind of a women's rights activist, very interesting, but not a match woman and absolutely not working class, absolutely not middle class, and the class divide is absolute in those days. So she's at a Fabian meeting, she hears that women are particularly impressed in the East End. She thinks, hmm, okay, so I'll go down to that match factory and I'll see if I can interview some of the girls for my paper, the link. And she interviews them and hears about Fosse Jaw and hears the story about the fine that we talked about with the girl getting her finger severed. That comes from Annie Besson. Goes back, writes up a piece for her paper called White Slavery in London. Duh guaranteed headlines, absolutely guaranteed, because at the time there's a big scandal about um the white slave trade being women being trafficked into foreign brothels, kind of happening, kind of sensationalised. To be honest, there's quite enough working class women being trafficked into brothels in London that we should be more concerned about. However, it's a big hot topic, like white slavery in London. So um, big scandal, um, a fairly short piece. She writes it, says this is terrible and people should boycott Brighton and May, and then she moves on. But just because of that, she's been memorialized as strike leader. Now, Bryant and May see this piece because she sends them a copy, which is kind of cool. She's like, You might want to have a look at this, lads.

SPEAKER_00 39:20 Power move.

SPEAKER_01 39:21 Absolute baller move, right? From Ali Besson. And they go absolutely incandescent with rage because they've been carefully crafting their PR. They're, you know, they're friends with the Liberal government, they are friends with politicians. They're they're the huge country estates. One of them's got a house so big you'd want to call it a palace, really. It's massive. They're the sons of the original Brighton made by this stage. Super accepted into society. They're gentlemen, they're doing great. They occasionally have a journalist around the factory to look at the one girl who isn't dying who goes, Oh, I love working here. And they write a story about Aunt Brighton and made wonderful benefactors to the poor. And this woman is coming along and trashing it, and we're not having that. So they originally um pick on their workforce. Interestingly, they don't choose to sue her, which you'd think they would if they were sure of their ground, would you not? But they start bullying the workers and they say they put a prepared statement, they print it up, they put it in every workshop. It's a huge workforce, you know, thousands of people working here, and they say, right, you're going to sign this underneath. And the statement says, you know, we love working here, it's super fun. The rotting jaws is great. I don't actually say that. Um, but we this journalist has lied, essentially. Um, we the undersigned love working for Bryant and May. And the foreman say, right, sign that, we'll be back in 10 minutes. They come back, not one single girl has signed. Now, this is incredible. And it's because they're not going to throw Annie Besson under the omnibus. They're not going to do it. And we know this because they put a note through her door, which always makes me a bit emotional. And they said, Dear lady, they're trying to make the girl sign a statement saying you had lied, but we will not do it, we will not go back on you. We thank you very much for standing up for us. And we hope we will see you again at one of the socialist meetings. Ah, everything is in that note, everything that's important to me. Firstly, they're calling her dear lady, not dear Annie. So she's supposed to have led them. They don't even really know her name. There's the class divide is there, dear lady. And secondly, they're saying that they go to political meetings, they recognise her from political platforms. So they're not these kind of underclass, almost insensate people. This is how we thought of the working classes in those days. No political inklings, because you have to be intelligent, the middle class to have political. You know, you can't know you're exploited unless you've read Karl Marx cover to cover, can you? Just because your jaw's rotting. You wouldn't know, right? Um, they're not political. And loads of people wrote, and still fairly recently, people were writing um papers and books about other working classes of this period, the underclass. And oh dear, no, they were actually incredibly political and incredibly aware. And why wouldn't they be? And aware of their heritage and their Irish history and so on. Um, so because of her, they wouldn't sign this paper and they said, We hope you will not get into any trouble on our behalf, which just kills me because it's just so so adorable and so touching. And also there is your solidarity.

SPEAKER_00 42:34 These women who are suffering on a daily basis are looking out for somebody in that way.

SPEAKER_01 42:40 And knowing they can be sacked, knowing they probably will be sacked, all of them, but if they don't sign this paper, but they stick up for each other, they stick up for other women and they stick up for people who've and that is solidarity in a nutshell. You can compress the whole of Karl Marx into that, really. So then the bosses sack one girl who's popular because she's kind of a leader, um, and they pretend she's not doing her job properly, but everyone knows why she's been sacked. It's to make an example of her. And so as she walks out the door, the other women who are in her work, there's these different sort of workshops, but all the women in her workshop lay down their tools, pick up their hats, pick up their coats, and they follow her out the door. And they stream out onto um the Fairfield Road and Bow Road. And you can imagine the managers by going, come back, where the hell do you think you're going? And they it's a huge factory site. If anyone's seen it, it's massive. It's almost like a little village in there. They manage to get a picket line round the whole of this massive factory site. And I see other girls come off shift at different times. They're like, we're on strike, by the way. And there are these wonderful scenes described with them picketing, and they're sitting on doorsteps and they've got sort of a cup of tea in one hand, slice of bread in the other, and people are coming to deliver, and they're like, No, sorry, Bert, turn it round, darling. We're on strike. No, you're not coming in, nothing's going out, nothing's coming in, we're on strike. It's unbelievable how quickly they manage to do this. Uneducated women, and yet they uh unpolitical women, they immediately nominate a strike committee, they have a vote, they nominate, they go back in, they put their terms to management. Management are like, are you serious right now? Do you not realize that we have top hats and you're working class, you know, scum basically? How dare you come and put your terms to us? What do you mean you want to form a union? Are you having a laugh? You know, you're all sacked. Even if you come back now, you're all sat. So they say, okay, strike it is if that's what you want. Um, and they organise themselves so quickly, they have 1,400 plus people out. Wow. They're walking, they're parading the streets of the East End. They're singing this song we're gonna hang old Bryant on a sour apple tree. Don't get me started on that word form, it's terribly interesting, and it goes back to ancient protests hundreds of years before. Hand, but that's a chapter in my book you can read. Um, and people come out and say, Um, what are you doing? And they say, We're the match girls, we're on strike because of those bastards up at Fairfield Road, treat us badly. People throw money down, they catch it in their aprons, these long aprons, that's their strike funds. They start having mass meetings, they're processing around the East End because you've got to make noise, right? You haven't got social media. And there's a lovely story about a van pulling up to the strike procession and someone jumping out and handing out hundreds and hundreds of pink rosebuds for these women to wear in their lapels. Don't know who, don't know who sent that. I reckon maybe Oscar Wilde. He was very ascetic and a bit of a lefty at the time. He would have known about the strike. Don't know, but anyway, someone sent rosebuds, so they did have supporters. But um, well, they march to Parliament and they meet with members of parliament to tell them about their conditions. And when they go into the posh streets of London, they are booed and cackled and hissed at. It literally stops the traffic. This parade of women looking poor, good God, in posh London. So that just shows you the class divide. But they're brilliant, they meet with members of parliament, they can do a political gesture as soon as look at you. One of the girls who's about 12 takes off her bonnet when about five of them meet with members of parliament. And she's bald because she's been carrying pallets of matches on her head since she was an infant, wooden pallets of matches. And that was such a powerful gesture to a Victorian gentleman because she were hair, you know, this pre-Raphaelite locks that girls always had. They would have had probably kids at home, these MPs. So this really hits the MPs when they're live where they live, and they stop Bryant and May then. They go to the MPs in Glasgow and the other areas where Bryant and May have workers, and they were thinking of bringing them in to break the strike, and they say, no, we're not gonna let that happen. So this is incredibly powerful. Where is Annie Besson, right, the strike leader? Well, absolutely nowhere for the first couple of days. In fact, I read her journal because I was trying to piece together there was nothing written about this strike, really, the odd line. There was no timeline, there was no book. So I'm trying to piece it together from every journal I can, every every newspaper, anything I can find. And Annie Bessant's journal, she said she was working, producing her paper, The Link, and suddenly there was a commotion outside. She looks out, and there are all these ragged girls outside. This is Posh London, mind you. This is, I think, Fleet Street. So goodness me, they're stopping respectable people. And she says, Well, I'll see five of them. So she she agrees to see five or six of them, gives them tea, and finds out the strike has begun. Hello, sorry, and he hasn't led the strike. We've always been told, right, for a hundred plus years, we've been told everyone. Wasn't there and didn't know about it. Now I've organised some strikes, you know, so you you try and give it your best attention, but even if you're a bit half-assed, you certainly know it's begun, right? And then she said in her paper, the link there's been a revolt of the matchmakers, but the girls will go back to work. Oh, really? Will they, Annie Besson? No, they absolutely won't. So she doesn't want a strike. She's horrified. It's like, oh my god, 1,400 of them are on strike. And she says they should have let a few of them be sacked. We could have maybe supported them financially. This is a nightmare. This is not what we want at all. You know, and she pretty much says these are kind of underclub, these are not really the women we want in the union movement. You know, they're not the respectable. We don't we don't like it. So, but it's she has to go along with it because they drag her, they drag the kind of middle-class socialist movement, kicking and screaming behind them. Momentum grows. Initially, they are really castigated in the press. Women of the lowest type, you know, surrounded by men who are almost even worse, marching around our streets. Oh my god, is there going to be a revolution? They pull police from around the country to police this dangerous match women. Um, I think perhaps local coppers were less enthusiastic about doing it because they they were quite scared of the match women, actually. They didn't mess with the match women. And the local police said, um, yeah, there's absolutely no way they're going back when even one of them is on strike, they're all on strike or else. And you have to remember in the East End, one of the um nightly forms of entertainment was to take the manhole covers off. So where the police were doing their route walking at night, they wouldn't see in the dark streets and they'd fall down. The coppers would fall down the manhole covers. So the East End didn't have a lot of respect for the police, and the police were kind of, you know, quite uh, you know, they had sort of respect for the matchwomen, they weren't going to mess with the matchwomen. So suddenly everything really changes. They talk to members of parliament who were absolutely astounded. My God, George, they could form entire sentences. We didn't know the working classes could do this. Extraordinary, eloquent, who knew? So that starts to change things. Um, there's an independent inquiry which finds that far from Annie Bescent lying, conditions are even worse in the factory. And then it all begins to change. The papers stop, criticize them, and start supporting them. There are papers like the star, not the daily star of today, very different, who support them from the beginning, however, and they record the strike funds. Frederick Engels gives some money to the strike fund. They're collecting wherever they can, they're holding mass meetings, and it all really comes to a head for Bryant and May. Annie Bessant does write some good pieces now. She's constantly saying she wasn't involved in the strike. I always say it's a bit like that shaggy song, It wasn't me. She's constantly, I wasn't at the factory. She's constantly saying it wasn't me. I did not encourage this strike. Absolutely not. 100% no, no, no, no. But since they are on strike, um, so it all very quickly falls in for Bryant and May. It all really quickly goes wrong for them. And within around two weeks, they are forced to settle. Having said, we will never settle. Yeah, we will never settle with these girls. Absolutely not going to be told what to do by these women. Share prices start to tumble. It gets very embarrassing because they're politically liberal, Bryant and May, they're in with the Liberal Party, right? They built a statue of Gladstone, for goodness sake, on the bow road just to creep up to the Prime Minister. So they are have a lot of liberal MPs who are shareholders and a lot of clergymen. And Bryant and May were originally Quakers, so we think they're probably quite nice to the poor. So people think they're a bit of an ethical, possibly lefty company. And they're shareholders, yeah, noop, and they're shareholders. So it's super embarrassing because people who are, you know, clergymen and liberal MPs who are supposed to care about the poor are being exposed in the press as being shareholders in a firm that's rotting the jaws of poor girls in these ends. So they also put pressure, the shareholders start to put pressure on the company, and it all gets really embarrassing for them. Interestingly, we do get um some men from the sort of established junior movement thinking, oh, don't worry, girls, we'll go negotiate with Brian and May. We're man to man, and Bryant and May are just like, no, get lost. It's a bit surprising. So it's the women themselves that go in and negotiate with their bosses. It's extraordinary. You know, the directors who wouldn't didn't even know if they care what their names were if they lived or died or who they were, are having to sit down with these women and be brought to the negotiating table in a matter of days. It's extraordinary. So eventually they are forced to share prices start tumbling. It's not that Bryant and May suddenly have their eyes opened and it's like a Christmas carol, and they suddenly think, oh, no, share prices.

SPEAKER_00 52:54 No brand new consciences, no.

SPEAKER_01 52:56 No, no, it's it's the economic stupid. No, it's the share prices they they tumble. And they are forced, you know, fuming and raging to give in to the matched women's terms, which interestingly are to form a trade union. Now, apolitical apparently don't understand politics. First thing they want to do is form a trade union, which they've never been allowed to do because Bright and May won't let them. To be honest, the established union movement isn't too fussed about having women members either. So that's their first demand, and of course it's absolutely crucial. And to have improved paying conditions, a dining room, a separate dining room out of the white phosphorus fumes, and the right to take their grievances straight to the directors, not to their awful line managers who attack them and fine them. That must have made their line managers rage. They must have been so furious about that. Um, and they get it. Bryant and May are forced to crumble within around two weeks. We have suddenly these women streaming down the bow road, down the Fairfield Road with their best bonnets, I'm very sure, on their heads, back to work as the Union of Women matchmakers. Incredible. Like it's an astonishing victory. Um, it's an unprecedented, it shouldn't have happened. Um, according to even now, um, the way some people say that important strikes happen, it's almost like there's an equation, it's all social science. It's not a key industry matchmaking. It's not like they're they're stopping the docks, and yet they absolutely are a catalyst. The strike industry, once they go back to work, that ain't the end of it. It's not the end of it for them. They are constantly having meetings for other women workers and trying to get them to unionize as well. And they always want tea and cake and Irish music at their strike meetings, which I really relate to that. And that's very cool. We should always do that. Um, and strikes just snowball after they their victory. You can see it in the industries of strikes if you look at the streets.

SPEAKER_00 55:00 The strikes outside of match industrial. Absolutely. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 55:04 See, this is the second thing that's so key about them. It's not just the strike in itself, which is unbelievably cool. It's the catalyst effect that they have. So I've looked at, because I am that history nerd, I've looked at the record of strikes and kind of the numbers and indices of strikes at the time. Boom, from when they go back to work, shoots up in the East End, in London, but even further afield, you see this snowball effect. And we suddenly see people writing from Ireland to the match women's union saying, Can you advise us? We see people striking, match workers striking in Sweden, Australia, apparently inspired by this strike. It's you know, before before modern mass media, it's incredible. And the dockers in London write to the match women and say, Can you please come and address us? Because we want to unionize as well. Can you please tell us how you did it? So we have hundreds and thousands of people doing exactly what the match women did, using a strike to force unionization. And the Docker strike, inspired by the match women, becomes almost a general strike. It is huge, it spreads right through the country. And historians have been really at pains to disconnect it from the match women and say, well, it was almost a year later, and they weren't the same types of workers. How were they not? Apparently, because they're men, I think, really. So I looked at that for my research. And the dockers and the match women are absolutely the same people. They are married to each other, they live in the same houses. Traditionally, match women date dockers. A lot of them are Irish, a lot of them are Catholic, they have the same church networks, they go to the same pubs. Absolutely. And then I found that the Dockers Union had written to the match women's union and asked for help. So I think it's nonsense to try and disconnect these two strikes and say the match women's strike happened first, but it doesn't belong to this glorious new unionism movement. We'll leave it there. It's awkward it happened before everything else, but we're saying it's not part of it. We're saying it didn't start anything. Because these are we don't really want teenage girls who drank gin and went to pubs and danced at the music halls. We we don't really want them to be the mothers of our union movement. Well, I'm sorry, tough. The facts absolutely bear it out. They inspired the dockers. And this is all the road that leads to the independent Labour Party, the demand for working class representation and the modern trade union movement, which becomes political and becomes something desiring to lift the whole working class rather than just individual groups of workers wanting to protect their labour price. So to me, my mind, absolutely blown by this as a young working class woman who's been in the labour movement, you know, and I'm old enough where stewards still used to say, male stewards still used to occasionally you'd hear, well, you know, love, women aren't really, shouldn't really be in the workplace taking male jobs, and they're not very good trade unionists really. Um, because we hold our meetings in the pub at 3:30, which is school pickup time, and none of the women come for some reason. Can't think why. So I was still fighting that prejudice myself. And then uh, and all the books were called things like Labouring Men that were about the movement, and then suddenly I find that this whole movement's been begun by women and it mind-blowing, absolutely mind-blowing. I wish I'd known that sooner. I wish we'd all were all taught this at school.

SPEAKER_00 58:35 So you can basically trace a line from the match women to the modern day really clearly. It was a pivotal, pivotal moment. And the way you describe it, I you said uh a few minutes ago, it's emotional. I mean, a lot of that that was an emotional roller coaster for me. Uh there were highs, there were lows. It was incredibly evocative. So thank you for sharing that. I mean, it could be a film. Um and it should probably be. It should be. It really is. I think you're right. Like people need to know this. Um because it is, you know, your work was recognized in Parliament in 2013, wasn't it? Yeah. Um this is incredibly relevant to today, actually. What why do you feel like this is a message that needs to be, as somebody who has been has led strikes and actions like that, why do we need to remember this story?

SPEAKER_01 59:27 It tells us that people we like who are often written off as powerless are anything but so that's the most important thing, that we think that teenage girls from rough backgrounds can't achieve anything. We have this great individual school of history that that the little people should just sit quietly and passively and wait for one big leader, you know, one big figure to come and lead them. That is disempowering, it's completely demotivating. And it tells us that we're not players in our own countries and our own nation's history. We're not important. It's the kings and the queens, and maybe the old Annie Bessant, we might sneak in there as well. And we're just, where are we? We're just a mass of um a rough set of girls, as Bryant and May called them, and we're not important. We are do not have power in our own destiny. We don't have the power to stand up for ourselves and each other, and that's really disempowering, and I think deliberately so. When I teach this in schools, and I've taught it in schools that are for so-called, you know, the sort of rather naughty children that get excluded elsewhere. The way this story takes with them, yeah, the way that you'll see teenage girls sitting up a little bit straighter, and teachers are writing and saying, Oh, I heard them talking in the canteen a week later, and they said the match women made me feel better about myself. I've had schoolgirls say, write me letters saying, We don't want to hear about Henry VIII and all these old psychopaths that killed their wives. We want to be taught about the match women, you know, girls. I love yeah, girls from from sort of migrant backgrounds. And this just makes me, this is so moving. And the match women would love that, and they'd be so proud of that. It it's everything, really. It speaks to us of you know the power of women. We all know that although we've got this kind of trad wife thing that women are, you know, just absolutely hopeless and can't do anything, we all have this dichotomy. We know the women in our lives are like your grandma. We know that's not the reality, and yet that's the ideology. And this just punctures all of that, and it shows this incredible sisterhood and solidarity. It shows that a class of women who we should absolutely admire, who built the wealth of this country through industrialization, women were often the workers in the first industries to industrialize. Um, that the women who kept entire families alive or next to nothing through resilience and ingenuity, like you wouldn't believe, who made the working class survive, really. They bought the networks of friendship that kept people alive in the slums and tenements into the factories. Codes of solidarity, you all stick up for each other. If someone's out of work, we all club together and give to that woman, right? This, we all know this happened in working class neighbourhoods and still does. Every street had its queen or its auntie who looked after everybody. It's so logical that they brought that into the factories and that became the modern trade union movement.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:41 Uh uh the the work that you've done to investigate their story and to piece it together after you know over all these years is just stunning, actually. Um where can people find out more? You've got a book, you you I think you hold an annual festival as well, do you? Um, how do how do people learn more about the matchwomen?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:59 Yeah, so you can follow me on social media. I'm Louise Raw, author on the dreaded Twitter. Uh I'm a little bit on Facebook and I'm a little bit on Instagram. Um, yeah, my book's called Striking a Light. My publishers want me to mention that, published by Bloomsbury. And I had to rest the festival this year because I am under fairly heavy attack by the far right myself. But we hope to be back in 2027. I'll talk about it on social media, and we tend to be uh we tend to hold it at Beau Arts, which is very, very near to the old factory in Bow. It's the venue that is the closest to the factory. And we have today's wonderful activists who I think are in the spirit of the match women who come along and and talk to us. And it's it's a wonderful day. It's a very low-key festival, it's very lo-fi. It couldn't barely be more lo-fi, but we make sure that we, in the spirit of the match women, we have music and we have um gin as well. That was very, very key to the match women. So yeah, what watch this space and I I yeah, uh it'll it'll be coming back in probably late August or early September 27th.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:09 Well, I'm sure you'll weather the storm with the far right, um, from what I can tell from our conversation. Um Louise Rohr, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:19 Thank you so much, Ali.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:21 Thank you so much to Louise, and thank you for listening. If you enjoyed my conversation, please like, subscribe, follow whatever your app lets you do. I'm Ollie, and this is what we did before, and I will see you next time.