The 1888 Matchgirls strike: how a group of East End women changed British labour history

The ‘matchgirls’ continue to exert a powerful hold over the public imagination to this day – plays and musicals written about them in the 1960s are still performed.

The women certainly were a colourful and vibrant presence on the East End streets. Even out of work, accounts tell us that the matchgirl could be distinguished by the “freedom of her walk, shrillness of her laugh and number of her friends”, as well as the bright clothes, fringed hairstyles and high-heeled boots they favoured. Appearance was important – the women paid into ‘feather clubs’ to buy and share between them the biggest hats they could find, trimmed with the largest feathers.

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Even when not seen they were heard – many an East End night echoed to “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay,” and “Knocked ‘em in the Old Kent Road” from matchwomen on evenings out. “They seem to know by heart the words of all the popular music hall songs of the day”, sighed one local magistrate.

The women received a threatening letter from someone claiming to be Jack the Ripper

However, in June 1888, an incendiary article by an East End woman of a very different class – but no less notoriety –revealed the horrors of the women’s working lives.

Annie Besant's life was an extraordinary fin de siecle search for meaning, encompassing devout Christianity and marriage to a clergyman and loss of faith. It also comprised relationships with famous, if not notorious men like scandalously-atheist MP, Charles Bradlaugh, and George Bernard Shaw. Besant ended her life as the de facto leader of a new religion and a venerated figure in India, where her body was cremated on a funeral pyre.

In 1877 she was tried for ‘obscene libel’ in connection with a campaign to teach contraceptive methods to poor East End women. She narrowly escaped prison, and the press had a field day with the spectacle of a young, attractive woman, the estranged wife of a clergyman, being tried for obscenity.

In the 1880s Besant became a socialist after meeting Shaw, joining the Fabian Society of which he was a key member. At a Fabian meeting in June 1888, she first heard about conditions at Bryant & May's, and decided to investigate. Interviewing a handful of women outside the factory, she published her findings in political paper The Link under the resounding title 'White Slavery in London'.

By this time the firm, controlled by sons of founder William Bryant, was a powerful player in both domestic and export markets, and a household name. By acting as a cartel, it had driven wages down so far that they were lower in 1888 than ten years previously. Besant found the truth of this written on the bodies of the workers: the youngest, malnourished while developing physically, were small and frail.

One 16-year-old could afford to eat only bread for every meal

One 16-year-old earned four shillings a week; after rent, she could afford to eat only bread for every meal. The “sole bit of colour” in her life was provided by rare and longed-for occasions when someone would “stand treat” to the Paragon music hall in Mile End.

Bryant & May imposed fines on the women when matches accidentally caught fire, for having dirty feet, even for simply talking to one another. One girl was fined for altering a machine to prevent it cutting her hand, and told to look after the machinery and “never mind your fingers”. Her workmate subsequently had her finger cut off by the same machine, and was left unable to work and penniless.

A grisly disease

What the women feared most was ‘Phossy jaw’, the grisly industrial disease of matchmaking. Ingesting even a small amount of white phosphorus could cause vomiting. The effects of full-blown poisoning were horrific: beginning with toothache and a swollen face, the disease would rot the lower jaw, forcing pieces of bone the size of peas out through ‘putrid abscesses’ in the gums, filled with such evil-smelling puss that even loved ones couldn’t bear the odour. Disfigurement and agonising death could result. Bryant & May’s sole precaution seems to have been to dismiss anyone with a swollen face, or force women to have all their teeth pulled: it was alleged that a pregnant matchwoman who refused, fearing a miscarriage from shock, was sacked.

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All in all, Besant concluded, ‘chattel slaves’ would have been better off than the unfortunate matchwomen.

The exposé was published on 23 June 1888, and it is perhaps not surprising that when the matchwomen walked out on strike days later Besant was widely assumed to be behind it; so much so that she has, for 121 years, been regarded as the strike’s leader.

That the women won the dispute, going on to form the largest union of women and girls in the country, was remarkable, given the power of their employers and considering that many unions would not let women join. The TUC’s Henry Broadhurst was not alone in urging the return of women to “their proper sphere at home”.

Just as remarkable was the impact the strike had on the matchwomen’s fellow workers. Following their victory a wave of strikes, including 1889’s Great Dock Strike, swept the country. Tens of thousands of the most exploited workers formed new unions to fight for decent wages and conditions, sowing the seeds of the modern labour movement, and Labour Party.

However, because middle-class socialists rather than the workers themselves supposedly led the matchwomen’s strike, some historians dismiss it as a mere footnote in history with no influence on what followed. The lives of the women themselves, unlike those of the dockers’ leaders or indeed Annie Besant, were not thought worthy of further study. They seemed destined to remain silent, nameless faces looking solemnly out from a black and white photograph, frozen forever in one moment in time – until now.

Recent research has, however, uncovered new truths about the strike, proving beyond doubt that the workers themselves were the driving force behind the walkout – and that their actions altered the course of British labour history.

The strike actually began in response to management bullying, not any urging by Besant. Bryant & May, furious at Besant’s article, demanded that the women sign a statement saying that they were happy and well-treated. The women refused, and warned Besant in a note delivered to her home: “Dear Lady they have been trying to get the poor girls to say it is all lies that has been printed and to sign a paper… we will not sign… We hope you will not get into any trouble on our behalf as what you have spoken is quite true.”

Downing tools

Bryant & May did not stop there, next making an example of one girl they believed had spoken to Besant, a “pale little person in black” who was popular with her workmates. When she was sacked, her workmates immediately downed tools and followed her. Quickly assembling a picket line at the gates, they elected six women to put their terms: reinstatement of their colleague, an end to fines, and a dining room – currently the women had to eat in the work rooms and toxic particles settling on food was a factor in ‘Phossy jaw’. Bryant & May responded by threatening the strikers with dismissal, but the “spirit of revolt against cruel oppression” had been ignited; they would not go back.

One local paper, initially siding with the ‘gentlemen’ employers, disapprovingly noted: “the …streets and thoroughfares of East London… swarmed with the girls… (who) marched up and down the streets soliciting coppers, quite willing to pour their tale of hardships into every sympathetic ear. On Tuesday morning… a vanload of pink roses drew up… sent down – by whom it did not transpire – to be worn by the strikers as badges.”

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By the end of the first week the “whole factory was lying idle…” “Eleven hundred employees paraded the streets in the neighbourhood of Bow on Thursday and Friday. A large number of police have had to be stationed in the neighbourhood.”

Annie Besant’s own accounts show that she was working upstairs in her offices four days after the walkout began, when a group of matchwomen arrived asking for her. Her first concern was they were blocking the pavement below, but she finally agreed to talk to three “respectable” looking matchwomen – and only then discovered that they were on strike.

Besant was not closely monitoring, let alone directing, events. And she never claimed so, insisting: "With regard to the charge that we instigated the strike… this statement is absolutely false, nor were we, as asserted, near the factory on the day it commenced." In fact she thought striking was a mistake, and said so in The Link.

The women went several days without money but maintained a cheerful solidarity: “…the girls were determined to stand together at all costs. ‘I can pawn this for you’, ‘I’ll lend you that’, in every direction girls might be seen plotting how they could help one another…”

The strike crystallised concerns not only about ‘factory girls’ but the exploitation of the new urban working poor at a time when social revolution seemed a genuine possibility. There were accusations of hypocrisy: “Messrs Bryant & May are well known Liberals and have… paraded their Liberalism before the world… more than one shareholder is a well-known member of parliament who… profess to champion the cause of the poor and the oppressed. How could they meet their constituents with large dividends in their pockets… when their employees in the east of London existed on next to starvation wages?”

As pressure grew, the directors had to accept that a mere “set of girls” had humbled them, and reluctantly conceded to their demands.

The Star enthused over the "magnificent" victory, "won without preparation – without organisation – without funds… a turning point in the history of our industrial development."

Who, then, really led the strike? An account from 1888 named a young matchwoman called Eliza as “one of the leaders…”, and in 1999, a list of suggested ‘ringleaders’ was found in company archives, naming five women: Eliza Martin, Alice Francis, Kate Slater, Mary Driscoll and Jane Wakeling.

After an extensive search for descendants, Eliza Martin’s grandchildren were finally traced and interviewed. Though Eliza had died in middle age and possibly tragic circumstances, they had learned about her from her children, their own father, aunts and uncles. Grandson Jim Best recalled seeing a photograph of the strike committee in a local newspaper in the 1980s: “I remember my dad saying, ‘that’s your nan’. She’d told dad she and her mates were involved in the strike… We’re proud of that.”

Mary Driscoll’s granddaughter, Joan Harris, was also found. She was extremely close to her grandmother and recalled her talking about conditions in the factory and ‘Phossy jaw’.

Historians have said that matchwomen were too different from dockers to have influenced their strike. Yet Driscoll was a docker’s daughter and later wife. Eliza Martin’s brother-in-law and nephews were dockers. As Jim Best put it, and as Census records confirm, matchwomen and dockers were “the same people” from the same East End streets and families.

Records also show that the dockers contacted the matchwomen’s union for advice after their victory, and that there was an attempted strike on the docks just weeks later. Once the 1889 Dock Strike had begun, famous orator John Burns, later an MP, urged a mass meeting of tens of thousands to “…stand shoulder to shoulder. Remember the matchgirls, who won their strike and formed a union”.

The Star described the victorious procession marking the dockers' victory: "…up came the dockers… Then a large contingent of women… match-makers, among others, advanced like a moving rainbow, for they all wore the huge feathers of many colours which the East End lass loves to sport when she is out for the day".

In 1940 Ernest Bevin wrote to surviving dock strikers about the importance of their action: “Fifty years ago… you were among those who were involved in… a great industrial upheaval – virtually a revolution against poverty, tyranny and intolerable conditions. You little thought during those weeks… that you were laying the foundation of a great Industrial Movement”.

We must now accept this to have been equally true of those other remarkable East Enders, the Bryant & May matchwomen.

Dr Louise Raw writes and speaks on labour, the East End, and women's history. She is the author of Striking A Light: The Truth About The Match Girls Strike And The Women Behind It (March 2009)

This article was first published in the April 2009 edition of BBC History Magazine