Louise Raw on the Bryant and May Strike (2005)

A Match To Fire The Docks: The Bryant And May Strike Reconsidered

Written By: Louise Raw
Date: October 2005 

 Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 25: Autumn 2005 

In the summer of 1888, fourteen hundred matchwomen walked out of the Bryant and May factory in Bow, East London. Their strike, over terrible working conditions, low pay and management bullying, would last less than a fortnight but attract considerable press and public attention.

The matchwomen’s story has an enduring appeal. Almost a century later, historian Sarah Boston found it to be the only generally known example of female militancy in British labour history.

Its enduring fame is perhaps surprising. After all this was a short strike and, according to all sources then and since, not even self-organised: Fabian socialist and journalist Annie Besant, whohad published an emotive exposé of conditions at Bryant and May, is generally believed to have led the women.

The strike is accordingly often seen as little more than a minor harbinger of the more inclusive and political New Unionism movement to come. The Great Dock Strike of 1889, which began a stone’s throw from the match factory, is generally considered the most significant event of New Unionism. Though the matchwomen, too, were ‘unskilled’ casual workers who triumphed over a powerful employer and a year previously, historians like E. H. Hunt have declared them ‘too different’ from the dockers to have influenced them.

It is not, perhaps, surprising that the matchwomen’s contemporaries tended to undervalue the significance of the strike by ascribed it to external influence. This was a period when domestic ideology dominated and, as Anna Clark has written, ‘gender divisions hardened’. The prescriptive literature of the day presented women industrial workers as potentially immoral and lacking in proper feminine virtues.

Signs of female militancy were particularly disturbing to the establishment, and it was simply a more palatable explanation that Besant had begunthe strike. The employers were were more than willing to concur rather than admit that the workorce had genuine grievances. The Victorian press too generally supported this version of events on both sides of the political divide. The Left needed to present the matchwomen sympathetically to a wide audience.We therefore we see both the Times and Besant’s The Link presenting the matchwomen as vulnerable victims, whether of socialism or capitalism: poor ‘little matchgirls’ rather than tough ‘factory women’.

Beyond the ideology, however, there is very little evidence to support this version of events, indeed the primary evidence points to serious flaws in it.

It is clear from my research that Besant was nowhere near the factory when the strike began, and was unprepared for it. Hours after the first walkout she spoke as scheduled at a Fabian meeting on art and socialism - but no mention was made of the matchwomen. No funds had been made available to support the women or meetings prepared.

Besant did not in fact support the principle of strike action by ‘unskilled’ workers like the matchwomen, calling them ‘mobs’ that undermined the organised labour movement. It would have been surprising if she had felt differently:. both the Fabians and mostestablished union leaders believed the organisation of such a powerless group to be unfeasible and not necessarily desirable.

Even if Besant had wanted to do it, it would have been an incredible feat for one woman from a very different background, who had never actually set foot in a match manufactory, to convince 1400 others to strike.

We must then consider why historians continue to accept the myth of her leadership, and all that it implies about the matchwomen themselves (still, incidentally, called ‘matchgirls’ by most, although we know that the women were of varying ages, and some wives and mothers), despite the advances of working-class and gender history.

I believe that one explanation may lie in the very trajectories of those histories.

The feminist and socialist historians who might have rescued the matchwomen from posterity’s ‘enormous condescension’, were in fact subject to some condescension themselves, and accordingly wary of giving further attention to so clichéd and apparently over-inflated an example of women’s action. It was a case, as Anna Davin has put it, of ‘Anything but the bloody matchgirls! ’

Though the matchwomen cannot be said to have ‘hidden from history’, they may therefore have been hidden by it, the orthodox version of their story a curious survival the ‘great individuals’ school of historiography.

However, my research has shown that this version has never been given credence by the matchwomen’s own communities.

I’ve been fortunate in having met people who knew the 1888 strikers, including the small group of women who I believe were the true leaders of the strike, and now know for certain that at least one of them was adamant that she and her friends lead the strike, which primary evidence confirms was one of many.

These appear to have been strong and courageous women, fiercely loyal to their fellow workers, who needed no lessons in practical solidarity. Many were of Irish heritage, placing them within one of the most disaffected, politically active communities in London - along with many of the 1889 dock strikers.

Indeed, far from being unconnected to the dockers they were often, as one of their grandsons put it, ‘the same people - not just neighbours, the same families’.

It would be surprising if their victory had not influenced other groups of workers who were also unskilled, also casually employed, and from the same communities, and there is evidence too that dockers’ leaders never denied the importance of the matchwomen’s victory.

Forty years after the Dock Strike Ernest Bevin wrote individually to surviving strikers.

… you.. have lived and witnessed how, as a result of your banding together, this great movement has grown; how it has spread world-wide; how literally millions of your fellow-men have benefited as a result of that great effort; and how you helped to raise the status of the so-called unskilled workers of the country and make them as proud of themselves today as they were despised

I believe that we must accept that if this was true of the dockers, then equal tribute must be paid to their ‘fellow-women’, the Bryant and May matchworkers.