The Match Girl and the Heiress
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Philanthropists, local clergy, and home mission workers quickly followed suit with their own clubs for Bow’s now famous match factory girls, who apparently refused to mix with other groups of factory girls.41 Bow was already headquarters of the evangelical Regions Beyond Inland Mission with its many clubs for poor mothers, factory girls, and men; its soup kitchens, bands of hope, and medical clinics; and religious services. Its Berger Hall branch on Empsom Street, just across from R. Bell and Company and Nellie’s home on Marner Street, sent brass bands roving the streets to recruit match factory girls like Nellie for its factory girls’ club on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.42 Many other philanthropists and Christian missionaries vied with one another to entice London’s celebrated match girls to join their clubs and classes. Just to the west of the Dowells’ neighborhood, Bow Common was the center of the philanthropic-missionary outreach of the advanced wing of Wesleyan Methodism (called the Forward Movement) under the leadership of Reverend Peter Thompson, “a big burly rough man with a great voice and strong practical way of saying what he has to say.”43 One of his fellow workers, the Rector of Bromley, St. Leonard’s, Reverend Parry, was “rather a gassy man: wanting in tact and judgment,”44 who ran a well-subscribed club for match girls on Albert Terrace.45 This small side street off the south side of Bow Road was also the location of the “junior girls’ club,” where Muriel volunteered her time.46 Perhaps this club, or one of its successors, was Muriel’s first philanthropic destination in East London.
Appalled by Bryant and May’s cruelty and the roughness of the match girls, Viscountess Clifden and a glittering cast of titled “ladies,” including Princess Mary Adelaide, opened Clifden House Institute in the summer of 1890 in three attached cottages directly across from the Fairfield works.47 (See fig. 2.5.) The institute allied itself with the Young Women’s Christian Association Factory Helpers’ Union, whose wealthy “lady” helpers claimed to stand between factory girls and “the many hundred difficulties and dangers to which they are exposed.”48 In marked contrast to Besant’s Theosophical match girls’ club, Clifden House was unabashedly the product of old-fashioned noblesse oblige. Its girls were expected to—and apparently did—play the part of deferential objects of benevolence. Its minute book abounds with motions of collective gratitude to various aristocratic ladies who had welcomed the “girls” to their country estates and provided them with meals and warm coats, tea and buns. On Boxing Day 1897, thirty club members played games and feasted on geese sent by Bryant and May for their delectation; meanwhile, the lady managers approvingly noted a “decided improvement in the behaviour of the girls,” who were “quieter and less selfish.”49
At its founding, Bryant and May viewed the Clifden Institute with “indifference, if not with hostility,” according to its lady superintendent Miss Nash, who struck Booth’s interviewer as not quite a “lady” herself but drawn from the “class from whom come matrons and housekeepers.” The girls, for their part, could not say a “good word” about their employers. They had been “a terribly rough lot,” Nash informed Charles Booth’s interviewer in May 1897. “Decent people scarcely dared to go down the street when they were coming out of work.” All that had changed. Club membership apparently had softened and refined the girls and heightened their appreciation for their employers. “The girls have become tractable, decent, and quiet in their dress and behavior,” Nash noted with satisfaction at her own civilizing influence; “their relations with the firm are excellent and the firm recognizes that the influence of the girls who attend the Institute, from 300 to 400 in number, has permeated throughout the whole of their female employés [sic].”50 Private benevolence had achieved what the firm’s harsh shop floor discipline could not. Miss Nash had made Bryant and May’s fiery match girls into docile model workers. Nash’s assessment of the Bryant and May match girls suggests that their grassroots radicalism in 1888 had long since dissipated by 1897. It also provides a sobering—and far from heroic—denouement to the Match Girls’ Strike notably absent from feminist and labor histories.
2.5. By the 1890s, Bryant and May heavily subsidized Clifden House, a bastion of old-fashioned noblesse oblige charity intended to provide rational recreation and moral uplift for match factory girls. “Clifden House,” The Sunday at Home (1895), 391.
The differences between Besant’s theosophical club in Bow Lodge and the paternalist Clifden Institute are less striking, however, than the similarities of their services and their underlying assumptions about match girls’ “nature.” Both offered well-cooked, inexpensive mid-day meals; a library; reading rooms; magic lantern shows and pianos for entertainment and elevation; and excursions to the countryside. Both emphasized match girls’ exclusion from and need for the civilizing influence of home. Besant’s Bow Lodge may have been founded on radically democratic principles, but there were as many household servants as match girls living there at the time of the 1891 census.51
Nash’s and Besant’s claim that “match girls” had been left outside the civilizing influence of the home became a commonplace by the 1890s. In 1894, the magistrate Montagu Williams published a compassionately critical portrait of the match girls who came before his bench. Williams’s description echoed Besant’s and encapsulates the post–strike fascination with match girls as convenient archetypes of that exotic species beloved of social commentators: “the factory girl.” “Detached from their families” and “not the very best of girls,” the girls were, he observed, prone to drunkenness, petty thievery, and had “very lax” ideas about law and order. He attributed their misbehavior to their “squalid and wretched homes” while celebrating their “exuberancy of spirits,” kindness, and remarkable solidarity to their “sisters” in times of need. Their inaptitude for domestic tasks such as washing clothes and cooking dinner was matched by their delight in bright colors, large hats, feathers, high-heeled boots, and fringe.52 (See fig. 2.6.)53
2.6
Many observers, including Gilbert Bartholomew, the managing director of Bryant and May, insisted that the girls’ love of pleasure compromised labor discipline and time management. They simply stopped working when they had earned enough to pay for a good meal and a penny gaff.54 The social statistician Clara Collet, no apologist for capitalism, could not conceal her annoyance with the girls’ irregular habits.55 In letters she wrote to Bartholomew in February 1889, she sought his help as she researched her study of working women in East London. Any reliable account of the “industrial conditions of the matchgirls” must refer to Bryant and May, she acknowledged. She assured Bartholomew that Bryant and May was neither worse nor better than “nine tenths” of the firms she had studied and described the “matchgirls” as “unskilled and difficult to manage.”56 In her published essay, Collet suggested that match girls’ low wages, so widely condemned in the press, resulted from high levels of absenteeism. Girls got paid very little because they frequently skipped work. Collet blamed the girls’ home life and prevailing norms in East London for encouraging the gratification of immediate pleasures at the expense of thrift.57
The emerging post-strike consensus about match girls coalesced around a more or less shared set of images and arguments positioning them as embodiments of social problems and promising “raw material.”58 On the one hand, match girls as a class remained “very rough, very wild, very dirty, but not by any means the worst class of factory girls.”59 Distinctly “city girls,” their irregularity and restless pursuit of pleasure were symptoms of the deeper psychological disturbances of urban modernity with its “rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves.”60 On the other hand, their keen sense of solidarity with one another and high spirits had also made them notably susceptible to philanthropic uplift. Besant and Bartholomew may have been the bitterest antagonists during the strike, but in its aftermath they agreed that match girls lacked adequate home lives. The strike alleviated some of the most egregious abuses at Bryant and May and redressed grievances about wages and work conditions. However, the rhetoric surrounding the �
�match girls” and their strike reinforced late-Victorian reformers’ and domestic missionaries’ self-serving diagnosis of and proposed solution to the girls’ afflictions. At once helpless and ferociously independent, match girls urgently needed the uplifting culture on offer at clubs, home missions, and settlement houses. Only the guidance and friendship of middle-class women, beckoned from their comfortable homes to journey into the slums to serve their outcast sisters, could lead match girls to domestic happiness. This was a path that Nellie and Muriel were only too happy to follow.
MATCH GIRLS’ MILITANT: WHY THE BELL’S MATCH FACTORY STRIKE OF 1893/94 FAILED
Nellie’s employers R. Bell and Company had good reason to congratulate themselves for escaping the public humiliation endured by their rival, Bryant and May. Employing approximately six hundred workers in Wandsworth and Bromley-by-Bow, R. Bell’s owners took pride in their purpose-built factory with its well-ventilated rooftop shed for phosphorous dipping and drying, which inspectors praised for reducing the incidence of necrosis. Nellie and the other box fillers toiled on the second floor.61 Bell’s employees enjoyed a separate well-lit and airy refectory, a further boon to their safety. A writer for the Sunday Magazine in 1892 graphically conjured the “incalculable sufferings” of East London’s “white slave” match girls while praising R. Bell and Company for its humane protection of its employees from “matchmakers’ leprosy.”62
However, by the summer of 1893, gratitude was in short supply among R. Bell’s workers, at least among the 150 who had joined the Matchmakers Union, led by Herbert Burrows.63 The firm’s managing director, Charles R. E. Bell, introduced a larger frame with more matches per row without correspondingly increasing wages. Workers retaliated by sending off empty boxes—sometimes as many as six out of a dozen—for overseas sale.64 “We are compelled by the severe competition in the trade,” Bell explained to Burrows, “to do as our neighbours [Bryant and May] do or we should be shut out of the market.” “Is it reasonable to ask us to pay more [wages]” than “our competitors?”65 The union argued that R. Bell expected its girls to do more work for the same pay. Nor was this its only grievance. R. Bell required the girls to pay for their own medical care and “sweepers” to clean up after them; it illegally compelled them to purchase work materials from their forewoman at inflated prices. Bell’s match girls faced excessive fines for petty shop floor offenses and matches that unavoidably caught fire while the girls were working.66
Simmering resentments boiled over into a protracted and sometimes violent industrial conflict between R. Bell and Company and its employees in the Matchmakers Union from 1893 until the late summer of 1894. In July 1893, two hundred men and girls hooted, yelled, and “molested” one of the firm’s partners, Edwin Bell, as he left the factory—under police escort—en route to Bromley Station.67 Negotiations between the union and R. Bell remained at an impasse until New Year’s Day 1894 when the firm unexpectedly locked the girls out in an attempt to embarrass the union and force them to accept its terms. Members of the Matchmakers’ Union Committee asked Charles Bell when they could return to work and he mockingly replied that as Union Committee members “they ought to know.” In a transparent attempt to undermine the girls’ loyalty to union leadership, Bell disingenuously insisted that their return to work was entirely in the union officers’ hands.68 Local police constables patrolled the intersection of St. Leonard’s Street and Bell Road, just north of the Limehouse Cut, leading to the factory’s front gates to prevent the factory women from picketing in protest.
The use of police to support industrial capitalists in a labor dispute excited angry comments from MPs when Parliament convened in February. In the years between the Bryant and May strike in 1888 and the Bell’s strike of 1894, Parliament had grown more hospitable to the interests of working men and women. Labor leaders with deep roots in East London, Keir Hardie and John Burns, entered Parliament in 1892 and spoke not just for workers but as workers. An advanced Liberal MP who worked closely with his trade union colleagues, J. A. Murray Macdonald represented Bow and Bromley. He rejected the state’s constabulary role as defender of industrial capitalists’ interests against workers.69 He questioned Home Secretary H. H. Asquith why Bell’s match girls “proceeding peaceably to work,” without intention to strike, had been met by police. Making clear his own objections to such intimidation, Macdonald demanded to know if police were to be used in this way at the “instance of private employers?”70 Eager to enlist Asquith as an ally, Macdonald brought a deputation of Bell’s match girls to meet the home secretary and put their case before him.71
Three months later, none of the issues dividing R. Bell and its workers had been resolved. R. Bell rebuffed the union’s offers to enter into voluntary arbitration. In a gesture calculated to provoke the union, R. Bell dismissed a leading Union Committee member. In solidarity, approximately 150 girls and women promptly went on strike on March 1. Sources offer no clues about the other 450 workers at Bell’s; nor is it clear that the strike necessarily closed down production. What is certain is that the union’s leaders were once again caught off guard and could not maintain order among the strikers.72
The exemplary self-control of the Bryant and May match girls in the face of their hardships had won the public’s admiration and lubricated the free flow of contributions to their strike funds. Bell’s girls exhibited a great deal more fight and much less discipline. Ellen Conway, one of the strikers, spitefully hurled a rock through the front window of a house inhabited by Bell’s forewoman, Kate Hubbard.73
Shop floor relations between forewomen and match girls constituted the strike’s frontline, where abstract issues about the rights and wrongs of labor and capital turned into small acts of resistance such as lingering in the lavatory and small acts of discipline such as locking its door at the day’s end. No social distance separated forewomen like Hubbard from those she supervised. Only a few years earlier, she herself had been a factory hand, packing fusées, a kind of friction match. Hubbard lived not far from the factory in South Bromley along with several other match factory hands. Sharing the same spaces—streets, pubs, music halls—only made it harder to negotiate the gulf in authority dividing forewomen from match girls within the factory. By hurling a rock through Hubbard’s window, Conway expanded the arena of conflict into the neighboring streets. Her gesture violently and literally brought the strike into Hubbard’s home.
Arrested, held in Holloway Prison, then hauled before the Thames Police Court, Conway denied breaking the window, but the magistrate, Mr. Mead, sentenced her to one month’s hard labor for destroying property valued at only one shilling, six pence. Mead justified the extraordinary severity of the sentence by linking the crime to the strike.74 The union immediately organized the Ellen Conway Defence Fund to cover the costs of appealing the decision to the sessional court, which came before Sir Peter Edlin. Edlin was no friend of organized labor. Only a few years earlier the Holborn Liberal and Radical Association had complained to the London County Council about his unfair sentences in labor disputes and asked for his removal.75 Even Edlin was appalled by the grotesque disproportion between Conway’s crime and her punishment. Conway was, he noted, a “young woman of good character … led away by excitement.” With considerable understatement, he acknowledged that in halving her sentence to fourteen days’ imprisonment, he had “not erred on the side of clemency.”76 Such was the justice meted out to unruly Bell’s match girls.
Conway was not the only Bell’s match girl of heretofore good character compelled to stand before Mr. Mead and Sir Peter Edlin that spring. The Pall Mall Gazette reported on April 10, 1894 that Union Committee member Amelia Gifford (age nineteen) was charged with assaulting two hands recently hired as strike replacements. A month later, Sir Peter Edlin sentenced her to twenty-one days in jail for assaulting a Bell’s forewoman, Lily Gardner.77 Margaret McCarthy (age twenty-five) and Annie Sheehan (twenty-three), like Conway, were the daughters of Irish immigrants. Gossip must have been thick in their�
�and Nellie’s—South Bromley neighborhood not far from the factory as the match girls awaited news about the strike. From the strike’s onset in early March until its tepid conclusion in August, R. Bell’s directors refused to engage in discussions with the union and demanded total capitulation on their terms. In March, the firm advertised for new hands to replace those on strike. Apparently, McCarthy and Sheehan learned that Emily Cakebread, an unemployed young woman, had responded to R. Bell’s advertisement and was offered work there. As Cakebread strolled along the towpath on the south side of the Limehouse Cut—the canal connecting the Thames with Bow Creek and the River Lea—toward the Three Mills Bridge and Bell’s factory gates, McCarthy and Sheehan accosted her. “You are not going to Bell’s this morning, so go back,” they taunted. One of her assailants—dressed in a black crepe hat, striped shawl and white apron—threatened to toss Cakebread into the Cut if she persisted. Cakebread fled to the nearest police officer, who escorted her to work. This was only the first of Cakebread’s terrifying encounters with wrathful strikers who stalked her after work. Cakebread required police protection to get home safely each night.78
The Bell’s strike was a disaster for the Matchmakers Union despite Burrows’ best efforts to recycle many of the techniques that had worked so well against Bryant and May in 1888. Perhaps that was the problem. What was novel in 1888 seemed distinctly dated in 1894. Burrows once again took aim at clerical stockholders and held them accountable for the match girls’ unchristian sufferings. He renewed his call to the benevolent public to engage in a consumer boycott of Bell’s products. He detailed the expenses involved in paying the strikers six shillings each week and solicited funds to replenish the union’s empty coffers.79 But the public remained mostly indifferent. The radical and progressive press covered the strike—Reynolds, the London Dispatch, Pall Mall Gazette—but nothing about it appeared in many leading papers such as the Times or the Daily News.