by Seth Koven
Such searches indicate an exceptionally high level of mutual distrust and animosity between R. Bell and its workers. The total retail value of the boxes was four pence. Mr. Mead, a veteran of many previous cases involving Bell’s match girls, sentenced them to seven days in prison for their crime. “Lucifer” editorialized that “it will be a bad day for this colony when our [New Zealand] girls have to submit to such degradation.” The Star added its own judgment. It insisted that Charles Bell explain his company’s actions to New Zealand’s minister of labour and warned the government not to help “perpetuate, on New Zealand soil, the cruelty exhibited in these London prosecutions.”103 News about R. Bell and Company flowed freely between New Zealand and Britain though print and human networks—its impact magnified rather than diminished as it traveled across the vast distance.
The Star’s deftly delivered admonition to R. Bell and the government exposed Seddon’s calculated political gamble in offering his patronage to the wax vesta manufacturer. As Seddon’s biographer James Drummond explained shortly after the minister’s unexpected death in 1906, the colony had always “been of an experimental turn of mind” in measures to protect the conditions of daily work for its citizens. “Those who left the Old Country to build up a new nation in the furthermost ends of the earth brought with them new ideas and new conditions,” Drummond opined, “and they frankly expressed a hope that the bad features of life in the country they were leaving would not be perpetuated.”104 Was R. Bell and Company a welcome example of New Zealand’s modernity, the diversification of its economy, and growing self-sufficiency in meeting demand for manufactured goods? Or had Seddon unwittingly smuggled into New Zealand the worst labor practices that the old world had to offer? What—or whom—had Seddon protected through his protective trade tariffs? These were only some of the questions to which New Zealanders demanded answers in the spring of 1900 when they learned that R. Bell and Company had decided to send a group of London match girls to work in its Wellington factory. Nellie Dowell was one of them.
Before examining the London match girls’ part in these larger political, social, and economic debates, it is worth pausing to consider why Nellie accepted R. Bell’s invitation to go to New Zealand. It was a momentous decision and one out of character with the intensely parochial nature of her life. Since her involuntary removal from Bromley-by-Bow to Forest Gate School in 1883 and her return five years later, she had moved several times, but always within a fairly short distance from R. Bell and Company. Most of her relatives also lived nearby in their south Bromley neighborhood of Bromley-by-Bow. Nellie’s maternal uncle David Sloan, an engine driver, lived around the corner on Empson Street in a complicated ménage with his four sons and a female cousin who had given birth to two of his boys.105 In the 1880s, Aunt Carrie, a fancy-blouse maker for a well-known West End shop, and her mother, Granny Sloan, had moved five miles north to Islington; but by 1901, they had long since rejoined the family, just south of the Limehouse Cut on Brunswick Road, a major north-south artery leading to the docks. Nellie’s sisters Florence and Rose married East Londoners and raised their families in Bromley-by-Bow. Rose married Harry Endersbee, a boot finisher. The newlyweds lived at number two Marner Street, just two doors from Harry’s parents, on the same street where both Harry and Rose had grown up as children. Harry’s sister, Elizabeth, was Nellie’s same age and worked as a match factory girl.106 Florence married William Dellar, a steel filer. The Dellars moved in with Harriet Dowell at 93 Marner Street and thus relieved Nellie of the responsibility of living with her mother. These household arrangements made it possible for Nellie to leave Bromley-by-Bow for New Zealand in April 1900. All of this underscores just how deeply rooted the Dowell family was in Bromley-by-Bow. They looked for and found spouses within their neighborhood, which in turn bound them ever more closely to a dense network of locally based kin.
The Dowells, like many other families in Bromley-by-Bow, had extensive networks of kin living close to one another. Residents possessed a keen sense of neighborhood territoriality often defined by physical landmarks such as major thoroughfares, train tracks, and canals.107 Nellie’s south Bromley neighborhood was bordered by Devons Road to the west, Bow Road to the north, St. Leonard’s to the east, and the Limehouse Cut to the south. Nellie never had to walk much more than fifteen minutes to get to work or to visit members of her extended family. Even a trip to the Epping Forest, the vast expanse of open space and parkland near the Lesters’ Essex home, was a costly outing to be savored and remembered. Philanthropic organizations attracted and maintained members by offering them such excursions on an annual basis. Nellie may well have not left Greater London since her short time in Leighton Buzzard as a Poor Law ward in 1883. In going to New Zealand, she grasped an opportunity to drastically expand her horizons.108
The Dowells’ social and cultural world may have been narrowly circumscribed, but at the same time people and goods from around the globe constantly passed through Bromley-by-Bow. Its proximity to the docks along the Thames and Lea rivers made it a favored home for immigrants, mariners, and dock workers, as well as large-scale industries that relied on easy access to seaborne products such as the pine logs used to make wooden match splints. While almost no immigrants lived in Nellie’s immediate south Bromley neighborhood, she worked side by side with the daughters of Irish immigrants who figured prominently in both the Bryant and May and R. Bell strikes.109 Nor were the Irish the only outsiders infiltrating the surrounding neighborhoods. By the 1890s at least some Jews had drifted eastward from Whitechapel to Bow Road between Mile End Station and Bow Station. The London docks to the south and east of Nellie were home to a small population of colored people: “Lascars,” Africans, and Chinese.110 Nellie then lived in a community that was at once narrowly parochial and integrated into a dynamic global economy, Cockney and yet in some surprising ways also cosmopolitan. Nellie came to embody many of these same qualities by the time she met Muriel.
Twenty-three and unmarried, Nellie embarked from the Royal Albert Docks for Wellington on the Waiwera, a 6200-ton cargo ship. (See fig. 2.8.) The voyage stretched from April 11 until June 4, with stops in Cape Town and Hobart. All 141 passengers traveled third class except the imperial soldier and veteran of the Maori Wars, Sir George Whitmore, and one other saloon passenger. They were overwhelmingly young, single, and English; men outnumbered women two to one. Most of the passengers on board the Waiwera were “unskilled” workers: laborers, factory hands, box makers, and tailors with a smattering of clerks, butchers, and cabinet makers. Nellie was the oldest of the dozen Bell’s match girls at twenty-three; the youngest, Elizabeth Barry, was seventeen.
The dysgenic outflow of healthy English working girls like Nellie and the inflow of undesirable immigrants like Jews infuriated anti-alien xenophobes at the turn of the century.111 The handful of Jews, Scots, and Irish onboard the Waiwera all disembarked in Cape Town. This must have pleased officials in New Zealand who had begun in earnest to regulate who was—and who was not—welcome to settle their island nation. In 1881, 1888, and 1899, New Zealand passed legislation designed to keep out the “yellow peril” of Chinese labor. The 1881 act established a ratio of one Chinese for every ten tons of cargo, later increased to one per one hundred tons; the 1899 act demanded exorbitant payments of a hundred-pound poll tax for each non-British immigrant.112 Either the acts were extraordinarily effective or the legislature’s response wildly disproportionate to the “yellow” peril, because in 1901, there were less than three thousand Chinese in a total population of just over 800,000. Among European settlers, the original imbalance between the sexes had moved closer to parity (405,000 men and 366,000 women), but young, white, single women like Nellie remained desirable immigrants.113 In the vast global flow of people within the British empire at the dawn of the new century, Nellie and the other Bell’s match girls were among the most fortunate. They came to New Zealand seeking a better life: higher wages, cleaner and newer accommodations, and fun.
2.8. New Ze
alanders and Britons alike celebrated the departure of troops aboard the Waiwera from Wellington to fight in South Africa in December 1899 as evidence of increasing closeness between the two nations. A few months later, this same ship carried Nellie to Wellington. Waiwera, Illustrated London News, December 9, 1899, 837.
According to Muriel, Nellie went to an unspecified location in New Zealand for a short time (in the first typescript version of “From Birth to Death” she has crossed out “six months”) on something of a lark in search of new experiences. “Everyone agreed that the sea voyage and the fine air would ‘suit the littl’un a treat’ and a very happy Nellie set out for the Antipodes.” Muriel characterized Nellie’s job variously as teaching “the girls there how to make matches” or “how to work the machines in a new factory that was just opened.” The girls “proved such effective teachers,” Muriel breezily explained, “that their job was soon done and they were recalled to Bow to find themselves in a delightful situation.” “How Nell loved telling of the joys of that free life, the friendships and the fun….”114 Muriel’s account of Nell’s carefree gambols in New Zealand is more than a little rose-tinted, no doubt reflecting how Nellie chose to remember it.
Nellie did go to New Zealand to work in its match industry, but almost all the other facts are not quite right. She lived in Wellington, New Zealand, for over three years, not six months, from early June 1900 through the summer of 1903. Wellington municipal records corroborate the arrival of new machines and R. Bell’s applications for building permits to accommodate them between 1895 and 1903. However, Nellie was not sent there to instruct anyone in their use. The factory had been open for five years and many “colonial” girls had worked there for several years before Nellie’s arrival. They were old hands, not untrained workers. Bell’s New Zealand match girls certainly did not view Nellie as an “effective teacher.” She arrived as part of R. Bell’s response to ongoing problems with the recruitment, compensation, and disciplining of its female workforce in New Zealand. As Robert “Bob” McKenzie, the leader of the Wellington Match Factory Union, declared, “but for this dispute [between the colonial match girls and R. Bell] the London girls would never have been here.”115 It was “moonshine” to pretend that R. Bell could not find plenty of New Zealand girls to fill its jobs, if only the company treated its workers fairly.116 I have no reason to believe that Nellie knew anything about these problems when she left London. However, by the time she and the other London girls reported to work the day after their landing, they discovered that they had been newsworthy—and part of the labor dispute—from the moment they had stepped aboard the Waiwera.
Rumors that R. Bell intended to “import” girls from its London match factory provoked the ire of Seddon’s parliamentary opponents, both within and outside the Liberal Party. Nor did they please Seddon himself. If the purpose of protecting the match industry was to provide jobs for New Zealand girls, then why had R. Bell sent over “slum girls” from London, questioned one MP. Seddon’s critics noted that R. Bell and Company had been the only new industry established in New Zealand during the first six years of the Liberal ministry. The cost had been enormous: over 16,000 pounds in tariff revenues had been lost each year while the entire wage packet for those employed in Wellington amounted to less than 5,000 pounds. Protecting R. Bell had cost New Zealanders at least 10,000 pounds per year.117 Throughout the rancorous debates about the revised tariff schedule raging from June to September 1900, many fumed that it would have been vastly cheaper and more efficient to give each of Bell’s workers a one-pound-per-week pension and allow them to do nothing.118 Such a solution had an added advantage for New Zealanders. They could then enjoy the benefits of duty-free, higher quality imported matches.
The London girls’ arrival not only exposed Bell’s match girls to critical scrutiny, but opened the floodgates of consumer grumbling about Bell’s New Zealand–made matches. Some complained that the heads of the matches broke off when struck and were “apt to light in the eye of the user.”119 One MP, David Buddo, demonstrated the superiority of Bryant and May’s imports compared to Bell’s New Zealand–made product. He brought with him boxes of each and counted what was inside them. The Bell’s box contained 134 vestas, 16 fewer than advertised; the Bryant and May’s contained precisely 150. Did this deficit reflect the lack of skill of box fillers at R. Bell’s? Or was it indicative of worker resistance to labor discipline, a veiled form of protest reminiscent of the empty boxes packed and sent abroad for export by London girls in 1893–94? Buddo concluded his tirade by pointing out that “however much we may desire protection for healthy industries that pay good wages to workers … matchmaking is not a healthy occupation, and the wages earned are very low.”120
It was hard to dispute that the “colonial” girls’ earnings of fourteen to eighteen shillings per week fell short of a “living wage” (approximately one pound per week for a single woman) and were unworthy of heavy state subsidies through tariff protection. Some members of Parliament insinuated that the Wellington match factory not only endangered workers’ health but degraded their morals as well.121 Revelations that Bryant and May (and specifically Gilbert Bartholomew) had deliberately violated factory regulations and concealed horrendous cases of necrosis fanned the flames of discontent against R. Bell’s New Zealand operations.122 Such shocking behavior incited the “extreme indignation” of a contributor to the New Zealand Journal of the Department of Labour. “Here is matter for reflection for the purchaser of the popular wax matches,” the author concluded, “these can be made only at the cost of human agony and death.” Written for a publication sponsored by Seddon’s own ministry, the article unambiguously condemned the manufacture of matches that Seddon himself had done so much to foster.123 Critics of Seddon’s special relationship with R. Bell and Company crossed party lines.
The Wellington Match Factory Employees’ Industrial Union of Workers proved even less easy to placate than members of Parliament. Registered as an official union in April 1900, it filed a “reference” against R. Bell with the Conciliation Commission on June 5, 1900, Nellie’s first working day in Wellington.124 During the 1894 strike in London, R. Bell ignored the union’s pleas to enter into nonbinding arbitration to settle its grievances. In New Zealand, workers enjoyed vastly more and better protections. The 1894 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act required employers and workers to resolve their differences first through “Councils of conciliation.”125 If this failed to satisfy both parties, they then stood before a Court of Arbitration, whose judgments were legally binding. This compulsory process of resolving labor disputes was a cornerstone of the Liberal ministry’s legislative agenda of social and economic reform. The brainchild of the Liberal minister of labour, William Pember Reeves, the act granted legal standing to trade unions to represent workers’ interests as elected members of conciliation boards. These boards also included representatives elected by employers’ associations. A Supreme Court judge headed each Court of Arbitration along with two assessors, one representing employers and the other workers. New Zealand trade unionists were indispensable partners in bringing together labor and capital, not dangerous troublemakers castigated by the mainstream press in London. This system was designed to ensure industrial peace among the factory population of about 30,000 out of a white population of around 715,000 in 1894.126
Several issues divided the Wellington Union and R. Bell—and all of them came to swirl around the arrival of Nellie and her London workmates. Troubles had begun during Christmas 1899, when R. Bell switched how it compensated box fillers. Instead of paying them by the number of frames they emptied, they were paid by the gross of boxes they filled.127 The Wellington match girls reported that the foreman, George W. Lacey, used intimidation to discourage them from joining the union. He and forewoman Ada Fulton kept close control over the key to the lavatory and locked it at 4:30 p.m. to prevent girls from wasting time at the end of the workday. Girls who arrived late were locked out and lost an entire day’s wage
s. They had to scrub down their own benches and floor space—tasks for which they received no pay. They could not live “respectably” on their wages. Finally, the union argued that R. Bell ought to show “preference” in hiring union members over nonunion workers. Importing the London girls demonstrated R. Bell’s determination to circumvent preferential hiring.
R. Bell and Company had its own litany of complaints about the indiscipline of the “colonial girls”: they came late, left early, and rarely labored a full week. Insolent and ill mannered, they worked slowly and inaccurately. Corporate coercion went hand in hand with worker resistance. The factory manager Walter McLay, who represented the firm during the first round of conciliation hearings, was a veteran of the 1893–94 strike in London. He vigorously asserted R. Bell’s right to import London girls and hire nonunion workers on grounds of “freedom of contract.”128 Here was not only a dispute over work discipline, but fundamental principles about the relationship between labor, capital, and the state.
In the eyes of union leadership, the London match girls had been shipped over to show up the New Zealand girls and weaken the union. It was no accident that all the London girls including Nellie were expert box fillers—precisely the department heretofore most heavily unionized.129 While New Zealand workers complained that they could not earn a living wage at R. Bell, the London girls had been lured to New Zealand by the prospect of better pay. Charles Bell had emphasized the wage advantage enjoyed by his entire New Zealand workforce. “The girls employed in the Wellington factory were infinitely better off than they were at Home, to the extent of perhaps 50 or 60 percent,” Bell had bragged at the factory’s opening.130 This advantage was accentuated by the virtuosic speed at which the London girls performed their tasks. One of Nellie’s London workmates earned as much as forty-eight shillings in a single week. R. Bell fired girls at its London factory who did not work quickly and efficiently, a London girl explained to the Conciliation Board during her testimony before it. Such words could not have been welcome to the several dozen trade union members listening to and participating in the proceedings.
