by Seth Koven
The wages of the “exceptionally smart” “energetic and willing” London girls remained newsworthy six years later. In July 1906, one newspaper reported that one of the “London girls” earned forty-one shillings, six pence in a week compared to her “top wages” in London of about “18s for longer hours.”131 In a colonial setting in which a high percentage of white settlers in Wellington (around thirty percent in 1901) were themselves immigrants from Britain or Australia, it is notable that the London match girls continued to be identified as outsiders.132 They remained “London” girls. R. Bell lost no time in declaring that the “Wellington girls” had only themselves to blame for earning far less than Nellie and the rest of her London mates.
The London girls surely did not endear themselves to their fellow workers by living in a lodging house run (but not owned) by R. Bell’s unpopular foreman, George Lacey, not far from the factory.133 The boardinghouse was, Lacey explained, a private “speculation.” The president of the union contended that the London girls “had it drummed into them all the time that they were against the Union” and had been rewarded with the best and most lucrative jobs.134 Coming from so far and without friends or family in Wellington, the London girls may well have been pleased and relieved to have a safe, respectable place to live together. In any case, they were in no position to refuse Lacey. In “From Birth to Death” Muriel offers Nellie’s perspective that “every arrangement for their comfort had been made by the manager of the New Zealand firm.” He provided them with board and lodging for ten shillings per week—a bit more than some colonial girls paid but within the range of prevailing rates for Wellington.135 This left Nellie plenty of money to send home to her mother and to spend on clothing and entertainment. It also meant that Nellie was rarely far from the watchful eye of her foreman who was also her landlord.
In mid-July, the arbitration court handed the Union a complete victory. It mandated substantial increases in pay for each type of work performed in the box-filling and box-making departments; it affirmed the principle of preferential hiring of union members while insisting that all workers be treated equally. The decision did not in fact put an end to the controversies surrounding the arrival of the London match girls. Unable to keep up with demand, R. Bell had imported a large number of matchboxes from its London factory stamped with the misleading label “New Zealand.” The commissioner of trade and customs ordered the forfeiture of nearly four hundred cases of these matches, worth over one thousand pounds, on the grounds that the boxes deceived consumers into believing that the London matches had been made in New Zealand.136
Seddon, weary of defending R. Bell’s business practices, decided to cut his own political losses. He reluctantly accepted that supporting R. Bell and Company was not the best way to demonstrate his increasingly fervent desire to draw “closer the bonds of union” with Britain.137 He publicly withdrew support for the firm in mid-July 1900 during a parliamentary debate over the London match girls’ arrival. “It was true,” he confessed, “that Messrs. Bell and Co were getting labour from the old country” and had imported deceptively marked matchboxes. Given the unhappy conditions prevailing in the factory, he did not wonder that “colonial girls” preferred not to work there. Seddon acknowledged that R. Bell had “not kept faith” with the government.138 He could no longer justify “protecting” a New Zealand match industry that hired “London girls” and imported “London matches.” With obvious sarcasm and anger, he observed that the cost of subsidizing the industry had been so great and the benefits so few that it would have been cheaper to provide free matches for the entire colony than continue to support R. Bell. He indicated that he would soon announce a tariff schedule withdrawing protection from the match industry.139 In the ensuing high-stakes political game of cat and mouse, R. Bell promptly laid off seventy “colonial girl” workers in Wellington in response to the new tariff schedule; others shrieked that the government’s sudden reversal of trade policy would scare off much needed capital investors from abroad. In the end, Seddon compromised and reduced protections and R. Bell rehired its workers.
The proprietors of R. Bell and Company had embarrassed their most powerful supporters in the Liberal ministry and infuriated their “colonial girl” employees by seeking to use techniques of labor discipline and factory management out of harmony with ideas prevailing in New Zealand about employers’ obligations to their workers. Shop floor bullying and surveillance so effective in Bromley-by-Bow simply did not work in Wellington.
Global capitalism connected people, goods, and services in London and Wellington, but local conditions and national political cultures produced drastically different outcomes for factory workers in the two cities. (See fig. 2.9.) Young women in Wellington refused to accept labor conditions and low pay that many of their London counterparts eagerly sought. In London, match girls faced draconian sentences for minor offenses; in New Zealand, the state supported them wholeheartedly. Ironically, R. Bell’s defeat in the arbitration court saved the firm from its own worst inclinations by mandating conditions that made it possible to recruit at least some “colonial girls.” Nellie and the London girls had been central figures in each of these disputes. Obscure East London factory workers in Bromley-by-Bow, they enjoyed the notoriety of countless newspaper articles about them and major policy debates about the implications of their arrival for New Zealand’s global trade policies and its relationship to overseas capital investment.
2.9. These two carefully staged photographs of industrial labor on R. Bell’s shop floors in London (1901) and Wellington (1906) depict matchbox fillers like Nellie in a modern, clean, and safe work environment that belied the occupational health hazards still posed by phosphorous. (Top) R. Bell and Co. London, c. 1901, from G. R. Sims, ed., Living London, Its Work and Its Pay, Its Humour and Its Pathos, Its Sight and Its Scenes, vol. 2 (London, 1901), 330. (Bottom) “People at Work in the R Bell & Co Match Factory, Wellington. New Zealand.” Department of Labour: Photograph albums for the International Exhibition, Christchurch, 1906–7. Ref: PA1-o-367–36. (Courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.)
It is fair to say that Nellie had received a remarkable if unintended education in the political economy of late-industrial global capitalism as a Cockney subaltern in East London and New Zealand. Too young to grasp the lessons of the Bryant and May strike of 1888, she was already an adult during the Bell’s strike of 1893–94. Smart, hardworking, and reliable, Nellie almost certainly did not join the union but chose to stick to doing her job well. Schooled in the hostile work environment of East London, a place where those who could not support themselves ended up in Poor Law institutions far from kith and kin, Nellie placed her own and her family’s financial security above the claims of solidarity with fellow workers. However, she had no choice but to absorb and think about the issues, large and small, driving the Bell’s strike of 1893–94. In New Zealand, she and the eleven other London girls were themselves a key point of contention in these conflicts. MPs’ angry rhetoric and journalists’ arch commentaries focused on trade policy, relations between labor and capital, and New Zealand national pride. For her part, Nellie had to live with her unwonted celebrity each day she came to work. She worked side by side with “colonial” girls who, unlike Nellie, refused to tolerate R. Bell’s managerial practices. It is hard to imagine that these colonial girls offered much of a welcome to Nellie and her London mates.
In spite of her longing for respectability, Nellie had a knack for becoming a “problem” at the heart of major debates in England and New Zealand. Her father’s death had made her into a “Poor Law half-orphan” at the metropolis’s most notoriously impersonal “barrack” school, which became a lightning rod for national debates about orphans and foster care, working-class family life and education, and the proper role of the British state. Her entry into the wax vesta and lucifer match industry had turned her into a poor little match girl and slum factory worker at the precise moment when the industry became a flashpoin
t for women’s trade union and political activism in East London. In New Zealand, she and her London workmates came to signify the bad faith of R. Bell, the political miscalculations of the Premier, and the manifold sins of the Old World visiting themselves upon the New.
These microdramas between labor and capital at the Newtown factory paled in significance next to the seismic shifts in the global match industry a few months later. The year 1901 was a momentous and portentous one in the British match industry. Liverpool’s Diamond Match Company gained a controlling interest in Bryant and May in a complex deal guaranteeing Bryant and May’s shareholders a generous fifteen percent return on their investments.140 This was not merely the triumph of an upstart Liverpool company over a long-established London giant but of American inventiveness over British obduracy and complacency. The Liverpool firm, founded in 1897, was backed and owned by the American Diamond Match Company. In 1896, American Diamond Match introduced self-acting machinery, which eliminated manual labor from the production process: match workers tended machinery rather than made matches.141 The chief function of its Liverpool firm was to introduce the American company’s patented machinery and technologies to Britain and absorb British competitors.
The amalgamation sent shock waves throughout the British business world as a sign of Britain’s irreversible economic decline stemming from its adherence to “antediluvian” industrial technologies and business practices. The president of the American Diamond Match Company did little to soften the blow. In a much-quoted speech, he crowed that his company had discarded the machinery currently used by Bryant and May more than fifteen years earlier. His company had invested more than $1,000,000 in research and technology to improve its machinery; it had spent over $250,000 in the last year alone to purchase patents on inventions to advance its productive capacity and efficiency. American business had embraced association of all kinds as a commercial principle, whereas its British counterparts had persisted in aggravating tensions between labor and capital. “You English are too conservative,” he explained, “and it is pretty hard work to change you. You Englishmen ought to remember that you cannot stop progress.” The Review of Reviews put the matter more bluntly: it was time to “Wake Up! John Bull” or face industrial obsolescence.142
At least for a few years, R. Bell and Company forestalled the inevitable and maintained its corporate independence from the encroaching monopoly capitalist behemoth, the American Diamond Match Company operating under cover of the Bryant and May name. Just as R. Bell encouraged patriotic consumption through its supposedly “New Zealand–made” matches, so too Bryant and May intensified its public relations campaign—after its acquisition by the American Diamond Match Company—to buy its products as a way to “Buy British” and support workers in the British-based match industry.143 Such campaigns could and did backfire in the increasingly globalized world not just of match production but of political debate. Rabindranath Tagore recalled his own comic attempts to produce “Indian” lucifer matches during the first stirrings of the Swadeshi campaign of 1905 to boycott all British and imperial goods and make everyday consumption a form of Indian nationalism. “The money that was spent in their making,” Tagore self-deprecatingly acknowledged, “might have served to light the family hearth for the space of the year.” It did not help that his virtuous lucifers ignited only with the help of another light.144 Unlike Tagore’s genuinely “Indian” lucifers, Bryant and May’s matches—along with the firm’s rhetoric of jingoistic consumer altruism—could not have been farther removed from the reality of its global ownership. The transformation of the global match industry at the dawn of the new century confirmed the wisdom of R. Bell’s expansion into the New Zealand market, where even a reduced protective tariff insulated it from direct competition with its vastly more heavily capitalized rivals in Britain and continental Europe.
Labor conflicts in Wellington may have closely resembled those Nellie knew only too well from her years working for R. Bell in Bromley-by-Bow, but the Empire City presented an altogether new world for her. Wellington looked nothing like East London, with its crowded streets, decaying infrastructure, ubiquitous poverty, and environmental degradation. The second most populous city in New Zealand with just under 50,000 people, it was dwarfed by turn of the century Greater London’s population which pressed beyond 6,500,000. With its steeply inclined hillsides and shimmering windswept bays and harbors, the city first expanded along the narrow strip of flat land along Oriental Bay. There was plenty of open space and undeveloped land on the outskirts and hills of turn-of-the-century Wellington. Emerging out of the long global agricultural depression, New Zealand entered a phase of increased immigration and economic growth in the early 1900s.
Nellie initially lived in Newtown, a booming suburb set on the hills south of city center. In the early 1890s, few houses hugged the main north-south roads (Adelaide and Revans-Riddiford) connecting Newtown with the city center to the north; but the extension of the tram lines rapidly accelerated suburban development. Aided by gunpowder, dynamite, and skilled excavation, some of Newtown’s rocky slopes sprouted modest but attractive cottages, many owned—not rented—by the city’s “mechanical” workers. Shops and civic institutions of all kinds from Wellington Hospital and Campbell Oriental Tea Mart to Mrs. Orchard’s plush Newtown Academy of Music and Art had followed the new residents. Newtown also welcomed industrial enterprises like R. Bell’s factory on Revans Street with its 30 foot by 100 foot curved shed and various outbuildings.145 The Cyclopedia of New Zealand proclaimed the nation’s many virtues and proudly displayed the match factory with all its employees assembled before it.146
Sometime between her arrival in June 1900 and 1902, Nellie moved out of the foreman’s boarding house along with at least one of her London match girl friends, Kate Newman, into a newly built small cottage on Charles Street. (See fig. 2.10.) Was this evidence of disaffection or simply the desire for a different and perhaps more private space? Nellie’s new home gave her distance from George Lacey, the factory, and her coworkers. Several of the London girls moved to 8a Rintoul Street, in the bustling heart of Newtown’s commercial district. Charles Street lay three quarters of a mile to the south in Berhampore, a working-class district named after the site of a British victory in India during the Seven Years’ War. Nellie and Kate lived on a quiet dead end residential block. Between 1898 and 1901, the entrepreneurial pork butcher-turned-real estate developer, Charles Swiney, carved it out of four empty lots off Herald Street and erected around a dozen small cottages.147 He rented these cottages to local workers—bricklayers, carpenters, journeymen plumbers, a smattering of clerks, and match factory girls.148 For the first few years, Wellington city officials tolerated Swiney’s self-promoting street naming for the purposes of collecting rates from him; but when they eventually gazetted the street, they refused to humor him any further. They changed its official name from Charles Street to Herald Terrace, the name it still bears. The cottages on Charles Street and those in the surrounding neighborhood remain virtually unchanged since Nellie lived there. Home to successive waves of immigrants, the district remained too poor to attract large-scale redevelopment and capital investment.
2.10. Nellie lived on Charles Terrace, a one-block dead-end street with newly erected workmen’s cottages including this one in Wellington’s Berhampore district. (Photograph taken by author, 2011.)
It was not just the geography, topography, and climate that differed so dramatically from everything Nellie knew back home. She also encountered a new respect for the dignity of labor and women. Few were rich, but even fewer were poor. New Zealanders had not so much embraced the gospel of equality as much as rejected the inevitability of inequality. Under the leadership of Seddon and the Liberal Party, the New Zealand legislature passed a series of socialistic measures, including old age pensions—what Pember Reeves called “sort of socialism”—without in any sense adopting socialism as a matter of ideological conviction.149 Theirs was a pragmatic politics designed to secure
fair treatment of workers. The electoral bill granting women’s suffrage managed to pass the Liberal-controlled Legislative Council (New Zealand’s upper house) in the autumn of 1893 without the support of Seddon and his cabinet. It was quickly signed into law—the fruit of nearly two decades of determined organizing by women acting through and in alliance with the transnational Women’s Christian Temperance Union.150 Here too was yet another unanticipated gain for Nellie. She acquired rights of full citizenship two decades before Muriel and almost thirty years before laboring women in Britain.
Nellie returned home to London onboard the Papanui in August 1903 with four other “London” girls. While it was unusual for a single white Englishwoman to leave New Zealand, “From Birth to Death” suggests that Nellie never saw herself as an immigrant. She had gone for higher wages and a change of scene, not to make a new life for herself so far from her family. Back in Bow, she apparently regaled her friends and fellow factory club members in Bromley-by-Bow with tales about her New Zealand adventures and encounters with its indigenous Maori people. Muriel included only one of these stories in “From Birth to Death”; it accentuated Nellie’s political education as a woman and citizen. It recounted Nellie’s experience voting in what must have been the 1902 New Zealand general election: “outwardly they treated it [their right to vote] as a colossal joke but inwardly were very proud and gazed studiously at the photographs of the candidates, drinking in with avidity every detail of their domestic life they could collect.” The story highlights Nellie’s process of learning about “prohibition” and its centrality to New Zealand electoral politics and women’s political culture. Nellie meets a “red-nosed” opponent of prohibition who informs her that prohibition would “kill” joy for and “rob” the workingman of his liquor. Unimpressed, Nellie declares, “That’s put the tin ’at on, I guess,” and she and the other eleven London girls back the Prohibition candidate. The poll is so close that a revote is necessary and a slick, smooth-talking electoral agent for the anti-prohibition candidate tries to bribe the girls and win their support. The story ends with the girls resolutely rejecting the proffered bribe—one pound each—and mocking the agent for so badly underestimating their political independence and strong moral fiber. Crucially, their block of a dozen votes ensures victory for their candidate. The episode reinforces Nellie’s pride in her newfound status in the world and capacity to think and act politically. It is yet another moment when Nellie defines herself in relation to the plebian culture and world around her: she rejects drink, bribery, and corruption in favor of a moralized and feminized politics. She exercises independent political judgment even as her day-to-day labor ensures her own—and her mother’s—financial independence. In Muriel’s published version of this episode, she offered an explicitly feminist gloss on its meaning: “Thus eighteen years ago the Suffragists’ faith was being justified in the lives of quiet, unknown, everyday sort of people.”151
