The Esther & Jack Enright Box Set

by David Field

  ‘Not necessarily waiting at home,’ Esther replied, smiling through slightly gritted teeth at the man’s studied niceness and condescending attitude. ‘I’ll most likely be working as well.’

  ‘And what exactly is your chosen profession, Esther?’ the vicar enquired.

  ‘I work as the accounts manager of a new employment organisation,’ she responded, only her eyes betraying — to those who knew her well — that dangerous ground was being crossed.

  ‘Esther — that’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?’

  ‘All Biblical names are Jewish, if you think about it,’ Esher replied sweetly, preparing to engage in the familiar skirmish regarding the relative importance of the Old and New Testaments.

  ‘Quite. I just wanted to make sure that you’re committed to the concept of a Christian marriage.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise,’ she replied. ‘And Jews get married too.’.

  ‘Do you have Saturday June 9th free, by any chance?’ Jack enquired quickly.

  The vicar beamed as he delivered one of his flat jokes. ‘Presumably that’s the day you’d like your wedding and not an invitation to a garden party? I don’t need to consult my diary to confirm that the date you have in mind would be available.’

  ‘But presumably you’re going to make a note of it anyway?’ Esther insisted and the vicar smiled back at her deprecatingly as he extracted a small notebook and pencil from his jacket pocket and began to make the necessary note at the back of it.

  ‘This is this year’s diary, obviously,’ he advised them, ‘but once I get my diary for next year, I’ll enter the booking. It’s Miss Jacobs, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Esther confirmed stonily. ‘Another Old Testament name, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What about bridesmaids and best man?’ the vicar continued undaunted. ‘Have you chosen them?’

  ‘They’ve been chosen for us, certainly,’ Esther bristled slightly, ‘so that’s all in order.’

  ‘I’ll need a note of your chosen hymns to give to the organist, Mrs Bratton. There’ll be a fee for her services, of course.’

  ‘And yours?’ Jack enquired.

  ‘Naturally. You’ll also need to make another appointment with me in the near future, in order that we may have the usual discussion about the seriousness and significance of matrimony and the life-long commitment that it involves.’

  ‘We obviously thought about that before we agreed to get married,’ Esther reminded him, ‘and I’m well aware of the obligation to “love, honour and obey”, although my obedience might be tested from time to time.’

  ‘All the same,’ the vicar insisted, ‘it’s traditional.’

  The vicar decided that perhaps it was a good idea to bring this interview to an end, which he did with a few tried and tested platitudes, before ushering Jack and Esther to the front door of the vicarage, from which they set off down Church Lane for an early tea with Jack’s mother.

  ‘You were a bit rude to the vicar,’ Jack chided gently. ‘He only means the best for us.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jack,’ Esther replied as she took his hand, ‘but all that Church of England sugariness makes me glad I was taught religion by rabbis. He’s about as convincing as dung from a rocking horse and clearly overawed by your mother, like everyone else in Barking, so far as I’ve been able to deduce.’

  ‘I hope this new job of yours isn’t giving you revolutionary ideas,’ Jack muttered as they approached the house.

  ‘I haven’t even started the job yet, so how would I know?’

  ‘Well, it’s just that these emerging labour unions have a reputation for being a bit — well, a bit sort of seditious and anti-authority. We have an entire department at the Yard that keeps a close eye on what they’re up to.’

  ‘Like I said, I haven’t started the job yet and the only person I’ve met so far is a middle-aged, middle-class lady who just wants to join with other women in making working life better for themselves. What could possibly be wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing, expressed in those terms,’ Jack conceded. ‘But some of the men’s unions have been known to take on entire contingents of police officers, like that mob that caused a riot in Trafalgar Square a few years ago.’

  ‘I’m sure that Helen Trenchard has nothing like that in mind,’ Esther assured him. ‘And if she does, I’ll be certain to report back to you. Talking of reporting for duty, here we are, back at the family headquarters.’

  Chapter Six

  Annie Cudsworth realised that there was something wrong the minute she opened the door to her room in Bolton’s Lodging House, round the corner from Shoreditch Station in Rivington Street. At the end of another fourteen hour day mending broken threads in the weaving factory that paid her a grudging six shillings a week, she was nevertheless not too exhausted to notice the faint smell of something sweet, reminiscent of pear drops. Nor could she fail to see that her few simple clothes were strewn all over the room and that the contents of her laundry basket had been tipped onto the floor.

  Shaking with apprehension, she hung her only two dresses back on their hooks. As she did so she became aware of a piece of paper stuck to the side wall. ‘DON’T JOIN UP’ was printed clearly in its centre. She pulled it from the wall and there underneath, written with the remains of her only lipstick, was another message. The scrawled, misspelt writing was hard to read, but it contained a lewd message about her underwear, and when she turned her attention to the items that had been tipped from the laundry basket onto the floor, she realised that the two items that had been in there had gone.

  With a loud shriek she ran downstairs to report the intruder to the lodging house Superintendant.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘It’s so good of you to let me occupy the building a week early,’ Helen Trenchard enthused as Esther opened the front door to her with a big smile and stood back to let her in.

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ Esther assured her. ‘I had nothing better to do and the property people told me that you want to do some building alterations. They also warned me not to let you make a start on them until you paid the first three month’s rent in advance, but I won’t tell them if you don’t. Show me what you’ve got in mind, then I’ll make us some tea. I hope you like gingerbread, because that’s just about all I have left upstairs in the kitchen. In view of the early hour I imagine that you’ve not had any breakfast?’

  ‘I never do, these days,’ Helen replied, smiling, ‘but I could certainly use a cup of tea after that horrible bus ride down from Hackney. Some people never wash these days, it would seem.’

  ‘So what will you be doing to the place?’ Esther enquired.

  Helen pointed to the wide open and empty ground floor. ‘I want to make this more like a proper set of office premises, with several rooms — including one for you, of course — so I’ll need some dividing internal walls from floor to ceiling. Then we may need to subdivide that large storeroom up on the first floor, which from memory will involve replacing some of the fire-damaged panels that are still there.’

  ‘I hope you weren’t planning on doing all that yourself, with me helping you?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Helen laughed pleasantly. ‘I spoke to a Mr Bowden at Hemmingsworths and he promised to send some builder types down here this week to size up the job and give me a quote. Mainly joiners and painters, I’d imagine. Anyway, let’s have that tea, then I can at long last put down this heavy bag, which contains most of my Alliance documents. One of them is my provisional idea of how the offices will eventually look.’

  ‘Tell me more about your organisation,’ Esther invited Helen as they sat across from each other in the kitchen, spreading the last of Esther’s butter on the remains of her slightly stale gingerbread. Helen gazed sightlessly at the far wall as she began.

  ‘It’s called “The National Women’s Labour Alliance” and in the fullness of time I hope that it will represent all working-class women throughout the nation. It’s about time somebody did.’
/>   ‘Represent them in what, exactly?’

  ‘Parliament, newspaper columns, negotiations with individual employers and their organisations — everything. Women are so undervalued and underrepresented in both public life and control of their working conditions.’

  ‘I certainly know all about the undervalued part.’ Esther grimaced, remembering her recent encounter with the patronising vicar who’d be marrying her to Jack. ‘And I can only assume that you’ve had similar experiences, else you wouldn’t be taking on such an ambitious project.’

  ‘All my life,’ Helen confirmed. ‘I was brought up in Blandford, in Dorset, where my parents ran a drapery store in the main street. That was how I developed an interest in working conditions, but only for men in those days. The countryside around us was largely given over to farming and heavily populated by labourers and their huge families, none of whom could afford to shop at our store. But their ragged children would congregate outside our premises, begging for any loose change that our customers might have left over, and when those customers complained my father would send me out to chase the beggars away. Gradually I began talking to them — and sometimes I gave them money out of my own allowance — and I soon learned about the terrible conditions they lived in, squatting in hovels with leaky roofs and no sanitation, scraping along on a few shillings a week, and so on.’

  ‘But what’s that got to do with working women?’ Esther enquired, genuinely puzzled.

  Helen smiled. ‘Forgive me, I tend to get carried away. But during the course of associating with those field labourers, I became aware of the work of a woman who in those days was using her unique talents to assist in the formation of a trade union for agricultural labourers. You’ve heard of Annie Besant, I assume?’

  ‘I can’t say I have,’ Esther admitted, ‘but I rarely read the newspapers these days.’

  ‘But you presumably heard about the Match Girls?’

  ‘Of course,’ Esther confirmed, ‘that was difficult for even me to miss. Didn’t they refuse to work until they got more money?’

  ‘There was much more to it than that,’ Helen enthused as she warmed to her theme. ‘The conditions they were working under in that terrible factory down in Bow were little short of scandalous and the employers should have been prosecuted, except that there’s no real criminal justice in this society of ours. The workers — mainly young girls — were exposed to something called phosphorous, which is one of the main ingredients of match heads. Well, continued exposure to that gave the girls something called “phossy jaw”, which, as its name suggests, slowly rotted out their jawbones and in many cases led to death. As well as that, they were lucky to get five shillings a week for working with the permanent risk of death or disfigurement and their employers used all sorts of low tricks and excuses to “fine” them in order to pay them even less.’

  ‘Disgraceful,’ Esther muttered as she gestured with the tea pot. Helen nodded for more as she continued.

  ‘What was even more disgraceful was that the business that employed them — “Bryant and May”, it was called — proudly boasted to its shareholders two years ago that they’d made a massive profit of twenty-two per cent and that’s when Annie Besant went into battle on behalf of the girls. She was working as a journalist in those days, although now I hear that she’s joined some weird Eastern mystic cult or something. Anyway, she published a story about their plight and there was a massive rally and march through Regents Park, and several large parks in the East End, including Victoria Park, across the road from where I’ve lived for many years now. That’s where I finally met up with Annie herself and a friend of hers and fellow organiser, called Clementina Black. I hope all these names aren’t just flying over the top of your head, because they’re important.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Esther assured her, fascinated by the recent history of her own community that she was learning for the first time. ‘I remember all the fuss about the marches and rallies — that was only two years or so ago, wasn’t it? I remember because it was just before I met my fiancé, when all those dreadful killings started down the road here, in Whitechapel and Spitalfields.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Helen confirmed, ‘and it was partly the public fascination with those that tended to take the issue of the Match Girls out of the public limelight. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Clementina and I began to meet and correspond, since we both had this long-standing interest in the rights of women at work, even though she was far better educated than me and was working as a teacher until she formed her own association.’

  ‘So will she be working here with us?’

  ‘Unfortunately not. Both Clementina and I remain committed to improving the position of women, but for her their working conditions have become part of a broader political campaign. She’s become friendly with Eleanor Marx, who’s the daughter of Karl Marx.’

  ‘I’ve heard of him,’ Esther announced proudly. ‘He’s the Socialist who’s written a lot of books.’

  ‘He died a few years ago, but yes, that was him. His daughter’s kept up his work, it seems, and she and Clementina joined something called “The Women’s Trade Union League”. Then last year Clementina went out on her own with something else, called the “Women’s Trade Union Association”.’

  ‘Forgive me for interrupting,’ Esther said as she poured the last of the tea into her own cup, ‘but with all these Associations that have sprung up recently, why is there still a need for yours?’

  Helen smiled. ‘A very intelligent — and very important — question, to which there’s a straightforward answer. The likes of Annie Besant, Clementina Black and Eleanor Marx are very good at standing on platforms and preaching Socialism, “the Rights of the Working Man”, and all that theoretical hot air, but in the meantime no-one’s doing the obvious practical thing of actually organising the women into one national trade union that will provide a united front to the men in Parliament.’

  ‘Aren’t the men already doing that?’ Esher enquired. ‘I seem to recall that the dockers went on strike only last year and got themselves a minimum hourly wage. And didn’t they cause a huge disturbance in Trafalgar Square on the same subject?’

  ‘That was in connection with the Match Girls.’ Helen frowned. ‘Unfortunately the men in the trade union movement are primarily only out for their own interests and one of those, regrettably, is the opportunity for a good fight with police officers. Have you heard of somewhere called “The Fenian Barracks”?’

  ‘No,’ Esther admitted, ‘but I know all about gangs of working men using any and every excuse to batter policemen. My fiancé’s one of them.’

  ‘He might want to consider another career,’ Helen muttered.

  ‘That’s what his mother’s always telling him, but what about this “Barracks” place? It sounds like an army camp.’

  ‘It’s the next best thing, except that the army in question consists of Irish troublemakers who’ll leap onto any cause for the excuse to cause a disturbance and challenge the English authorities. It’s a block of streets in Poplar, where all the residents have Irish names and a “no co-operation” attitude towards the authorities in general. Quite a few of the Match Girls lived down that way — do I need to explain further?’

  ‘So the Trafalgar Square riots had basically nothing to do with supporting the Match Girls?’

  ‘No, not really. As usual, hypocrisy won the day and a pretended support for working-class women and girls was just a front for a different political agenda. And of course the men hate us forming our own unions, simply because we’re women. We’re reaping the harvest sown by those other crusading women who think that they’re entitled to the vote and a seat in Parliament.’

  ‘But surely you agree with that as well?’ Esther argued, now thoroughly confused.

  ‘Of course, but not as a first priority,’ Helen replied. ‘For as long as women are seen as the lowest of the low, in the most humiliating and meaningless jobs, paid pittances for fourteen hour days and gener
ally used and misused, they’ll never be taken seriously by the politicians. So, step one is to get them equal status and equal pay and even that’s been undermined by the men.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Helen allowed herself a bitter snort before she explained. ‘Two years ago, my misguided friend Clementina Black was one of only two women who were allowed to attend as delegates to the male dominated Trades Union Congress. She was condescendingly allowed to put forward a motion for equal pay for women and was still congratulating herself on this barrier-breaking achievement when the male delegates agreed to vote for it only because the existence of lower pay rates for women threatened male jobs. Put crudely, if an employer can get a woman to do a job for five shillings a week, why would he employ a man to do the same job for ten shillings?’

  ‘From what you’ve been telling me,’ Esther observed thoughtfully, ‘I’m surprised that the men’s unions are prepared to tolerate women’s unions in their midst.’

  ‘Some of them aren’t, believe me.’ Helen laughed ironically. ‘But up to now there’s been no strong opposition because there’s never been a powerful and united women’s union movement. For as long as the men can boast of large unions full of strapping healthy men in industries such as the docks, the coal mines and the shipyards, they can present quite a physical presence, leaving aside the fact that the withdrawal of their labour in, say, the docks, can have such dire consequences for commercial interests in the city. How much threat do you imagine is posed by a “National Association of Bookbinders”, or the “British Society of Upholsteresses”?’