The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  In the aftermath of the Bryant and May Match Girls’ Strike and the famous Dock Strike the next year, strikes by unskilled workers in East London like tailors and chocolate makers had become so frequent that they hardly qualified as news. The public apparently had exhausted its supply of good will and cash to support strikes. No political celebrities with Annie Besant’s charisma and talent for publicity stepped forward to become the face of the Bell’s strike. By 1894, Besant cared more for “astral bodies” and “mahatmas” than match girls and committed herself to Theosophy.80 The Bell’s match girls did find some unlikely benefactors at the London May Day celebration in Hyde Park. Six brakes-full of match girls, bearing collecting boxes, arrived to hear speeches by one of the heroes of the Dock Strike, the MP John Burns, the radical Christian socialist slum priest Stewart Headlam, and the Arts and Crafts socialist-poet William Morris.81 The only speaker who specifically addressed them was a “literary” entertainer costumed in an Ally Sloper top hat and “carrotty wig” who promised to donate half his day’s earnings to their cause.82 This did not bode well for the Bell’s match girls.

  The fiery actions of Bell’s match girls like Conway, Shannon, McCarthy, and Gifford made it difficult to turn their strike into the sort of fairy tale narrative about suffering and redemption so beloved by the British public. This was precisely the way Bryant and May’s managing director Gilbert Bartholomew rescripted the Match Girls’ Strike in its aftermath. Confronted by the public relations debacle of the 1888 strike, Bartholomew reinvented himself as the preeminent philanthropic supporter of match girls, not their cruel oppressor.83 By 1895, Bartholomew had charmed and toured so many journalists through the Bow factory that Bryant and May’s match girls had apotheosized into the “Cinderellas of our National Household.” Lloyd Lester, a reporter for the Girl’s Own Paper, described the match girls he met at Bryant and May’s as “white-aproned dauntless damsel[s] with … sweeping feathers and ‘fringe,’ worn Skye terrier fashion, whose nimble fingers manipulate matches with bewildering celerity of motion.” Bryant and May’s match girls, erstwhile phossy-jawed child victims and rebellious factory hands, had become “bonnie fresh faced girls” doing essential work for the nation.84

  The Bell’s match girls enjoyed no such post–strike rehabilitation. They returned to the anonymity from which they had briefly emerged. A wrenching, protracted, and sometimes violent conflict, the Bell’s match girls’ strike ended with the union’s complete defeat after six costly months. Union Committee members not only lost their jobs, but some suffered the ignominy and trauma of imprisonment for their involvement in the strike. Reynolds’s, which had provided the most comprehensive reporting about the strike, did not bother to inform readers that it had ended. The Bryant and May strike changed the face—and gender—of British trade unionism. However, it failed to provide a usable template for subsequent generations of match girls. Novelty and what counted as news were so deeply entangled that second acts like the Bell’s strike played to empty houses.85

  How did Nellie respond to the strike and what impact did it have on her life? Let me begin with the one thing that is certain. Nellie made a choice. She either joined the strikers or continued working—and by so doing, weakened the chances for the strike to succeed. She appears nowhere in sources about the strike. However, this is hardly surprising, since no strike register has survived and press reports mention by name only a handful of strikers. Muriel suggests that in the first years of Nellie’s employment, she benefited from match girls’ high level of sisterly solidarity, a characteristic universally admired and mentioned by social observers. Fellow workers pooled their scant resources to provide sick money for Nellie in 1890 during the first of her many bouts of rheumatic fever when she was around thirteen years old.86 They had insisted on sharing food with her and even gave her a waterproof coat (which they pretended was hers) to protect her delicate health. But what is most notable in Muriel’s narrative is that she portrays the foremen and manager as participating in this benevolent conspiracy to take care of Nellie during her illness: “even the Manager and Foremen made much of her.” One foreman affectionately tells Nellie to ask no more questions about the proper ownership of the coat since “it don’t do them coats no sort of good to be out of work.” “From Birth to Death” erased any hint of the bitter antagonisms dividing workers from their shop floor supervisors at R. Bell and Company.

  Muriel’s affectionate, not quite critical description of Nellie during these years does not portray a young woman likely to join a trade union and go on strike. Nellie joined the Factory Girls Club connected to the Bow Evening Mission and Night School. “She liked the ladies. Their clothes delighted her; so did their voices and their white hands. Nellie wanted to look as nice as they did.” Her encounter with cross-class sisterly philanthropy left her hungering to be like her social betters. Muriel narrates a moment of social emulation and sanctioned class mimicry, not the awakening of a radicalized class consciousness. According to Muriel, Nellie keenly desired to please her social betters as a way to better herself. She developed close ties with the mission’s “slumming” ladies—“Miss Livermore, Miss Cook, Miss Smith, Miss Clarke, Miss Howard and later, Lady Plender”—that endured over many decades. She mentions several of them in her letters to Muriel written after 1910. Nellie raced home from the factory to present herself to lady workers and fellow members of her Factory Girls Club in a freshly washed blouse. She prized the punctuality mark she received. If such rewards were defining symbols of conformity to bourgeois concepts of time management, they were also emblems of Nellie’s commitment to self-discipline and self-improvement. The defiant seven-year-old girl who disrupted routines at Forest Gate Barrack School had grown into an efficient young worker eager for approbation and respectability.

  Nellie also had financial responsibilities at home to help support her mother, who lived on a paltry six-shilling weekly pension from Trinity House, supplemented by earnings in the match industry and later as a monthly sick nurse. Such considerations may well have made Nellie reluctant to jeopardize the steady work and wages at R. Bell that kept her out of reach of the Poor Law. As a Poor Law half-orphan, Nellie knew only too well the degradations and indignities of parish relief and the paramount value of financial independence. As one longtime worker among East London’s factory girls noted, “they would rather die at their post than receive parish relief.”87

  In 1894, R. Bell and Company took a hard line toward the union. It went on record that it would not rehire strikers and evinced no interest in reconciling with the union. Bryant and May, by contrast, contributed funds to help support Besant’s match factory girls club, and its senior managers and their wives—notably Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Bartholomew—became leading sponsors of Lady Clifden’s institute for match factory girls for the next several decades. Nellie’s continued employment at R. Bell for another fifteen years—and the firm’s decision to send her twice to work in its overseas factories—strongly suggests that she was a trusted and reliable employee, not a trade union member on strike.

  The strike must have loomed large in Nellie’s day-to-day life for the better part of 1893 and 1894. It spilled out beyond the factory gates into the streets and neighborhoods of Bow, Bromley-by-Bow, and Poplar. Nellie heard her workmates articulate grievances against workplace abuses and witnessed the suffering they endured for a cause they believed was just. She also saw the price they paid individually and collectively in failing to achieve their aims. She must have read or heard about the manifestos circulated by Burrows and others that connected local grievances at Bell’s to the broader struggle to secure justice for workers against the machinations of self-serving industrial capitalists. The ongoing labor unrest in the match industry from the moment she entered it in late 1888 constituted the social and intellectual crucible in which she shaped her identity as a worker, a young woman, and a member of her community. The fact that Nellie probably did not play the part of trade union heroine does not diminish its impact on her
understanding of her world.

  I do not know what lessons Nellie took from the strike because there were—and still are—so many different ways to interpret its meaning. Was she inspired by the bravery of some of her workmates? Did she disdain their intemperate and rash behavior? Did she come to see capitalists like C.R.E. Bell as exploiters of labor or as benevolent providers of stable jobs? Certainly R. Bell and Company, Mr. Mead, and Sir Peter Edlin sent a clear message to the Bell’s match girls. Even trifling acts of aggression like breaking a pane of glass would be met by harsh punishment. Nellie might have learned that workers like Amelia Gifford who actively resisted exploitation suffered catastrophic personal consequences; better to maintain job security, work hard, and please forewomen and masters. Given the subtle intellect and sensitivity Nellie revealed in her later letters, she may well have been able both to admire and to distance herself from the strikers.

  Nellie’s absence from the historical record of the strike is much less surprising than the absence of the strike from Muriel’s narratives about Nellie. Muriel inevitably left out information I wished she had included. But I do not think this is a case of omission by authorial design. Given Muriel’s skill in framing her narrative to highlight the injuries of class Nellie sustained as a young child and worker, it is improbable that she chose to exclude this dramatic episode in Nellie’s life. At the time Muriel wrote her biographical sketches of Nellie, she was a radical Christian socialist, actively engaged in the fight for workplace justice as a member of Britain’s most advanced borough council in Poplar. She certainly did not hope to awaken workers to their rights as citizens by encouraging them to emulate ladies with “white hands.” Nellie and her family members probably never discussed the strike with Muriel. I suspect that this too was another choice Nellie made.

  METROPOLITAN MATCH GIRLS ABROAD: IMMORAL CIRCULATIONS OF MATCHES AND MATCH GIRLS

  As tension mounted between match girls and management in the spring of 1894, Charles R. E. Bell left London to seek opportunities to expand his business in Britain’s antipodean empire. He saw no reason to stay home and negotiate with the union and the strike committee. The proprietors of R. Bell and Company decided that the firm’s survival depended upon acquiring new markets and manufacturing sites for their goods far from the cheap continental matches then flooding Britain.88 Bell headed to Australia and New Zealand to establish new match factories. After a year of disputes with trade unionists and match girls, criticisms by reporters and MPs, and citations issued by factory inspectors for workplace violations, Bell enjoyed a warm welcome from New Zealand’s Liberal prime minister, Richard Seddon, and the colonial treasurer, J. G. Ward. No doubt recalling the troubles he had left behind in London, Bell hoped that “the laboring classes here [in New Zealand] will not drive your Government to passing any measures which will be inimical to the employers of labour.”89

  In Britain, the numbers of match manufacturers shrank each year as the industry consolidated in the face of ferocious competition and ever-smaller profit margins. In New Zealand, newspapers chronicled Bell’s efforts to open its first match factory and the public debated its meaning for the country’s future. The ministry, eager to help Bell, anticipated the creation of several hundred new jobs for New Zealanders at a time when unemployment had slowly but steadily risen.90 In the early 1890s, the explosion in the export of meat products to Britain made possible by advances in transoceanic refrigeration drove the New Zealand economy. This did not deter Seddon’s government from courting metropolitan capital investors like Bell and promising to protect fledgling home industries from overseas competition. Seddon viewed the match factory as a test case to demonstrate the benefits of his selective use of protective tariffs.91 When pressed to explain his decision to favor the match industry, Seddon characterized his policy as “fair trade” rather than free trade and claimed that he would only protect industries “naturally” suited for New Zealand.92 For better and for worse, the political stakes of Seddon’s investment in R. Bell and Company were substantial.

  Charles Bell flirted with the idea of opening a factory in Auckland but turned his sights three hundred miles south to New Zealand’s capital, Wellington.93 He leased space to begin production in August and acquired property in Newtown—a southern suburb of Wellington—where he erected a purpose-built factory.94 He sent over several key employees from Bromley-by-Bow—most notably Walter McLay, the foreman in charge of the phosphorous-mixing department, to manage the factory and instruct employees in the art and science of this hazardous industry.95 Charles Bell also extracted several crucial promises from the government. The precise nature of these commitments became a subject of considerable controversy in the years ahead. Bell testified before the New Zealand Tariff Commission that the Seddon government had verbally promised to maintain preferential tariffs for the match industry “so long as the present government was in power,” an open-ended and completely unconstitutional arrangement.96 During debates about tariffs in 1895, Seddon’s parliamentary opposition pounced on this opportunity to denounce Seddon’s disregard for principles and his government’s usurpation of Parliament’s exclusive legal right to make such decisions.97 Some facts were indisputable. In 1894, the government allowed R. Bell and Company to import duty-free matchmaking machinery as well as the raw materials necessary for making matches at the lowest possible price. Imported matches made by rivals such as Bryant and May were subject to tariffs, thereby artificially inflating their retail price. The net result was that the “colonial” matches sold for slightly less than their better-established rivals.98

  What made a “colonial match” a genuine New Zealand product, one worthy of protection from foreign competition? (See fig. 2.7.) New Zealanders asked themselves this question from the moment they first learned of Bell’s plan to open a factory. As the Otago Witness commented on July 26, 1894, the “expert hands” had been “brought out from England” and “all the ingredients of the wax matches will have to be imported.” Charles Bell, perhaps ill-advisedly, made precisely this point at his speech to celebrate the opening of the new factory on July 15, 1895. While the stearine fat was from “New Zealand sheep,” gum came from Java, wax from Central America, and potash from Sweden. The seemingly simple wax match, Bell concluded, required materials from “nearly every portion of the globe.”99 Prime Minister Seddon and his wife triumphantly toured the new factory and praised its well-designed interior and “perfect” ventilation. In remarks calculated to disarm critics, he insisted that Bell’s factory posed only an “infinitesimal” danger to the “operatives and neighbourhood” and would soon employ a “large number of girls.”100 The promise of well-paid, safe jobs for New Zealand girls was an essential part of Seddon’s justification for the enterprise.

  2.7. Royal Wax Vesta, early twentieth-century R. Bell and Co. Wellington matchbox. (Object in author’s possession.)

  About R. Bell and Company, many in New Zealand knew too much to share Seddon’s joy at the opening of the new factory.101 Charles Bell was badly mistaken if he believed he could escape the problems plaguing his London operation. He failed to grasp that it was not just the matches themselves—as physical objects—that were enmeshed in a vast global network. News about their production and labor relations between R. Bell and its London workers also circulated between metropole and colony via the infrastructure of a global information network in place since the founding of the Press Association and Reuters at mid-century. Advances in telegraphy drastically diminished spatial and temporal distances separating New Zealand and London. New Zealanders had ready access to metropolitan newspapers and, more importantly, to local New Zealand papers containing London news. They were remarkably well informed about the health dangers of the London match industry as well as R. Bell’s treatment of its workers.

  Rumors that Charles Bell would open his factory in Auckland in July 1894 provoked immediate response. Miss Rees, recently returned from a long trip to London in which she had investigated the economic, social, and philant
hropic conditions in East London, concluded her lecture to a women’s meeting by condemning R. Bell’s treatment of its workers in Bromley-by-Bow. The Auckland Knights of Labour disputed the Auckland Herald’s claims that there was nothing “unpleasant, dirty or noxious” about match manufacture. Members discussed two lengthy and damning accounts of the Bell’s Match Girls’ Strike published by the London Weekly Dispatch on May 20 and 27 and resolved to oppose any government subsidies or bonuses to R. Bell and Company. They insisted that the government closely regulate and inspect the factory for occupational health hazards and violations, and they demanded a compulsory living wage for all employees. The Auckland Star published a detailed account of the Knights of Labour’s resolutions on August 14, 1895, which made its way to London, where Herbert Burrows pasted it into the notebook he assembled to document the union’s strike activities. A week later, the Star published two long excerpts from an unnamed London newspaper sent to it by the pseudonymous “Lucifer” detailing Messrs. Bell and Company’s treatment of its workers. Two of Bell’s London match girls, Hettie Michell (age seventeen) and Kate Wright (sixteen), had been caught concealing on their persons a total of three boxes of matches during a “periodical search”—a disciplinary technique used by the firm in the strike’s aftermath in which all employees were physically searched for stolen goods.102