by Seth Koven
At least some elements of this story can be corroborated. Nellie and six other London girls (not all twelve of them) were on the electoral roll for 1902, which provided their addresses and occupations along with their names. Most of the London girls, including Nellie, called themselves spinsters. A few, however, registered as “box fillers.”152 Newtown, like Wellington and the rest of New Zealand, had two distinct ballots in 1902, one to elect representatives, the other to determine local drink regulations. It is also possible that Nellie remembered an election of local councilors in Wellington.153 Nellie’s story—and Muriel’s recounting of it—may have been accurate, but none of the local newspapers saw fit to report about such a tightly contested race and revote.
I know little about Nellie’s life from her return in 1903 until approximately 1906–7 when R. Bell once again sent her to fill match boxes in Sweden. I have not located any record of her arrival in Sweden; nor have I tracked down a branch of R. Bell and Company in Sweden. The Swedish and English match industries had been closely connected from the 1850s when Bryant and May first distributed Swedish-manufactured safety matches by Lundström. Several English firms in the early twentieth century maintained close connections with their Swedish counterparts, occasionally acting as distributors for their goods. Nellie apparently enjoyed the pleasures of village life. But there was nothing bucolic about her workplace environment. Sweden’s leading match factories were even larger and more imposing than their London counterparts. This was capitalism on a grand scale.154
After Bryant and May’s absorption into the Diamond Match empire, it had eyed R. Bell and Company, whose value was enhanced by its strong share of the market in New Zealand and Australia. By 1909, R. Bell and Company had ceased to be an independent corporate entity in New Zealand and had been purchased by Bryant and May. This was immediately evident to New Zealanders each time they passed the renamed factory and purchased a box of Bryant, May and Bell matches.155 (See fig. 2.11.) At approximately the same time Nellie went to Sweden, British match manufacturers formed an association (the British Match Manufacturers’ Association) to fend off foreign competition, in particular, Swedish matches. In response, a few British firms forged even closer ties with the Swedish match industry. A parliamentary report from 1920 suggested that these pre–World War I Anglo-Swedish corporations were motivated by the desire “to secure the advantages of the Australian preferential tariff for British goods.”156 My best guess is that Nellie’s move to Sweden must have been part of the larger global restructuring of R. Bell, Bryant and May, and Diamond Match.
2.11. The architect’s plan for the expansion of the match factory shows the addition of a prominent tower as well as the change in name indicating its purchase by Bryant and May. Architectural plans submitted by Bryant, May, and Bell & Co., Ltd., 1910. (Courtesy of Wellington City Archives.)
Muriel’s narration of Nellie’s time in Sweden captures her at midlife, contemplating fundamental questions about herself, the world, and God. It explores her inner life of thought and feeling at a spiritual and intellectual crossroads. Nellie loved the Swedish countryside, began to learn the language, and forged meaningful relationships there. She “found herself weighing up theories, comparing practice and profession, examining the colossal claims of religion, thinking about God … she began to criticize hymns which up until now she had sung with zest merely for the sake of the tunes, she found herself setting one Bible story against another to the obvious discredit of both.” Beset by a crisis of faith, Nellie rejected the easy path out of such soul searching: marriage and motherhood. She had a “presentiment that getting married wasn’t going to satisfy her.” She refused to risk being widowed and left to fend for herself like her mother and grandmother: “you’re left without nourishments when you need ’em most, a queer sort of world.” Such an explanation sidesteps any questions about Nellie’s sexuality and instead emphasizes how gender shaped household resources and married women’s economic vulnerability. The so-called Christian world no longer seemed so Christian to her. She questioned the truthfulness of the words of the national anthem she sang at Girls’ Guild concerts, which extolled “our just and righteous laws”; she was much less inclined to shout “for our most gracious King at theatres”; she wondered what had happened to “our national sense of fair play.”157 Importantly, Nellie’s emerging intellectual critique of patriarchy, empire, and patriotism are the fruit of her own self-reflection stimulated by her global travels. Muriel gave Nellie the last word in this section of “From Birth to Death”: “It was all very queer.”
Muriel did drop one tantalizing hint about Nellie’s personal life after her return from New Zealand indicative of the intellectual milieu that she had entered. Apparently, Harry Snell was one of Nellie’s would-be suitors, who continued to press his claims upon her even during her time abroad in Sweden.158 What part Nellie’s relationship with Snell played in provoking her profound disquiet with the verities of dogmatic religion and patriotic nationalism is difficult to judge. Snell was a well-suited interlocutor for her. An eyewitness to the Bryant and May Match Girls’ Strike, he had hailed it as a momentous achievement for women workers. He had thought long and hard about right moral action and religion. A quintessential Victorian working-class autodidact, he shared Nellie’s zeal for self-improvement and thirst for knowledge. Reared in a culture of radical Nonconformity in Nottinghamshire, he discovered socialism as well as the free thinking Charles Bradlaugh (Annie Besant’s erstwhile partner in schemes to promote working-class knowledge of birth control) and the secularist movement while attending evening classes at the University College in Nottingham in the 1880s. He came to London under the wing of a progressive clergyman who headed the Charity Organisation Society’s branch in Woolwich. Snell emerged as a formidable leader in Labour politics and the Ethical Society.159 The society had a two “churches” in Bow, one on Ford Road and the other close to Nellie in Bow Road.160
In many respects puritanical in his moral judgments, Snell helped to outline the principles guiding the Ethical Movement in Britain: “the love of goodness and the love of one’s fellows are the true motives for right conduct; and self-reliance and co-operation are the true sources of help.” He espoused a “progressive ideal of personal and social righteousness” determined by the individual’s “own conscientious and reasoned judgment.” He insisted that moral life involved “neither acceptance nor rejection of belief in any deity, personal and impersonal, or in a life after death.”161 We can be certain that Snell responded sympathetically to Nellie’s newly articulated discontent with the glib slogans of English jingoistic patriotism. Snell was keenly attuned to problems of race, nation, and nativism. He was on the founding executive council of the first Universal Races Congress in London in 1911 that sought to produce global amity between East and West, North and South.162 In his 1904 Tract for the Times, “The Foreigner in England,” Snell defended the rights of Eastern European Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution and blasted British colonial policy for shipping Chinese indentured laborers to South Africa. He astutely observed that “the cry of ‘English’ necessarily raises the question, ‘What constitutes an Englishman?’ ” The greatness of the English, Snell insisted, depended not upon the reactionary struggle to preserve some imagined purity of race but in the “continuous admixture of different blood.”163
It was not on account of Harry Snell that Nellie returned to London. She came home because her brother-in-law, William Dellar, had sustained a disabling injury and been consigned as “incurable” to a Poor Law asylum. What Muriel does not say is that the Poplar Board of Guardians eventually sent him to the very same Poor Law complex at Forest Gate that had been Nellie and her sister Alice’s home for so many years.164 The loss of his wages forced her sister Florence to leave Marner Street for even cheaper lodgings on Devas Road. Like her own mother before her, Florence Dellar lacked resources to keep her family together. She entered domestic service and her mother, Harriet Dowell, adopted her youngest child Willie.
Nellie was determined to support her mother and nephew out of her weekly wages of eighteen shillings. “From Birth to Death” emphasizes her keen sense of gratitude to and economic responsibility for her mother: “She returned to Bow determined by herculean efforts … to better her position so that her mother should not be the loser through the increase in the family.” Nellie moved into 313 Brunswick Road, the three-room flat occupied by her grandmother and Aunt Carrie in 1901, a few blocks south of R. Bell’s factory gates. She was heartsick and angry at a social system so cruel that it took a child away from “such a mother” as her sister. Muriel pithily summed up Nellie’s growing intellectual ferment and her increasing distance from the core assumptions of late-Victorian philanthropic benevolence and cross-class relations: “The Evening Club [with its philanthropic ladies] didn’t seem to Nellie so satisfactory in her new mood.”165
Nor did R. Bell and Company seem so satisfactory to her. On May 19, 1909, a “Miss Lester, The Grange, Loughton,” filed a complaint with a women’s watch guard committee, the Industrial Law Committee, founded in 1898 to promote the enforcement of laws protecting industrial women workers. Muriel Lester had learned from an unnamed worker that R. Bell and Company had continued to use the now-banned form of yellow phosphorus that caused necrosis.166 I suspect that Nellie was Muriel’s whistleblowing informant. Sometime that same year, Nellie ended two decades of employment at R. Bell’s and took a job at Cook’s East London Soap Works.
Cook’s was an immense industrial enterprise just across Bow Bridge to the north and east of Bromley-by-Bow. (See fig. 2.12.) The noisome odors produced by soap manufacture saturated the atmosphere and had shocked Muriel’s sensitive nostrils when she opened her window as her first-class carriage sped from her Loughton home through Bow en route to West London. Always delicate, Nellie suffered another bout of rheumatic fever in 1908. A few weeks before Christmas 1909, the fever returned and Nellie had to give up her job at Cook’s. This time its consequences were devastating and changed the course of Nellie and Muriel’s lives.
2.12. Cook’s East London Soap Works was a vast industrial complex that dominated the east side of the River Lea north of Bow Bridge. It was Nellie’s last employer of her industrial waged labor. Its owner served as chairman of the managing committee of Forest Gate School during Nellie’s time there. “East London Industries,” East End News, June 5, 1906, clipping collection. (Courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library.)
CONCLUSIONS
Britain’s global capitalist economy teetered at its precarious height during Nellie’s working life in the match industry. The accelerating integration of the world economy—enhanced communication and transportation networks, well-organized London-based capital markets as well as an “unprecedented increase in inter-continental migration”—strengthened Britain’s ties with much of its empire while fueling anti-colonial nationalist movements.167 Such developments encouraged providential imperialists like W.T. Stead to foretell a Union of English-Speaking peoples (a “great Federation of English-speaking commonwealths”) that would usher the poor and outcast of all races into a new Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.168 They also provided the macro-economic conditions that encouraged New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Seddon to entice R. Bell and Company with tariff protections and led Nellie Dowell from Bromley-by-Bow to Bell’s Wellington wax vesta factory. Thickening political and economic ties between Britain and New Zealand did not—and could not—efface the profoundly different ways in which each state defined citizenship and understood its role in regulating relations between labor and capital. Match factory girls in New Zealand had vastly more rights than their London counterparts that extended from the polling booth to the shop floor.
It was pure coincidence that the SS Waiwera, the ship that brought Nellie from London to New Zealand, had transported New Zealanders several months earlier to fight on behalf of their mother country against the Boers in southern Africa.169 For political economist J. A. Hobson, these global flows were intimately connected. He insisted that the grotesque maldistribution of wealth—the under-consumption of the ill-paid laboring poor and the subsequent flight of capital to the far reaches of empire—would hasten Britain’s geopolitical and moral exhaustion. In Hobson’s classic marriage of Ruskin’s ethics and Marx’s economics, Imperialism: A Study (1902), imperialism subjugated Britons to profit-mongering financiers and jingoistic media moguls while exploiting the white working class at home and non-white races globally. The Boer War, he admitted, had temporarily and artificially produced greater solidarity between white Australasians and Britons. Nellie unobtrusively slipped into Hobson’s grand narrative under cover of aggregate anonymity in one of his many statistical charts. She was one of the 14,922 outward-bound passengers from the United Kingdom to Australasia in 1900.170 Nellie’s story and Muriel’s retelling of it don’t align with Hobson’s. White proletarian factory girls have no place in his account. And Nellie apparently did not experience either empire or global capitalism as a malign system of exploitation. No doubt this reflects both her personality and the privileges of whiteness in the British empire. It is possible to read against the grain of “From Birth to Death” and speculate that Nellie must have contemplated her whiteness in New Zealand. Muriel mentioned in passing that Nellie returned home from New Zealand with tales of the Maori people she had encountered there.171
Nellie’s global circulations provide one set of answers to the question: what did capitalism look like from below and down under? Britain’s global match industry from the 1880s to 1920s was ferociously competitive, compelled to adapt to market forces and new technologies, characterized by draconian labor discipline while subjecting its low-paid workers to severe occupational health hazards. Firms like R. Bell and Bryant and May developed entire advertising campaigns, which intentionally made virtues of their vices. They trumpeted the safety of their production process while concealing documented incidents of phossy jaw caused by the continued use of dangerous (and eventually banned) substances. They urged customers to engage in everyday consumer patriotism by purchasing so-called British or New Zealand matches even as they knew full well that no such thing existed: matches were truly global products.
Nellie’s arrival in Wellington prompted New Zealanders to look long and hard at British industrial capitalism in the guise of R. Bell and Company. They did not like what they saw. They condemned R. Bell and closely regulated its labor and commercial practices. As best as I can tell, the story Nellie told Muriel about her laboring life emphasized opportunity and adventure, not constraint; workplace solidarity, not trade union strife; financial security, not exploitation. In so many ways, the intimate story of Nellie’s laboring life in the match industry does not square with the political-economic one that I have assembled. Nor does her story betray traces of deep inner conflicts about her choices. The black internationalist and sociologist of race W.E.B. Du Bois asked, “how does it feel to be a problem?” His answer was that for African Americans it meant bearing the burden of double consciousness, forever aware of being part of and excluded from what it meant to be American.172 A different answer emerges from my examination of Nellie’s life. As a white proletarian worker in Britain and its empire, Nellie, it seems, never saw herself as a problem.
Nellie Dowell toiled in what was arguably the most radical sector of late-Victorian Britain’s female workforce: the match industry. She lived in one of London’s most class-conscious political districts, in which workers gained a substantial voice in local government and Poor Law administration by the 1890s: Bow, Bromley-by-Bow, and Poplar. And yet, the more deeply I researched Nellie’s working life in the match industry, the less evidence I found that she was radicalized by it. Nellie chose not to participate in the industrial strife that literally followed in her footsteps during her global travels in the match industry. In light of the profound insecurity of her childhood experiences as a Poor Law half-orphan ward of the state, Nellie used her keen intellect and strong work ethic to ensure economic
security for herself and her family. Her choices, rooted in the logic of family life and pride in her own labor, require no apology, although they certainly invite explanation and analysis.