The Match Girl and the Heiress

by Seth Koven

  47. For notice of its opening, see the Morning Post (London), June 27, 1890, 5 and July 5, 1890, 2.

  48. Marguerite, “The World of Women,” The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, May 31, 1890, 345.

  49. Minute Book, The Club for Working Girls, Clifden Institute, entry for December 27, 1897, D/B/BRY/!/2/540, Hackney Local History Archives.

  50. “Interview with Miss Nash, superintendent Clifden House Institute,” May 19, 1897, B178, pp. 62–69, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES.

  51. At the 1891 census, three matchmakers lived with Bow Lodge’s matron, Ann Catherine Lloyd along with three household servants. Bow Lodge closed for renovations in the late 1890s and reopened in the early 1900s. Lloyd left Bow for India to serve as matron of the girls’ residence of the Central Hindu College in Benares.

  52. Montagu Williams, Round London: Down East and Up West (London, 1894), chap. 2.

  53. Images like this one of tea-drinking factory girls satirized attempts to domesticate her. “The Story of a London Factory Girls’ Club,” Girl’s Own Paper, January 5, 1895, 222.

  54. “Interview with Mr. Gilbert Bartholomew, managing director of Bryant and May’s match factory,” June 8, 1897, B178, pp.132–45, Booth Papers, BLPES.

  55. For a good analysis of Collet’s views on factory girls, see Emma Liggins, “Women of True Respectability?’ Investigating the London Work-girl, 1880–1900,” in Women and Work Culture: Britain c. 1850–1950, ed. Louise Jackson and Krista Cowman (Burlington, VT, 2005), 89–103.

  56. Clara E. Collet to Gilbert Bartholomew, February 8, 1889, and February 11, 1889, D/B/Bry/1/2/563, Records of Bryant and May Limited, Hackney Archives.

  57. A hint of anti-Irish disdain slipped into Collet’s account, albeit surreptitiously. The strike originated at the Victoria factory branch of Bryant and May, whose female hands were well known for their Irish backgrounds. On the Irishness of all the workers at Bryant and May’s Victoria Works, see Lloyd Lester, “The Matchmakers of East London: A Visit to Bryant and May’s,” The Girl’s Own Paper 17 (1895): 148. See also East London Advertiser, July 7, 1888, which described the first group of “match girls” to go on strike as girls aged fifteen to twenty of “Irish extraction.” For Collet’s published essay, see Clara E. Collet, “Women’s Work,” in Life and Labour of the People in London, vol. 4, Trades of East London, ed. Charles Booth (London, 1893), 323–24.

  58. Millicent Fawcett Garrett, “East-End Match Girls,” London Standard, July 23, 1898, 4.

  59. This was how Miss Smith, head deaconess at the Bromley House Institute on Brunswick Road (just across from Granny Sloan and Aunt Carrie), characterized the match girls who used the medical and maternity clinic services provided by Bromley House. See “Interview with Miss Smith, deaconness in charge of Bromley Training Institute of mission nurses in connection with Harley House (Dr Grattan’s Guinness Institute),” June 8, 1897, B173, p. 213, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES.

  60. The phrase comes from Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) reprinted in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds., The Blackwell City Reader (Oxford, 2002), 14. Representations of match girls do not conform to some key elements of Simmel’s formulation, with its emphasis on rational calculation.

  61. See Dr. Cunningham’s report, “Visit to Messrs. R. Bell and Co., Limited, Match Factory, Bow,” in Professor T. E. Thorpe, Professor Thomas Oliver, and Dr. George Cunningham, Reports to the Secretary of State for the Home Department on the Use of Phosphorus in the Manufacture of Lucifer Matches (London, 1899), 141–44.

  62. William Preston, “ ‘Darkest England’ Matches,” Sunday Magazine (1892): 448–49.

  63. Mrs. Thornton Smith replaced Annie Besant as secretary.

  64. C.R.E. Bell to Herbert Burrows, Dec. 29, 1893, TUC online archive.

  65. C.R.E. Bell to Herbert Burrows, January 5, 1894; January 2, 1894. TUC online archive.

  66. Such matches were called “burnts.” Burrows detailed these complaints in a circular, “Strike of Match Girls at Bell’s Factory, Bromley, London” (May 1894), TUC online archive.

  67. The commissioner of police reported to Home Secretary H. H. Asquith that his officers had faced difficulties protecting Mr. Bell from “molestation.” No one could have confused Bell’s match girls for helpless victims. Even their most ardent admirers acknowledged their rough, volatile ways. “We have never professed,” Herbert Burrows told reporters, “that [the girls] have been brought up in West End drawing-rooms.” Burrows knew only too well from experience that these “girls” bore no resemblance to Andersen’s quietly suffering little match girl: they often took matters into their own hands and acted without consulting him. See Hebert Burrows, May 20 and 27, 1894 interview with London Dispatch, reprinted in “The Match Industry,” and “The Match Girls,” Auckland Star, August 14, 1894, 2.

  68. Amelia, Mary, and Eliza to Mrs. [Thornton] Smith, undated (probably Jan. 1, 1894), TUC online archive. I am surmising that Amelia was Amelia Gifford. See explanation below (note 77) about committee member Amelia Gifford’s subsequent arrest and imprisonment.

  69. George Lansbury served as Macdonald’s electoral agent and continued to admire him even after Lansbury left the Liberal Party and became a socialist. See Lansbury, My Life (London, 1928), 72–75.

  70. Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. 21 (February 12, 1894), cols. 282–83. This exchange was widely reprinted in the London, national, and international press. See, for example, “The Democrat in Parliament. Labour Questions,” Reynolds’s Newspaper (hereafter cited as Reynolds’s), Feb. 18, 1894, 3. Macdonald was a founding member of an influential extraparliamentary discussion group of New Liberals, the Rainbow Circle. Devoted to progressive causes, it included the famous critic of imperialism, J. A. Hobson, and Herbert Burrows among its members.

  71. Asquith kept to himself whatever thoughts he may have had about this meeting and the Bell’s match girls’ strike; but it was probably no coincidence that the Home Office found that R. Bell had violated the Truck Act and other occupational health regulations governing the match industry. See letter from Asquith’s secretary in Whitehall, E. Leigh Pemberton, to J. A. Murray Macdonald, March 9, 1894, in reference to Burrows’s letter of January 13, detailing complaints about R. Bell. TUC online archive.

  72. At the Quarterly Meeting of the Matchmakers Union on March 2, 1894 Burrows praised the girls for “sticking together,” while gently chastising them for not first consulting the committee before going on strike. Minutes, TUC online archive. One indication of Burrows’s anxiety about maintaining order is his decision to conclude his speech at the union’s quarterly meeting by urging the “girls not to make any hostile demonstration outside the works when they went to draw their pay.” See “Strike of the Match Factory Girls at Bromley-by-Bow,” Reynolds’s, March 11, 1894, 3.

  73. Hubbard lived on Streatfield Road in the 1890s as a married but single mother of two daughters. She was still employed as a forewoman at Bell’s in 1901, but she had moved to West Ham. I reconstruct Hubbard’s addresses and occupations from census data for 1891 and 1901, Ancestry.com. Conway’s parents, James and Ann, were both born in Ireland. Conway was nineteen at the time of her arrest.

  74. The cashier of the Docker’s Union, Henry Kay, offered surety for Conway during the appeal process—proof of the close ongoing links between match workers, dockers, and their trade unions in the 1880s and 1890s. See “The Match Girls’ Strike,” Reynolds’s, March 25, 1894, 1. On Conway’s appeal, see Reynolds’s, March 18, 1894, 8.

  75. See William Saunders, History of the First London County Council, 1889–1890–1891 (London, 1892), 537. Saunders published verbatim the minutes of the London County Council meeting, October 20, 1891.

  76. See “Match Girls’ Strike.- The Appeal,” Reynolds’s, April 22, 1894, 8.

  77. On Gifford, see “Political Notes,” Pall Mall Gazette, April 10, 1894, 8. Bow and Bromley’s Liberal MP J. A. Macdonald demanded on the floor of the House of Commons that the Home Secr
etary immediately release Gifford, but his request was met with laughter. See “Release from Prison Asked For,” Yorkshire Herald, May 11, 1894, 5.

  78. “The Match Girls’ Strike,” Reynolds’s, April 8, 1894, 1. R. Bell and Company claimed that this sort of “intimidation” kept girls from returning to work and thus infringed on the girls’ right to earn their living. See “Labour Notes, The Strike of Match Girls,” London Illustrated Police News, March 1, 1894, 3. To curtail this sort of street violence, the metropolitan police denied Bell’s match girls the right to picket in front of the factory. Many of East London’s leading trade unionists saw the matter quite differently: they held a large rally in East London’s great public park, Victoria Park, to denounce the picketing ban as part and parcel of a more general assault on their right to engage in peaceful protest. On the rally in Victoria Park to raise money for Ellen Conway, see Reynolds’s, April 8, 1894, 1.

  79. Burrows detailed holdings by clergymen in R. Bell and Company as well. See “The Match Girls’ Strike,” Reynolds’s, May 20, 1894, 1.

  80. See Gracchus, “The Last of the Mahatmas,” Reynolds’s, November 18, 1894, 2; and “Mrs. Besant’s Astral Body Makes a Call,” Aberdeen Evening Express, November 14, 1894, 2.

  81. “Labour Day in London,” Illustrated Police News, May 12, 1894, 4.

  82. “The Celebration of May Day. On the Embankment and in the Park,” Pall Mall Gazette, May 2, 1894, 8. For a brilliant analysis of the cultural meanings and history of Ally Sloper, see Peter Bailey, “Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday: Comic Art in the 1880s,” History Workshop Journal 16, no. 1 (1983): 4–32.

  83. By the mid-1890s, he and his wife were the most visible supporters of the Clifden Institute’s match girls’ club and he readily praised its matron, Miss Nash, whose “marvelous” influence over the “girls” led many to embrace temperance as well as regularity in their work and private lives. See “Interview with Mr Gilbert Bartholomew, managing director of Bryant and May’s match factory,” June 8, 1897, B178, pp. 133–45, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES. Bartholomew complained to Booth that he and his firm had been calumnied by outsiders and that the firm had virtually eliminated phossy jaw. Revelations by the Star less than a year later contradicted nearly all of his claims.

  84. See Lloyd Lester, “The Cinderellas of the National Household. The MatchMakers of East London. A Visit to Bryant and May’s,” Girl’s Own Paper, December 7, 1895, 148. Lester was not the first to use the phrase “Cinderellas of the national household” to describe match girls. It appeared in W. P. Byles’s contribution, “Ideals: Imperial and Social,” in a book of idealistic and fervent essays describing the birth of the so-called New Party. Herbert Burrows contributed a manifesto outlining the group’s “Principles, Hopes, Ideals.” Other contributors included ILP socialists Keir Hardie and Margaret McMillan and the women’s trade unionist Frances Hicks. See Andrew Reid, ed., The New Party, described by some of its members (London, 1895), 31.

  85. The error of assuming that match girls retained strong links with radical working-class politics based on the 1888 strike is underscored by the apparent decision of Bell’s match girls to campaign as a unanimous bloc against George Lansbury in the 1912 election, on which he staked his own political fortunes by backing women’s suffrage along with efforts to abolish the Poor Law. See the Daily Graphic, Nov. 26, 1912, Clipping Notebook, 670.1 Tower Hamlets Local History Library.

  86. See St. Andrews Poor Law Infirmary, Hospital admissions records, 1890. See SA/M/1/17, Royal London Hospital Archives.

  87. Miss Jean Price, Life among Factory Girls and Lads (London, 1897), published for the Welcome Institute, Millwall, East, 11. This booklet is located within “Interview with Miss Price, The Welcome Institute, coffee Tavern for Factory Girls, 333 West Ferry Road,” May 21, 1897, B173, pp. 102–115, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES.

  88. Bell discussed the pressures of cheap European imports on English trade and their impact on his decision to establish a company in New Zealand. See “Wax Matches,” Bay of Plenty Times, August 13, 1894, 4.

  89. See “Wax Matches,” Canterbury Press, July 28, 1894, 6.

  90. Many notices appeared in New Zealand newspapers about Bell’s visit and the assistance the government offered him. See “Match Factory Project,” Poverty Bay Herald, July 20, 1894, 2; “A Bell and Black Match Factory,” Grey River Argus, July 21, 1894, 4; Marlborough Express, July 20, 1894, 2.

  91. On Seddon’s use of protective trade policies and his views of Bell’s match factory, see “An Object Lesson in Protection,” Hawkes’s Bay Herald, September 5, 1895, 2. New Zealand Liberals felt much freer than their namesakes in Britain to modify the party’s founding free trade doctrines. Of course, issues of empire and protective tariffs had already done much to rip apart and reconfigure Gladstone’s Liberal Party in 1886, when the charismatic imperialist Joseph Chamberlain led opponents of Irish Home Rule to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which in turn allied with the Conservatives.

  92. For Seddon’s elaboration of “fair trade” in relation to R. Bell and Company, see “Financial Statement,” in New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, First Session of the Fourteenth Parliament, Legislative Council and House of Representatives, vol. 113, August 28, 1900, 288–291.

  93. See “Passing Notes,” Otago Witness, July 26, 1894. Apparently, Bell had actually imported the plant for the factory to Auckland; he then had to take it down to Wellington.

  94. On R. Bell’s temporary location on Cornhill Street, see Nelson Evening Mail, August 9, 1894. By November, neighbors lodged complaints about smoke from the factory.

  95. McLay was the middle-class son of a Scottish soap manufacturer in Wandsworth, where the Bell family and its match company originated. He remained in New Zealand for the rest of his long career as a match manufacturer.

  96. For a brilliantly vituperative critique of Seddon’s support for R. Bell and Charles Bell’s testimony before the tariff commission, see “An Object Lesson in Protection,” Tuapeka Times, September 18, 1895, 4.

  97. During the protracted debate over Seddon’s global trade policy in relation to R. Bell’s match factory, MPs introduced evidence to document the government’s dealings with C.R.E. Bell, including letters and testimony from previous Tariff Commission hearings. See the debates over Customs and Excise, September 18, 1895, in New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, Second Session of the Twelfth Parliament, Legislative Council and House of Representatives, vol. 19, September 3 to October 1, 1895 (Wellington, 1895), 343–345.

  98. It is possible to track R. Bell’s slight retail sale price advantage over imported Bryant and May matches through the New Zealand Trade Review and Wellington Price Current, which quoted figures for wholesale and retail costs as well as number of imported wax vestas. For example, on November 26, 1896, it reported that Bryant and May’s “plaids” sold for 3/8 to 3/10, compared to Bell’s “plaids,” which sold for 3/6 to 3/8. New Zealand Trade Review and Wellington Price Current, November 26, 1896, 7.

  99. For a summary of Bell’s speech, extracted from the New Zealand Times, see Hawkes’s Bay Herald, July 17, 1895, 2. The Manawatu Herald snidely lampooned Bell’s speech a few days later and implicitly asked readers to consider the high price they had been asked to pay to subsidize this new industry: “In the Messrs. Bell’s match factory all that this colony supplies to make a match is the fat, which sounds true in other meanings. Manawatu Herald, July 23, 1895, 2.

  100. Seddon preferred the title prime minister to that of premier. The official name for his office changed during his tenure from premier to prime minister. Newspapers offered different although not contradictory accounts of Bell’s and Seddon’s remarks at the opening of the new factory. See “A New Industry. Opening of a Match Factory in Wellington,” Wanganui Herald, July 16, 1895, 2; Timaru Herald, July 16, 1895, 3; Hawkes’s Bay Herald, July 17, 1895, 2; “Local and General News,” Inangahua Times, July 19, 1895, 2.

  101. See “The Match Factory,” Observer, August 4, 1894, 2, for a highly critical ac
count of the health hazards of match making and the undesirability of establishing match manufacture in New Zealand.

  102. These clippings are part of the digitized archive of the Match Makers Union available online at the Trade Union Congress history website, TUC online archive, http://www.unionhistory.info/matchworkers/links.php.

  103. Star (Canterbury, NZ), August 22, 1894, 2.

  104. James Drummond, The Life and Work of Richard John Seddon. Premier of New Zealand 1893–1906 with a history of the Liberal Party in New Zealand (Christchurch, Wellington, and Dunedin, NZ, Melbourne, and London, 1907), 223.

  105. My thanks to Nellie’s distant relative, Lorraine Sloan Lee, for explaining her great-grandfather’s complicated household arrangements.

  106. The Endersbee family lived on Marner Street for several decades. Harry’s father, Thomas, was a gas worker. They occupied 101 Marner in 1881; in 1891 and 1901, they occupied 4 Marner.

  107. The circumscribed local geographies of people in Bow are captured well in a Booth interview conducted by George Arkwright with Sister Nellie, a Wesleyan sister of the people born in Bow and associated with the Wesleyan Church in Old Ford Road. She informed the interviewer that she “seldom passes south of this line [formed by the Great Eastern Railway] which is a very distinct barrier.” See “Interview with Sister Nellie, Old Ford Wesleyan Church,” June 28, 1897, B176, pp. 179, Charles Booth Papers, BLPES.

  108. There were at least some precedents within Nellie’s family for such far-flung travel. The Dowells’ fortunes—and misfortunes—had once been intimately bound to overseas trade. Nellie’s father William and maternal grandfather Hugh Sloan were mariners. Hugh had also been a sometime customs and revenue officer; William was en route to Australia when he died in 1881. Hugh died long before Nellie was born and her memories of her father must have been faint at best. No doubt she grew up hearing stories about them and their seafaring adventures. As pensioners of Trinity House, Harriet Sloan and her daughter Harriet Dowell necessarily remained closely connected to the maritime networks of their long-dead husbands.