Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Although so close to the city of London and Westminster, Silvertown was a circle of industrial hell unknown to those who never ventured east of the Square Mile. Due to its position on the estuary flatlands on the fringe of the metropolis the area was, by long tradition, the home of so-called ‘offensive industries’. It produced every legal industrial chemical, compound and by-product on which commodity capitalism depended and shed its toxic, poisonous industrial effluent directly into the ancient river. The workers, many of them women, were badly paid, exposed to every industrial hazard imaginable, and worked a minimum of eighty hours a week for entirely unprotected pay regulated by an invidious, slave-like system of ‘pass tickets’.

  Silvertown struck in the third week of September 1889. The primary demand was that workers should be entitled to overtime pay for weekly shifts exceeding eighty hours. For the duration of the strike Tussy commuted daily to Silvertown from Chancery Lane. Between 6 a.m. and midnight she travelled by Underground, overground, buses or trams. When public transport closed at midnight she walked home, or just stayed through the night and kept on working.

  She spoke every weekday and Saturday, sometimes several times a day, at the factory. On Sundays she spoke at mass rallies in Hyde Park (29 September), Victoria Park in Hackney (6 October), Clerkenwell Green (27 October), and again in Victoria Park the following Sunday, when 10,000 workers marched from the docklands to Hackney, led by Silver’s workers, all with union tickets stuck in the bands of their hats.

  The Silvertown strike pickets were pitched battles. Although picketing was legal under British law, the factory owners and police refused to allow it. Blacklegs were brought in under police escort. Once they were inside, they slept in the works, supplied with food driven in by government vans. ‘The Blacklegs in the works are getting v unmanageable,’ Tussy wrote:

  132 were seriously burnt (through lack of skill) in one week; they had a fight yesterday and one Blackleg . . . stabbed another. Out of 45 men brought from Brighton 42 had had enough of it, and had not only ‘given notice’ but have promised to put ‘a shilling a man’ in our collection boxes. In many ways this fight is the most interesting we have had. It is distinctly on a question of principle.26

  Engels wrote to socialist leader Friedrich Sorge that ‘Tussy leads the gasmen (under cover) and this union certainly seems to be by far the best.’27 However, Tussy was not under cover in her leadership of the women gas workers. For nearly three months she led the women from the front. Eleanor climbed on chairs and tables to harangue workers in Silvertown pubs, gathering her skirt up briskly above her ankles and revealing a flash of red flannel petticoat.

  Eleanor formed the first women’s branch of the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers on 10 October 1889. On Sunday 27 October, the executive council formally admitted the Silvertown Women’s Branch and its secretary, Mrs Eleanor Marx-Aveling, to the union. This new role, she told her sister, ‘takes up no end of time’.28 Tussy was now a public leader of a major union. The formation of the Silvertown Women’s Union was critical to British labour history.

  Eleanor knew that subsuming women within the male-led union would not work. Nor would ghettoising women’s labour rights in a separate organisation. Women’s participation and representation had to be incorporated in every aspect and at every level of organisation, action and process. A wrong done to one is a wrong done to all. This strike and all others would ultimately fail unless the women workers unionised and coordinated strategically with the men’s unions. By dividing workers by gender, the employers kept everyone’s wages down. If male workers accepted women’s labour as being of less value than their own, they allowed employers to undercut their wages. Net result: lower pay for the entire workforce.

  The division of labour into men, women and children, Eleanor explained, was simple long-division divide and rule. This was not clever economics or the natural law of markets; it was the unnatural law of patriarchal commodity capitalism. Adults of both sexes must refuse the co-option of minors into child labour and insist on the rights of working-class children to education and play. Women must take the lead in refusing to undercut the wages of their fathers, brothers, lovers and husbands. Men must insist on women’s wages being equal to theirs.

  Eleanor explained the structure of industrial capitalism in plain English. Inequality between men and women in the workplace did not just favour or support capitalism, it made capitalism possible. Each great strike of 1889 taught the union movement an important lesson. The crucial lesson of Silvertown was the necessity for men and women workers to work in unison.

  The Silvertown strike ended in defeat on 14 December. When the first snow came, hungry workers could no longer hold out. Bailiffs hired by the employers started evicting families from factory-owned lodgings. Will Thorne, supported by the union executive, urged workers to return to the factory rather than starve themselves, their families and communities. They needed to live to fight another day. The remaining international relief funds were distributed amongst the 450 remaining locked-out workers.

  But as Eleanor pointed out, the Silvertown defeat was chiefly due not to the actions of the employers but to the failure of skilled labourers to continue to support their unskilled colleagues. Some highly skilled labourers had the vote by the end of the 1890s. The Amalgamated Engineers’ Society of skilled labourers scuppered the strike by returning to work.29

  The Dock Strike had taught the necessity for skilled and unskilled labour to organise together. The Gas Strike succeeded in large part because it applied this principle. Silvertown failed because it did not. ‘The great danger here in England is the spirit of compromise,’ Tussy wrote. ‘I am glad the Gas Workers are saved from the “patronage” of the bourgeois.’30 So saying, she headed off with Edward to the General’s distinctly bourgeois Christmas meal, crowned by the steaming glory of Lenchen’s legendary plum pudding.

  At the beginning of December Eleanor and Edward had been offered a new job editing Time, the monthly shilling journal recently bought by Bax. The day the Silvertown strike ended, Eleanor started writing and commissioning for the next issue. As she quipped, there was no reprieve after the end of her work in the docklands; now ‘I have not . . . too little but . . . too much Time.’31

  One of the most important resolutions of the 1889 Paris congress was to establish May Day as an annual demonstration of the international solidarity of labour in the demand for a legal eight-hour day. Eleanor spent the first months of her thirty-fifth year working to get this resolution implemented in Britain. At her instigation, the Bloomsbury Socialist Society campaigned to bring the broadest possible base of London workers to observe May Day at a mass rally in Hyde Park.

  The Socialist League and the SDF distanced themselves from the May Day campaign, though their rank and file supported it. Morris and the Socialist League were in favour of May Day as a demonstration of general international socialist solidarity but opposed the specific call for the eight-hour day. They felt it was of peripheral importance.

  Tussy rallied support for what she called the ‘universal May Day demonstration’ all over Britain. Unions subsidised her travel so she could speak at eight-hour demonstrations. The Bristol unions, for example, sent her thirty shillings to cover her return fare. After the meeting she handed back ten shillings to the treasurer with a typed account and her receipts. What a contrast between Tussy, who accounted for every ha’penny and farthing she spent, and Edward, who never accounted for any sum of money, however large or small.

  Because of the Socialist League’s refusal to back the call for the eight-hour day, there were two May Days in London in 1890. On 1 May about 3,000 people convened on Clerkenwell Green under the banner of the official Socialist League and were addressed by William Morris and others. On 4 May, upwards of 250,000 congregated in Hyde Park and were addressed by Eleanor and others. Nearby in Paris, the first official May Day attracted 100,000 supporters to the Place de la Concorde.

  May 1890 was also the month o
f the first annual congress of the gas workers’ union. Eleanor was elected to the national executive committee. The show of hands in the hall supporting her nomination was unanimous, and – embarrassingly – accompanied by members leaping to their feet and roaring cheers of approval.

  As secretary of the women gas workers and serving member of the gas workers’ national executive, Eleanor was a leader of one of the biggest emerging labour movements in the UK.

  Tussy was now so much in demand that she had to ask the press not to publicise her name as a speaker in advertisements unless they had checked that she had agreed to appear. On several occasions where her name was billed without her agreement to speak, protest and disturbances ensued at meetings and rallies when she didn’t turn up.

  Inspired by her vision that women and men needed to coordinate and work together in order to restructure the labour market and stop the divide and rule of wage-undercutting, various organisations asked Eleanor to come and show them how to organise, strategise and take action. Amongst them were the fast-growing numbers of shop assistants in the expanding retail service industries. Women and men worked together closely in this sector, particularly since the advent of modern department stores.

  In March 1890 the Hammersmith branch of the Shop Assistants’ Union asked Tussy to address a meeting at the Hammersmith Palais – the music hall Palace of Varieties. They wanted her to endorse their campaign calling for a local boycott of shops that refused the union’s demand to implement a fixed eight-hour day plus overtime. Tussy commended the union’s good sense in involving local consumers in a retail boycott. She declared herself willing to sign the petition and support the action, but she recommended that the union might want to consider removing the word ‘boycott’, as this was an indictable offence under British law.

  She suggested replacing the illegal ‘boycott’ with ‘exclusive dealing’, which was legal in contract law. So ‘we will boycott’ became ‘we will go in for exclusive dealing’. With self-taught knowledge of the law and a two-word edit Tussy saved everyone who signed the petition from potential prosecution. There followed Sunday marches and mass meetings supported by shop assistants from all over the capital. ‘Our Old Stoker’ addressed most of the gatherings.

  The retail employers threatened legal action but their lawyers advised them that the framing of the protest was technically legal. Eleanor had protected what was, indeed, an all-out boycott. Skirmish and negotiations ensued.

  By 3 April all of the Hammersmith shopkeepers had capitulated and agreed to the eight-hour working day in order to reopen their hard-hit businesses. The shopkeepers had hired expensive lawyers from Chancery Lane. Tussy ensured the Shop Assistants’ Union organised within the rule of law. David beat Goliath.

  The onion-skinners at the Crosse & Blackwell factory in London’s East Ham called on Our Old Stoker to help them organise industrial action. Onion-skinning was a hazardous job and the workforce comprised exclusively so-called ‘unskilled’ women workers. Women skilled with knives and cutters laboured twelve- to fourteen-hour shifts with their arms plunged elbow deep into noxious chemicals, inhaling lung-burning fumes in unventilated workrooms. They suffered from eye infections, and skin, respiratory and reproductive diseases, which in turn caused permanent disability and layoff without medical support or pension. Top wages for onion-skinners were two shillings and threepence for a fifteen-hour day – but most received only a shilling for a full day’s work. Eleanor organised 400 women into a union. They set terms for an eight-hour day, minimum standard wage and improved work conditions, and struck.

  Within a week, Crosse & Blackwell were unable to meet their orders to retailers. Management tried to bribe the women with selective pay rises and, in final desperation, free beer for all workers. These offers were rejected; the skinners won.

  From onions to sweets. The factory girls (most of them under twenty) at Barratt’s sweet-making factory in Tottenham invited Eleanor to come and address them and advise on their strike, prompted by the draconian system of fines imposed on them by management. To try to pacify them, the Barratt’s board offered the young women a free party, described by Eleanor as ‘a beanfeast’. She challenged them to dish out ‘beans’ to Barratt’s in return and led a demonstration of 800 women and their male supporters through the streets of Tottenham. Their action was successful, but Eleanor convened a review meeting with the young strikers and discussed how they would have been more effective if they’d joined the union before being forced into action.

  All-male labour forces, such as the railway workers, also asked Eleanor to work with them. Railway employees, Eleanor wrote, worked hard and were paid badly, yet they held the potential power to bring the industry of the entire country to a complete standstill.

  A few weeks later, Tussy made history as the first woman to speak on West Drayton Green, a long-established public meeting place for democrats and radicals. One of the topics raised by the women at the meeting was the problems they encountered at home if their families or men refused to join unions. When the women organised strikes or unionised – or both – some of their boyfriends or husbands verbally and physically abused them, or threatened to throw them and their children out of their homes – even if it was the women’s wages that paid the rent. Tussy suggested to these women that they insist potential lovers show them a fully paid-up union card and, if they would not, show them the door. She was only half-joking. Keir Hardie expressed the same view when he observed that men who were unable to be true to their co-workers and brothers would make bad lovers and husbands.

  In a speech to the gasworkers’ union gathered in Northampton market square on a Saturday morning, Eleanor stated that workers would brook no opposition to the continuing struggle for ‘a legal eight-hour working day’. She reminded the mass gathering that unskilled workers were more vulnerable to unregulated working hours:

  Up to the present time the Trades Councils and old Trades Unions have been not merely indifferent, but actually hostile to the union of the unskilled workers. But . . . there are hopes that . . . this suicidal opposition will cease and the skilled and ‘unskilled’ will row together. The latter sorely need organising. They work ter­ribly long hours for wretched wages. Our Union has started and is being cordially helped by the Socialists.32

  Much of the dissension within the union movement about legislating working hours stemmed from the fact that fixed working hours affected working women more than working men. Craftsmen, for example, rejected the call for the eight-hour day. However, there was one exception: there was majority support for the eight-hour day for miners – the one industry in which unskilled labour was absolutely dominated by men. The sexual division of labour in the industrial workplace under capitalism was laid bare by the eight-hour movement.

  Tom Mann, Will Thorne and Ben Tillett were all sons of working mothers. All three insisted on the absolute necessity for legislation on working hours. Eleanor hammered home the point that the principle of overtime pay could not be established without first benchmarking what constituted a working day. Most women labourers were classified as unskilled and most were working mothers with the primary responsibility for childcare, home and – if they had one – a working husband. These women were the most vulnerable to the difficulties of undefined or unlimited working hours. Women worked and to them fell the burden of reproducing the labour force to feed the capitalist machine.

  To many men women were, by definition, unskilled workers. Aware of the division and debate this caused in the union movement, Eleanor tackled this sexism head on. She started to refer to herself in her speeches, pointedly, as ‘a more or less unskilled worker’ who was nevertheless a leader on the union executive on which she had served almost since its foundation. As such, ‘it is my duty to protest against the statement that the “unskilled” do not demand a legal right to the eight hour day.’33

  Provoked by this intervention, her fellow – male – unionists and political allies cavilled, in hilariously misogynist terms, o
ver whether or not Eleanor could fairly call herself an ‘unskilled worker’. All agreed that she laboured very long hours but they refuted her argument that she was ‘unskilled’ as she came from the intellectual class. But Tussy’s socialist sisters got her point: as a woman of any class she was, by legal and social definition, classified and regarded as ‘unskilled’.34

  There was no question that Tussy worked extremely hard. The turnout in Hyde Park that first May Day bore testimony to the effectiveness of her campaigning, alongside the other almost exclusively male union leaders. The General described the 4 May demonstration as ‘nothing short of overwhelming, and even the bourgeois press had to admit it . . . the platform where Tussy was, had a brilliant reception.’35

  Eleanor made a speech that first May Day of 1890 that encompassed her determined socialist internationalism, her commitment to British trade unionism and the need for a parliamentary labour party to represent working people:

  We have not come to do the work of political parties, but we have come here in the cause of labour, in its own defence, to demand its own rights. I can remember when we came in handfuls of a few dozen to Hyde Park to demand an Eight Hours Bill, but the dozens have grown to hundreds, and the hundreds to thousands, until we have this magnificent demonstration . . . Those of us who have gone through all the worry of the Dock Strike, and especially the Gas Workers’ Strike and have seen the men, women and children stand round us, have had enough of strikes, and we are determined to secure an eight-hours day by legal enactment; unless we do so, it will be taken from us at the first opportunity. We will only have ourselves to blame if we do not achieve the victory which this great day could so easily give us.