London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City

by Gray, Drew D.

  The declaration of industrial action was immediately backed by the Women's Protective and Provident League who urged its members and `its friends' not to buy the company's matches. The walkout on 5 July involved 1,100 or more employees who paraded in the streets for the next two days requiring the police to bring reinforcements into the area in case of trouble. Bryant and May made it quite clear that they would resist any attempt to control the way in which they treated their employees.122 The dispute was taken up by Annie Besant as part of an ongoing campaign against the practice of `sweating' (the overcrowding of workshops and the deliberate flouting of the factory acts that we have already seen in relation to immigrant labour in the clothing trade of the area). Besant, along with her ally Charles Bradlaugh MP and others, had consistently called for tighter restrictions to be applied to workshops and the staff employed in them. The House of Lords was undergoing an investigation of the sweating system in the East End, which it eventually published in August 1888. The committee concluded that there were `grave evils' associated with the practice and recommended that its brief to investigate be extended throughout the The practice was defined by a witness to the committee thus:

  The sweating system I take to mean that the work is taken from a merchant by a contractor, who lets it out again to a sub-contractor, and he employs a number of men to do the work.124

  Charles Booth, however, suggested that the term was more popularly applied to the consequences of this system of middlemen who `transmit this pressure [from the demands of wholesale suppliers] to those working under them, masters and men suffering alike from the long hours, insanitary conditions, and irregular earnings characteristic of the East End workshop. 115 Booth was loath to be drawn into condemning a system he was still in the process of exploring himself but he clearly agreed that it represented an abuse of labour relations in that an unfair advantage was being taken of unskilled and unorganized labour. The key here was the use of the term `unorganized. The late Victorian period witnessed the gradual emergence of organized labour trade unions but before 1888 they had had little success in challenging the low wages and poor conditions under which many workers suffered. Arguably the Match Girls' Strike and the Great Dock Strike of the following year did much to change this situation.

  The shareholders at Bryant and May met on 31 July at the Cannon Street Hotel to hear Mr Wilberforce Bryant condemn the `so-called strike' as the work of socialist agitators, ill-informed trade unionists and `some young men in connection with Toynbee Hall' He claimed conditions in his factory were excellent and that wages were better than average for the area. He rejected attacks on the payment of dividends to shareholders (which presumably went down well among his audience, who voted themselves 15 per cent per annum) and argued that the falling off of some workers' pay was merely a consequence of a reduction in fulltime working during a general decline in the trade and poor weather affecting their ability to earn work picking fruit in the summer.126 The offer of a mere 15 per cent dividend probably reflected the initial impact the strike had caused along with Besant's exposure of the conditions under which the Match Girls worked. In an article for The Link Besant had claimed that Bryant and May had been intending to pay a dividend of 20 per cent (on top of payments of 23 and 25 per cent in previous years) at a time when they were asking their workers to start work at 6.30 a.m. (8 a.m. in the winter) and continue through until 6 p.m., for little pay. The work was hard and injuries not uncommon: one girl was fined for `letting the web twist round a machine in the endeavor to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, "never mind your fingers" ' Another, who carried out the instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless' 127 Besant passionately argued the case for the Match Girls who were the seeming victims of unrestrained capitalism, their employer even stopping a shilling from their wages to pay for a statue of Gladstone (of whom he was a fervent admirer) in Bow In a later article for the Gazette Besant argued for a matchmaker's union made up of male and female workers so that it was `strong enough to guard its members against abnormal oppression' but recognized that poorly paid workers, as the Match Girls undoubtedly were, could little afford the dues of union membership. Her vision was of an integrated national and indeed, international, federation of trade unions to give workers real power and influence. Not that she necessarily saw industrial relations as a `war' between the classes: striking was a last resort, something to be used judiciously, but it `cannot be wholly given up until capital and labour become friends instead of

  It would be a mistake to view the Match Girl's Strike as one orchestrated and inspired by Annie Besant or her Fabian friends. True, she visited the factory after Clementina Black had alerted her to the poor conditions endured by the workforce and handed out copies of The Link as the girls came off shift but it was the workers themselves that took direct action in protest at the sacking of one of the girls who gave information to Besant. A delegation of Match Girls appealed to Besant and her paper directly for help and other newspapers, notably the Pall Mall Gazette and the Daily News, took up their cause.13' Subscriptions were raised to support the strike and on Saturday, 14 July the strikers packed into Charrington's Hall to receive a strike payment and a plea from Besant for them to stay `hold together till they should have compelled their employers to do them justice'. There were rumours that the factory owners were going to bring in workers from Glasgow to break the strike or that the business would be removed to Norway and Sweden. The former was refuted while the meeting was told that inquiries were being made in regard to the latter.131 The poor pay and long hours were behind the dispute but the publicity surrounding the Match Girls also exposed the health risks that these young women were taking. Matches were made with yellow phosphorous, a highly dangerous chemical. A campaign was launched to protect workers from `phossy jaw' (necrosis of the jaw) and it was suggested at a public meeting that Bryant and May had `hoodwinked' the factory inspectorate for some time about conditions within their

  Bryant and May were eventually forced to concede and despite their threats to replace them with Scottish labour all the workers were reinstated. The girls were allowed to form a trade union, which they did in August of that year, the Matchmaker's Union, and the factory promised better conditions and increased rates of pay. By all measures of industrial dispute this was a victory for the workers and Reynolds's News championed the result:

  A victory of such a complete kind is full of hope for the future ... It will encourage the many others of the poor and helpless classes of workers of both sexes who are ground down under petty exactions, such as have been exposed by this strike, to make their grievances known, and to organise themselves for their removal."'

  It was a tremendous achievement for the 1,400 or so workers at one East End factory and it undoubtedly inspired others to stand up for their rights in the future. 114 Clearly the support of Besant and The Link helped to bring much needed publicity to the strike, as did the intervention of several other London papers including the campaigning Gazette. But along with this we should also note the character and attitude of the Match Girls themselves. They had struck before, in 1886, and Clara Collett - researching for Charles Booth - had pointed out the reserves of energy and love of life that the factory workers at Bryant and May's possessed: `The superabundant energy displayed by the match girls when their work is over, although they have to stand up all day at it, is inexplicable and is in striking contrast to the tired appearance of machinists' 135 The Gazette also remarked on the large numbers of Match Girls who `stroll along, in parties of from two to ten, or twelve, joking, romping, with each other and the passers by' to the theatre and musical hall, determined to have a 'good time' and enjoy themselves.136 Annie Besant was clearly inspired by these young women and perhaps it is among the women of the East End that we can look to see the real spirit of the area. The Match Girls' Strike may have a been a relatively small event - indeed it is given surprisingly little coverage either in h
istories of trade unionism or of late nineteenth-century London - but arguably it had a long echo. The workers who struck in July 1888 were not demanding vast increases in wages, nor were the dockers who went on strike in the following year. Instead they demanded fair treatment, accepting that theirs was a hard job, a dirty job, but that did not mean they could be abused in it. That determination to stand one's ground in the face of oppression, to put up with difficultly but not if it is unfair, might usefully define the inhabitant of the East End, regardless of their ethnic origin.

  In a sinister footnote to the dispute, the owners of Bryant and May received a letter from `John Ripper' on Saturday, 6 October which stated that:

  I hereby notify you that I am going to pay your girls a visit. I hear that they are beginning to say what they will do with me. I am going to see what a few of them have in their stomachs, and I will take it out of them, so that they can have no more to do on the

  The Ripper murdered no Match Girls and he never fell into their clutches. It is quite easy to imagine his fate had they caught up with him.

  CONCLUSION

  As we have seen the East End Cockney was as much the product of contemporary construction as the East End was itself. Little of what we understand about the East End comes to us from within the area itself, almost every image we have is presented to us from outside. We are constantly witnessing a magic lantern show about the East End rather than seeing the district and its community for ourselves. We might ask ourselves whether this really matters? We continue to play fast and loose with the past, appropriating bits of history and `heritage' as they suit our modern purposes. The Ministry of Information's adoption of the cheerful Cockney may have obscured to some extent the reality of the Blitz but it is also built upon a level of truth. The modern East End is a very different place to the one that the victims of Jack the Ripper knew and worked within. `Banglatown' has echoes of the vibrant international communities of the 1880s and the clothing trade still predominates in the Commercial Road. But the area is changing, it is dynamic - it refuses to sit still, or stay preserved for posterity as the `East End' in tableau. The immigrant communities of the area have regularly moved on and displaced themselves. The Irish were early settlers, occupying the poorest homes in Spitalfields and Whitechapel before the incomers from Eastern Europe in turn ousted them. As the Jews prospered they in turn moved on, out to the suburbs of North London leaving room for the next wave of Asian immigrants in the postwar period. The old synagogues have become mosques, kosher butchers have become halal and the street traders sell saris and sweet breads rather than kittels and salt beef.

  In 1957, Michael Young and Peter Willmott published their seminal study of families and family life in London.13R They chose to focus on the East End and in a challenge to contemporary notions of the `nuclear' family they uncovered a world in which community and family retained very strong ties with the streets and geography of the East End. The women of the area who, by implication, could not rely on their men folk to bring up and support their families maintained strong female networks of kinship. As the authors have written: `The extended [East End] family was her trade union, organised in the main by women and for women, its solidarity her protection against being alone'.139 This is, in some ways, how we now view the East End - channelled as it is through the fictional relationships of the inhabitants of Albert Square - as an area in which some essence of community spirit and extended family ties survives. This is a positive view of East London and it sits alongside that other long-held and equally constructed view of the East End as a dangerous playground for the middle-class `slummer', full of exotic foreigners, criminals, prostitutes and downtrodden paupers in need of rescue.

  As we have seen in this chapter much of the responsibility for representations of both the ingidenous and immigrant populations of the East End can be laid at the door of the popular press. The so-called `fourth estate' was flexing its muscles in the second half of the nineteenth century and it is arguable that without them the story of the Whitechapel murders and the character of `Jack the Ripper' would be little more than a distant memory. With this in mind we can now look at the actions and attitudes of the Victorian press in greater detail.

  4

  Read All About It! Ripper News and Sensation

  in Victorian Society

  nothing can ever get itself accomplished nowadays without sensationalism ... In politics, in social reform, it is indispensable

  So spoke the father of investigative journalism, William Stead, in 1886. Stead, as the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, was in the vanguard of the so-called `new journalism' that revolutionized the newspaper industry in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The development of a new and, arguably, `modern' press had much to do with the importation of new technologies from America and a growing literate and relatively affluent population at home. New journalism can be closely linked to sensation literature, crime reporting and other forms of popular culture such as the music hall and melodrama. The newspaper industry was highly competitive in the late nineteenth century, no more so than in London. This competition drove editors to develop new styles of news presentation to attract readers and advertisers to their products and to search for news items that would keep readers interested enough to follow stories for days or weeks on end. In the Whitechapel murders they had an almost ready-made sensation story to report. `Jack' provided them with an ongoing news item that ran for several months and an almost mythological villain who harked back to bogeyman figures from the earlier part of the nineteenth century and beyond.

  The spotlight of attention that the Ripper murder threw upon the East End allowed the campaigning element of the press to decry the desperate poverty of the district and issue dire warnings about the state of the nation. The failure of the police to capture the killer similarly enabled some sections of the press to use this as a stick with which to beat the government and the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. In short the Whitechapel murders facilitated the creation of what Stanley Cohen has identified as a'moral panic' in late Victorian society. In this chapter we will explore the nature and development of the Victorian press and `new journalism, and their relationship to sensationalism and contemporary popular culture. In closing we will consider whether in their reporting of the Whitechapel murders the press were responsible for creating a moral panic in late Victorian London.

  THE RISE AND RISE OF THE VICTORIAN PRESS

  By the time the Whitechapel murders came to dominate the newsstands of the capital London was served by thirteen morning and nine evening daily newspapers.' In addition Sunday papers and weekly journals provided Londoners with a tremendous variety of news, gossip and stories from the Empire and beyond. By the 1880s newspapers catered for a diverse reading public as literacy rates improved and printing costs fell. It was probably this latter development that allowed the massive increase in newspaper sales in the second half of the century. Newspapers had been around for over 300 years but had not become a fixed part of daily life until the late eighteenth century. Newspapers had cut their teeth in the propaganda battles of the English civil war but were subject to government censorship until 1695. Up until 1700 all newspapers had been printed in London but the new century saw the appearance of papers in major provincial centres such as Norwich and Bristol. Experimentation followed quickly and by 1760 some 130 different papers had been inaugurated (although only 35 managed to stay in business) and 200,000 copies were being printed daily - this figure had doubled by 1800. By the late eighteenth century reading a newspaper was an important part of a gentleman's daily activity.

  The 1780s saw weekly, thrice weekly and daily newspapers in circulation and by the early years of the new century the political weekly and the Sunday newspaper had appeared. Growth was dramatic, especially in the provinces. However, the provincial press in the eighteenth century had relatively little that was original on their pages. They took their news from London, steered clear of controversy and filled their columns wi
th advertising. However, increased competition in the 1800s led to some changes in these local papers. These provincial papers began to report local issues and were more prepared to use editorials to voice concerns and make political statements. This in turn led to the emergence of some of the more important, and in some cases more radical, papers such as The Manchester Guardian.

  By 1814 The Times had improved its output by utilizing steam power, and faster production was eventually combined with faster distribution after the advent of the railways. This helped the `respectable' press outstrip and outsell the `pauper' press (organs such as The Black Dwarfwhich catered for a radical middle and working class that demanded electoral reform). The radical press was still effectively muzzled by government interference and restricted in its readership by the high costs of production and by taxation. However, after the failure (or defeat) of Chartism, politicians became more willing to reduce restrictions on the press in the form of stamp duty.

  Historians have characterized the press as an agent of social control in the nineteenth century, inculcating accepted norms of behaviour and standardizing opinions about state institutions. Some contemporaries certainly felt the press could have an important role in society; there was a belief, as expressed by men such as Palmerston and Gladstone, that the press could be force for good by bringing the nation closer together. The new police (created by Peel in 1829 and gradually introduced across England and Wales over the next 25 years) believed it could help cut crime. Educators believed it could increase knowledge in a positive way. As Alan Lee concludes, politically, `it was argued, a cheap press was an essential component of an educated democracy'.2 This new confidence in the positive potential influence of print media resulted in tax reform in the 1850s. The duty on advertising was removed in 1853, and this was followed two years later by the exemption of newspapers from stamp duty. Finally production was made cheaper still by the abolition of paper tax in 1861. The result was the birth of a middle-class daily press that was much more affordable to many more consumers. One of the first beneficiaries of this was the Daily Telegraph, which had carved out a circulation of 250,000 by the 1880s. The numbers of newspapers soared - from 795 in 1856 to `well over 2,000 by 1890'.3