London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (17 page)

Women's rights and that moonshine, my pippin. Thinks I'there's a barney on here' And wherever there is hens on the crow, 'Arry's good for an hinnings, - no fear! Needn't tell you my views on the subject. The petticoats want keepin' down,

Like niggers and Radicals, CHARLIE; but spouters in bonnet and gown, While they haven't got votes are amusing. They can reel it off and no kid. Though I hold their right line is to marry, bile taters, and do as their bid.119

By the last decades of the nineteenth century the cockney character that 'Arry represented was a largely negative one and, according to Stedman Jones, was in need of a political and cultural makeover. This was achieved by the coming together of elite and popular culture in the music hall of the 1890s and in the creation of a new stereotype of the Cockney, the hard working costermonger as played by Albert Chevalier. Chevalier used a version of cockney dialect that, while not representing an accurate depiction of coster patter or street slang, gave his audience the sense of cockney speech and made him a more acceptable and engaging presence to the popular theatre-going audience. Chevalier was a less grating character than 'Arry. Easier to embrace and identify with, he was also altogether less threatening to the political classes. Gradually the image of the Cockney changed - from being brash outsiders they were brought back into the fold of the nation. After the upheaval of the London Dock Strike in 1889, and the long-standing fears of a revolutionary residuum, the Cockney emerged in the early twentieth century as a reassuring figure of optimism for early Edwardians. As Stedman Jones notes, this reassuring image was recreated in the 1940s as the Ministry of Information drew upon the `cockney spirit"with its emphasis on "cheerfulness" and the "carry-on spirit"; as the dominant motif in its attempt to sustain morale during the Blitz'.izo

It is very hard to see the real Eastender, the indigenous resident of East London, among all these competing images of foreign migrants and local Cockneys. Most of the population of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green was white and English-born, although London attracted migrants from all over the British Isles. Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth both mapped the community of the East End but these give us views of the inhabitants filtered through a middle-class perspective. The overwhelming image we are left with is that of the poverty of the area and the desperate conditions of its people. This we will address in some detail later and so in finishing this look at the people and geography of the East End we might explore one event in which the real denizens of the east come to the surface in a more positive and proactive way. These were not the flash'Arry's of Punch nor the furtive criminals of Mayhew's London, Labour, and the London Poor (1861), but instead the Match Girls who took on Bryant and May and won.

STRIKING A BLOW FOR THE WORKERS: THE MATCH GIRLS' STRIKE AT BRYANT AND MAY'S

On 23 June 1888, the Fabian socialist Annie Besant published an expose of conditions at the Bryant and May match factory in the Bow Road, Tower Hamlets. On Friday, 6 July the Aberdeen Weekly Journal reported that:

A strike of match girls in the employment of Messers. Bryant and May has taken place under peculiar circumstances. Mrs. Besant having, in a publication known as the `Link, given particulars of a system of inflicting fines on the match girls for trivial offences, two girls suspected by the firm of supplying the information on which the article was based were dismissed. The remainder of the female employes [sic] failing to sign a document controverting Mrs Besant's statements, came out on strike yesterday.121

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 histories 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.