Matchgirls' strike
In July 1888 the women and teenage girls working at the Bryant & May match factory in Bow, London, England went on strike.
At first, the strikers were protesting the dismissal of a worker after employees had refused a demand from Bryant & May management to repudiate an article on terrible working conditions at the factory.
When management promised to rehire the fired worker, the strikers continued the industrial action to bargain for a cessation of unfair deductions from pay and for other improvements to working conditions.
In the late nineteenth century matches were made using sticks of poplar or Canadian pine wood, twice the length of the finished product.
[13] This manifested itself in, initially, toothaches and flu-like symptoms, then tooth loss, abscesses, swelling of the gums, the formation of fistula and necrosis of the jaw.
In 1850 the company entered into a relationship with the Swedish matchmaker Johan Edvard Lundström in order to capture part of the market of the 250 million matches used in Britain each day.
The women and girls involved in boxing up the matches had to pay the boys who brought them the frames from the drying ovens and had to supply their own glue and brushes.
[29][c] The day after a mass-meeting at Victoria Park, London, up to 10,000 match makers— mostly girls and women between the ages of thirteen and twenty—marched to the Houses of Parliament to present a petition.
[40] Social activist Annie Besant and her friend Herbert Burrows became involved in the situation and published an article in her halfpenny weekly paper The Link on 23 June 1888.
Management quickly offered to reinstate the sacked employee but the women then demanded other concessions, particularly in relation to the unfair fines which were deducted from their wages.
[49][50][51] In 1891 the Salvation Army opened up its own match factory in the Bow district of London, using less toxic red phosphorus and paying better wages.
[40] The owners, Francis May and William Bryant, had started importing red-phosphorus based safety matches from John Edvard Lundström, in Sweden, in 1850.
They had some partial success because: many of their supporters refused to buy white phosphorus-based matches; they automated much of the match-making processes (but not box filling), thus bringing down costs; and the use of child labour in dangerous trades had been prohibited.
But the factory still struggled to compete on price, and after 1898 the Salvation Army War Cry newspaper ceased to advertise their matches.
[54] In 1966 the British actor Bill Owen collaborated with songwriter Tony Russell to create a musical about the strike, named The Matchgirls.
The strike was next featured in an episode in the second series of the BBC's Ripper Street, originally aired on 11 November 2013, with various victims of the conditions in the factories seeking revenge on the parties involved.
The matchgirls were featured during the "HerStory" video tribute to notable women on U2's tour in 2017 for the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree during a performance of "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" from the band's 1991 album Achtung Baby.
[58] In 2022 English Heritage announced that the Matchgirls' Strike would be commemorated with a blue plaque at the site of the former Bryant & May factory in Bow, London, later that year.
[59] The plaque was unveiled at Bow Quarter, Fairfield Road, Tower Hamlets on 5 July 2022 by actress Anita Dobson and Sam Johnson, great-granddaughter of strike committee leader Sarah Chapman.
