Margen
23 June 1888
Bow, a working-class district in the east of London, is home to the Bryant & May match factory. Most of the people filling its rooms are young women and girls. They cut, dip, dry, bundle and pack matches through long shifts, surrounded by a substance that soaks the air and clings to hands, clothes and food.
Annie Besant, a journalist and campaigner for workers' rights, publishes White Slavery in London today, a report on factory exploitation, in The Link, the reformist weekly she edits. Before writing it she has talked to women from the plant. They have told her what they are paid, what deductions they endure and what happens when a forewoman decides they have talked, arrived late or dropped material.
The fines come out of small wages. There are also deductions tied to the materials of the job. A worker can finish her shift and discover on payday that several offences, decided inside the factory itself, have cut the money she will take home. The company presents its posts as steady employment.
The sum that circulates most in those days is not published by Besant: it is put together by Henry Hyde Champion, a socialist editor, setting the two ends of the same balance sheet side by side. Bryant & May pays its shareholders dividends of over 20% while paying, in the rooms of Bow, what he calls starvation wages. The fines come out of that second figure, never the first.
The article also records a harm no wage slip can explain. Some workers begin with toothache. Then come swelling, abscesses and wounds that will not heal. The jawbone can be left exposed, become infected and die. The face is deformed, the pus finds a way out and the smell announces the disease before the patient can hide it. In severe cases the destroyed tissue forces surgeons to remove parts of the jawbone.
The workers know the danger from their workmates. The management knows the accusations circulating against the industrial process. Yet keeping the job means walking into the same rooms every day. Eating near the work increases contact, because there is no proper separation between the contaminated area and the place set aside for rest.
The factory reacts by trying to discredit the piece. The workers are pressed to sign a statement denying the accusations. Signing would mean asserting that Besant has lied and that the conditions denounced do not exist. Refusing means standing up to a company on which hundreds of families depend.
The refusal spreads along the workbenches. The company dismisses one worker; accounts differ on the formal excuse, but her workmates link the expulsion to the campaign to impose the denial. By the next day the news has gone round all three floors.
5 July 1888
Some 1,400 women and girls, enough to fill a large theatre, walk out of Bryant & May today. The walkout halts production and turns a piece of journalism into a visible strike. The workers demand that the dismissed woman be taken back, that the fines end and that the company hear their claims without reprisals.
The question about their jaws already has a chemical answer. Bryant & May uses white phosphorus, a highly reactive form of the element, in the flammable mixture of the matches. Its vapours and residues come into repeated contact with the workers. When they reach the mouth, especially through damaged teeth or wounds, they can cause bone necrosis: the progressive death of the jawbone, almost always the lower jaw.
In the factory they call it phossy jaw, the phosphorus jaw. The surgery available consists of removing the dead tissue, but an extensive operation leaves the face caved in for good and carries its own risk of killing the patient.
There is an alternative. Red phosphorus, a more stable and less toxic form, makes it possible to manufacture safety matches without causing that necrosis. Using it costs more and demands a different design: the igniting material is split between the head of the match and the surface it is struck on. The technology able to prevent the disease is available, but protecting the workers costs more than carrying on as usual.
The way in is the teeth: dental problems, common among people with little access to care, make it easier for the substance to reach the bone, and once the necrosis has started, pulling a tooth does not stop it. The infection advances while the worker loses her job, her income and part of her face.
Besant meets the strikers and helps to organise public support. The workers form a committee to put their demands. They raise money, explain the dispute and take their case, in deputations, to public figures who end up backing them: that money feeds the families who have lost the wage.
The company maintains at first that conditions have been misrepresented. Halted production makes that answer hard to sustain. Every day without the workforce multiplies the commercial pressure and attracts new questions about the fines, the dismissals and the phosphorus. Consumers start to connect the name printed on the boxes with the damaged faces of the people who make them.
The dispute also changes the relationship between Besant and the workers. She had published the accusation, but the strike is not a performance staged by a journalist. It is the workers who leave their posts, elect representatives and decide which concessions to accept.
The pressure turns a local dispute into national news, uncomfortable for a company that guarded its commercial reputation.
The factory can no longer solve the problem by hiring another workforce straight away. Replacing around 1,400 people takes time, training and a willingness that is scarce while the press describes the disease. The strength of the strike comes from having walked out together: no forewoman can dock a fine from the whole production line and expect the machines to keep running.
17 July 1888
Bryant & May gives in after less than two weeks of strike. The dismissed worker gets her job back and the company agrees to abolish the system of fines that cut wages, to restore the packers' wages it had lowered and to stop requiring that boxes be carried on the head: from now on they go in barrows. It also undertakes to receive complaints through representatives elected by the workers, a channel that reduces the immediate power of foremen and supervisors.
The agreement includes a dining room away from the rooms where the chemicals are handled. Eating stops meaning opening your lunch beside the dust and residue of the matches. That separation does not remove white phosphorus from the process, but it corrects an obvious source of exposure and recognises that the place of rest must be kept clear of contaminating work.
The strikers go back without having yet obtained the immediate disappearance of the compound responsible for the necrosis. British industry will go on using white phosphorus for years. Its legal ban will come later, driven by a wider campaign and by international pressure. The victory of July concentrates on changes that can be applied inside the factory: reinstatement, an end to fines, representation and a safe place to eat.
The women also set up a union of their own, and they set it up after going back, not as part of the agreement. The Union of Women Match Makers holds its inaugural meeting at Stepney Meeting Hall, in the east of London, and elects as president Sarah Chapman, a matchworker at Bryant & May herself. On 4 August, 468 new members enrol. It is run by the workers who stopped production, not by a charity set up from outside.
The 1,400 walked back in through the Fairfield Road gate with the system of fines abolished, the dismissed workmate reinstated and a dining room of their own to open their lunch in. White phosphorus stayed inside until 1 January 1910, the day the law banning it across the United Kingdom came into force.