Striking a light

The Bryant and May matchwomen and their place in history

Louise Raw, Continuum Publishing Corporation, 288 pages, paperback, £16.99

In 1888, around 1,400 match workers, mainly young and female, went on strike at the Bryant and May factories in east London. Up until now Annie Besant, the famous Fabian socialist and middle-class journalist, has virtually monopolised the attention of historians studying this dispute. She is portrayed as the strike leader.

But Louise Raw demonstrates that the strike was not orchestrated by Besant. In fact Besant wanted not a strike, but a consumer boycott of Bryant and May to embarrass the company into making reforms.

Raw expands on John Charlton’s book It just went like tinder — which analyses the key role played by Irish immigrant workers in the union movement in London — to stress how Irish republicanism helped form this radicalism.

And she uses the electoral roll to suggest that most of the match workers were of Irish descent.

This was also true of the dockers of the time, and Raw uses the same method to show that the two groups of workers were family, friends and neighbours. This helps to build a picture of the match workers as among the vanguard of new unionism.

Don’t miss this now it is out in paperback.

Reviews contributed by Bookmarks, the UK’s leading socialist bookshop. Order online at www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk