S3 – INTERVIEW 2: Louise Raw

labor history. In addition to organizing an annual festival in the Match Women's Honor, Dr Raw has served as a historical consultant for the BBC and appeared on camera in series like The Victorian Slum which is available in the US as Victorian Slumhouse. She has written regularly for British newspapers including The Independent, of The Morning Star and New European. She drops in on BBC Radio London and contributes to programs on BBC Radio Four. It's a privilege to have

her here on Unobscured. Researcher Karl Neelli sat down virtually and talked with Dr Raw for this season of Unobscured, and you'll hear that a storm rolls in part way through their convert station, but Louise couldn't be stunted I'm grateful for that, and I think you will be too. Carl and Dr Raw begin their conversation with the winding route into studying and writing forgotten stories from the past. This is the Unobscured Interview series for season three. I'm

Aaron Minky. I'm a historian, but I like to call myself an accidental historian because that's really accurate in terms of what happened. I'm not an academic historian who always thought they would do that. I'd lass school of fifteen and I've done. You know, the jobs you do when you leave school of fifteen really pubs and restaurants and shops.

And I really, through being involved in the trade junior movement, fell into becoming the historian, in particular of a strike that happened in the East End of London in that big year of the strike of the Branton main match from him and I really started as an essay on a trade in Labe, a history course about Oh, I don't like to say how long ago, but twenty plus

years shall we say. And I'm still writing that essay Coal really because I'm still researching the match and I'm still finding out new things about them and They were my teachers. They really were. They may be dead, but let's not hold that against them. They were my best teachers. Through them, I learned so much about how history, as I don't need to say to you or your listeners, isn't just a neutral record of everything that happened. It's

incredibly political. It can be incredibly biased. It's also very very powerful. We need it. We as human beings, need stories of where we come from. We need stories of people like us. That's really important, whether we're black, or working class or female. We need stories about people like us, our achievements and our importance to our country. That's so

vital to a sense of our identity. And I learned from my research that British history, of course, is incredibly bad at that it is a forgetting machine, really that forgets all the bad things. Well, the Britain's done all the bad things about the empire. Americans may need to be told that Britain did do some bad things historically. You know, we've not been wonderful through the years. You will be stunned, I know, to hear this. But it's

not just about the empire. All the achievements of anyone who's not the kind of great white individual, really preferably a great white man. We allow a few women to sneak in as well. Anyone who doesn't fit that mole gets really excluded from the narrative. We just can't believe they kind of achieved anything. I realized how important that was, and it became my obsession really to be a collector of those stories and a teller of those stories, because

I think history should do something. It's not just there to be interesting and fascinating, just about who we are and what we're capable of, and it's so important to inspire us today in terms of what we can achieve. People like the match women were supposed to be powerless. They were supposed to be completely irrelevant. Although they're part of the majority of the country, the working classes, they're supposed to be completely irrelevant to it. They're just toiling away.

We don't need to know their names. There are kind of undifferentiated blob of the masses, and we don't need to know anything about them because they're not really people. Of course, that's the humanizing. Of course, it's very dangerous politically to go down that route, and we need these stories. So I'm trying to really turn the spotlight of history onto those stories that have been kept in the dark

or pushed into the dark. So part of the way that you have shined a light on some of these stories is with a fantastic book called Striking a Light that tells the story of the brandon a Match Women's Strike, what they won, the durable union that they built. UM, that had kind of all in victim to that forgetting machine. As you say, UM, can you describe you mentioned the amount of time that you've spent learning their story. Can you describe some of the process of what it took

to learn their story? What did that take? As a loving description, it really was like wrestling with this beast of history and trying to get it to give up these stories that it was obscuring. It was a bit like who done it? When you know who done it, but nobody wants to believe you about who done it. So I had to prepare a case, and of course I had no witnesses. That was the first problem. The first thing that I did was to go to the archives.

I kind of toddled down in my lunch break. I remember from work, I happen to be working quite close to where that Brian to Make Company archives would then kept, which was in the basement of a to local history museum. And I had not been in an archive. I had to tell you, I did not know what that entails at all. So I was completely fronting it out. Oh yeah, hello, I'm here to look at it. I know exactly what

I'm doing. And they took me down to this basement and they brought me loads and loads of enormous cardboard boxes. Now this is not how archival work is done. Now you're ordering one document at a time if you're lucky. But then they just left me with these boxes, and I thought, I have no idea what to do here. So I opened the boxes started routing through papers in there from the sixties, the nineteen sixties. It's all jumbled up, fascinating.

So I just had a route through and very quickly came upon some evidence that the strike was not at all as I've been taught it. Those historians who had written about it, the mainly manly historians, the mainly manly Marxists. That you had written about the strike, I've only done so very briefly. There would be the odd line about it, or this strike happened, but it wasn't very important. It was just a few girls. It was a big deal. And crucially that the strike was led from the outside

by a socialist called Abbescent. She's chiefly pushing to the role of strike leader because she was middle class. That meant it's not a real, proper worker organized strike. So that means immediately it's downgraded. It's not an important fact of labor, of working class history, because what are the match girls in that scenario. Puppets? They're just puppets. They have been told what to do. So I'm in the archives.

I quickly come upon a note the foreman had made the formula a factory saying these are the women who we think are the troublemakers and the ring leaders of this strike. And I thought, oh, hello, Well, if this is a strike that was completely organized from the out side, how can there be ring leaders from inside? So I started to draw up a timeline to prove I suppose I was trying to prove myself wrong, because I'm not

an academic at this point at all. As I say, I'm less called at fifteen, and you know, men have written in books that this was not an important strike and that this was led from the outside. Who am I to question that? And yet I'm a trade unionist. I didn't know at the time that, you know, my whole life really had been a preparation, and that I had the advantage of not being an academic, of having been involved with strikes, that having been involved with workers

a bit like this. So I had to prove it, and I started drawing up a time and my goodness, you know, I'd love to say I was following some kind of classical academic tradition, but I kind of made it up as I went along, just to pursue this story. How do you do it? There's no timeline of events. We only have a few lines on it. Though some girls went on strike, wasn't a big deal. Nothing to see here, and move along until some men do it with the ducks strike the next year. So I'm thinking, right,

I need a timeline. So I literally done in the middle of my front room, put a line of papers, wrote dates on them, and then got every bit of evidence I possibly could, from newspapers, from people's journals, from any kind of commentary. I could find local papers, national papers, you know, George Bernard Shaw's diary, any Besson's journal, William Morris, any of the celebrities socialists who were around at the time,

and working through these I managed to piece together. Okay, so it seems to have this seems to have been what really begun the strike. This seems to have been what happened next. And I went to the Colindale newspaper library, absolutely wonderful. Ruined my eyesight, you know, looking at microvision micro film of reports in local papers, because local papers did carry the strike. Actually there was a paper called The Star that was very interesting, sent reporters down there.

But and from that I did manage to come up with a good, solid timeline which told a completely different story from the orthodox version. This is a proper strike. It's a spontaneous strike. It's a reaction to management bullying, and they're brilliantly organized. They're not just these little girls

who are who are being told you have. The orthodox version would suggest that any Vescent, who was a journalist at the time, went down to the factory and sort of, for no apparent reason, told the match girls they were going on strike. I say, girls who know you don't know me, but George Bynature and I who don't know either have had a vote, and we've decided for no real reason. You know, it's a Wednesday, we're board, we've decided you're all going on strike. I mean, how ludicrous.

And supposedly the women just said, oh god, Bleshamama, certainly, whatever you say, we'll be there. This is not how strikes happened. This is not how real life happens at all all. So I had to really claw back, and once I had the timeline, I had immensely contradictory accounts, you know, orthodocs history, and he bessn't led the strike, and he besn't Oh my god, the match wouldn't have gone on strike, and paraphrasing obvious legion actually said that,

and she's thinking, oh no, this is a disaster. Why are they gone on strike? We can't afford to support these people financially. Oh shit, or the Victorian equivalent to that, not knowing the strike has happened, And I'm thinking, my goodness, if I can find this out, what the hell is happening here? How have historians who have looked at this strike managed to conclude that this woman who's who's who's like sort of that shaggy song. It wasn't me, that's

Sammy Best. She's running around and I did not stop that strike. That was not my idea, she said. I think it's a terrible idea that they've gone on strike. Why did they have to do it? And yet historians have looked at that and gone yet finitely started by this middle class woman. That's how blinkered we are, isn't it? In terms of class? We just can't accept anything else. And then I thought, well, I've got these accounts, but

they're mostly middle class accounts. They're from journalists or as I say, from your Morris Is and your George Burnit shures, and there's this kind of hilarious incomprehension of middle class people observing what working class people are doing. Is if there are another species. Really, And one journalist goes along to the picket line and he says, well, is it

really extraordinary looking women? Gosh, they are strange. They seem to have this sort of style where their clothes they've got wear patches on their clothes and they have very broken boots and it's very odd. Yes, this is not a fashion fella. They are poor. You know, there's complete the class is just there's such a gulf between a middle class journalist and a working class match battery woman.

There's complete incomprehension. So I thought, I'm trying to put a case here without the witnesses, without the real witnesses, who are of course the women themselves. What do we do about that when they are very, very dead by the time I'm researching this, And I thought, well, the closest I'm going to get, isn't it is to get to their descendants, if possible, if I can possibly find grandchildren, maybe even great grandchildren by this point, that's as close

as I'm possibly going to get. And goodness, lots of historians advised me not to do this. That's a terrible idea. It's very hard to trace women forward through history, to trace their families. It is hard, by the way, that's completely true. But also again I felt, there was this class, and why would you want to talk to their descendants? They probably won't know anything about the strike. They might be a bit old and perhaps a bit do dally by this stage. Would they even would they know? Would

they understand the importance of it? And you sort of think more to be just there, probably working class still, I mean, who knows. They may not be at its point, doesn't mean they won't know anything about this event. But to me, that seems to be the impression that I was being given a really really bad I did to do that, but I persevered. I wrote a little piece for the Irish Times because I thought a family that

have gone back to Ireland. I knew that a lot of these women were Irish or Irish heritage, and I didn't really get me anywhere. Got me a lot of interesting letters, but nothing that really connected me. And then I was doing a talk at the Docklins Museum in London and I was saying, oh, I'm talking about the match, and I was saying, oh, and I'm looking for descendants, but it's so difficult to find. And at the end a woman came up to me, a woman called Joan Harris,

and she said, oh, sorry to bother you love. I know you're trying to probably get away, but I think the photograph you showed of the women, I think that's my grandmother in there in the back, and probably her sister as well, my great aunt. And I was sort of like, lock the doors, did not let this woman escape. You are going nowhere, madam, until I have your address. And I immediately went around to interview her like like an arrest. I've been drained by as quickly as I could.

That's where it all began, fascinating story of Mary Driscoll, who was her grandmother. There I spoke at another museum, the Ragged School Museum, and I was talking about that. I was saying, and would you believe I got so lucky. I met this woman who was a descendant and two bloats at the back where we'll actually love. Yeah, our our grandmothers were matched with it as well. And again I was like, go nowhere, oh nowhere. And I met Jim Best and Ted Lewis. These were so valuable, so valuable.

You know, all history can be looked down on a little bit is not not quite proper, not quite documentary. But these people taught me so much. I would walk around the East End with Ted Lewis and he was a historian. You know, he might not have been a professional one, but he was a historian, that man to his bones. Because he could take me around the modern East End and make me see past the concrete and say, well over there, girl, there was a music all over there.

Over there, that's the pub where my grandma used to go. That's where she used to buy her jelly deals. That's where she used to go to the market. And suddenly you see it. You see it, and it's real, and those people are brought closer to you, so that but wouldn't have happened without those descendants, and they are I was learning from them, you know, there was none of this thing of the historian goes to interview the informants

who were very minor in the process. I learned everything really from them about how it really was and about how how events were remembered in the East End, which runs parallel but separate from how their grandmothers have been remembered in conventional history. They don't have this Annie bess at this top down version of this story. They have that was my grandma and her mates, and they were pretty proud of it. They were quite pleased about their story, Lave. Yeah,

they were pretty pleased about that. Didn't have much time to think about it because they were straight back to work, so they didn't have time to sit around and write your books like you're doing. But they were Yeah, they used to talk about it and they were pretty pleased, and that's amazing. That's a you know, an uncorrupted, sort of preserved in amber version, and that's just close to the horse's mouth as you're going to get m hm. And I love reading the book because you can see

their stories shining through. I mean, I think I'm so glad that you that you met up with them and talked with them, because it gave so much life to your book. So I hope we'll spend especially a few more minutes talking about Mary Driscoll later on. Um, but let's let's go now. Can you take us a little bit back to that London of the late eighteen hundreds. Um, let's start with getting oriented in the place. What's the geography of London like from the big picture to the

East End? Well, we really only have an East End from around this period. Of course, London's always had an Eastern basis. It's not new. They don't suddenly stick it on in the eighteen eighties, but it only starts to be talked about as the East End around this period. And London is such a separate collection of communities and such disparate areas, it's it's hard to conceive really of how cut off different bits of London are from one another,

and particularly along a class line. This is really really crucial. You can't look at London without that, and people start to talk about east End to West End, worst End to best End, and that's what we're talking about. We're talking about posh London and disreputable London, which is what the East End becomes. Everything really changes with industrialization. London

becomes much more divided. Before that, you've had rich and poor living fairly cheap by gewl So imagine a typical London square if anybody's ever seen EastEnders, You've still got some of those old houses facing onto a square, and the rich people are living in those lovely big houses, and then behind them rows and rows of sort of service streets really where people live who are perhaps working for them, but people are close together. And then we

have industrialization. Everything changes. People come in from the countryside from working in you know, perhaps on farms or working in a very feudal set up really perhaps the lord of the manner in some capacity. They come flooding into the new towns and cities in especially London to work in the new factories. Nothing's ready for them. Nothing's prepared, so they just come rowding into London and the rich get the hell out as soon as they can, and

scheme trains, of course make that possible. Suddenly we have new suburbs, so you can get out, you can come back into London for work, and then you can get away from all the dirt and the dust and the disorder of industrialization. And you know, it's a pretty stinky process, industrialization, particularly in the East n where you had a lot of slaughter houses as well, absolutely dank on Sundays. So they could get out, and they left the poor, particularly in the East End, just to get the hell on

with it. They had very little infrastructure, you know, forget about social services or really good schooling or any sort of help. Of course, there are no welfare benefits at all in those days. They're just left to get on that. They haven't even got street lighting in the East End when you read about you know, the darkest East and the dark streets where they really were dark because they

were unlit a lot of the time. And we start to find that people even who live quite near to the East End claim they don't know where it is. I mean, it sounds so bizarre, but literally Jack London finds this. He asks people. I think he asked some shopkeepers. Oh, I'm trying to find this place called the East End. Can you tell me sort of where does it start?

Where does it begin? How do I go? And these, you know, quite well, quite respectable shop teams, I've heard tell of it, But I am afraid I couldn't tell you where such a place as I would never go there. One one simply would never go there. And people would pretend they couldn't find the East End on a map. Of course they could, but it became this embodiment of

sin and depravity and disreputable policy. So you were not respectable if you had connections in the East End, if you had friends there, if you went there apart from business. So it's so bizarre, isn't it. We have this area which is producing a lot of the wealth of the country, that we have all these important factories there, we're unloading the wealth of empire at the docks there. It's crucial,

crucial to the glittering success of the Victorian Empire. And we're pretending it doesn't exist, We're pretending we don't know it's there, and we're calling it the Darkest East as orientalist language, as if it's a strange terror incognito, this weird place completely cut a drift, sort of culturally and mentally, cut a drift from the rest of London. So London is a divided place. And if we say what was life like in London, we'd have to say, well, whose

life and where? It completely depends on how much money you have, I mean doesn't it always, but particularly at this time and in this place, and what kind of life are you doing and where are you? Completely different to the extent that there are events in history, there are marches and protests, and the match Women Strike is one of them, where the poor leave their district, you know,

and that wasn't allowed at all. People were horrified knowing your place literally keeping in your place is geographical as well as cultural, and people would throw things. I mean, we have protest marches in theies where the servants of the posh clubs in Palman, you know, the gentlemen's clubs in Palma come out on the door sorts and throw

things at the poor who were marching past them. They throw heavy glass asteries, they throw shoes, you know, they're cleaning the gentlemen's shoes and they get their carrier, they throw them at the poor. You know, go home, what are you doing here? Get out of here? So who's London for the poor? They were told this is your part of London. The rest of it does not belong to you, and you shouldn't even be there. When the match women during this marched Parliament, it literally stopped the traffic.

People stopped and stead and cat called and hurled abuse at them because the poor were, yes, supposed to be preferably not seen as well as not heard. You were supposed to be invisible. That was a lot more comfortable, of course, for the rich if you were invisible. So it's just this hugely divided place at this point. And you've mentioned that you've started to bring in the context of London as the largest city in the world at the time, the nerve center of a global empire. How

would you describe the conditions of working people? You know, do you have a few more comments on the relationship between the conditions of working people to London's financial significance to its imperial significance at the time. As somebody said on observing the doctors at work, there's this huge contradiction because they're unloading the wealth and the riches and the silks and the spices and the teas and all this wonderful, luxurious stuff, and they're touching all things and tasting none.

They're dealing in these goods they can never ever afford them their unloading tea that they will never taste, their unpacking spices, that they will never be able to enjoy, silks that their wives will never be able to wear. So there's this immense and it seems to modernize immensely hypocritical division. Here we are this incredibly rich, I mean mostly because we stole and stuff from other people around

the world. But you know, that is how the British do things, as a little tradition of ours to do that. But we have become incredibly rich off the backs of other people, including our own poor people. So they are the engine of our prosperity, and they're not getting to share in it whatsoever. We treat them almost like machinery. You can process things, you can produce our wealth, there's nothing to do with you. You don't get a share

in it whatsoever. And yet we have this jingoistic sort of flag waving narrative that's in the music halls at the time, and in all the songs, everyone in Britain is doing well. We're also incredibly proud to be British. And yet most of Britain is being excluded and might let him wave a flag occasionally, but they're being excluded from any of those benefits. Huge wealth is being made and people are working twelve sixty nowadays and starving to death. How do you square that? How is that in any

way fair? Even according to the fairly simplistic christian Ish Victorian narrative that everyone's in their place, and God puts you in your place, and you know, the rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gap, be happy with your place in life. Even then, it's a little bit hard to argue that the people making the wealth, helping to make the wealth, should be actually starving to death whilst working. What do the Victorians do about this?

Where they could have reformed things, They could have improved housing, they could have improved working conditions, But why would you do that? That's expensive. It's a lot easier to divide the poor into the deserving and the undeserving. Virtually no one is deserving poor. Really, even if you are, they'll find a way that you're doing something wrong and being the wrong sort of poor person. So we can blame these people, Oh, well they must be drinking, or well

they can't really be working hard enough. And when there are occasional stories of a doctor being called to a woman who's who's working sixteen hour days and who's literally died of malnutrition, it's all a bit awkward and embarrassing and quite now what to do about that, So tend to do nothing really, but she probably had a husband who drank. It's probably some kind of you know, properly

behavior was going on there. And it's really only when the upper classes absolutely have to I mean, there are some exceptions, of course, there are reformers and philanthropists, but really it's when there's something like cholera and they realized that disease doesn't necessarily respect class boundaries. That we get people going into the East den missions to the East End to try to help these poor souls, but in very much a top down way. There's no equality there.

It's so this poor souls, this poor there's massive people called the poor who are always with us, as Jesus sale and will go in and pat them on ahead a little bit and tell them to clean themselves up and sort themselves out, and give them a little bit of rather cold charity. So there's no there's no respect really for working class people at all. They are written

about as animals a lot of the time. The terrible conditions that they're living in are blamed on them, as if they're choosing, you know, as if a family of Irish migrants who are living fift into a room have chosen that, you know, they could have lived in a five story town, has what they decided they did much rather or live in one room with no running water and granny dying in the corner and much more fun.

That's what they like to do. So we stigmatize and we blame people for conditions that are absolutely no fault of their own MHM. In the book, in Striking a Light, you cite an argument that in the Victorian era, um here's the quote from the book, the power, social standing, and influence of the industrial industrial bourgeoise increased exponentially to the point where it had been argued it became the hedgemonic class that its values eventually suffusing and dominating the

entire society. Did you find this sort of thing to be true as you conducted your research? And to what extent does that include ideals about domestic femininity among working class women? So how true was it that really it was middle class rather even than than upper class kind of culture that became the dominant culture in Victorian society. Yes,

we definitely do see that happen. We see what people might be familiar with as the angel in the house narrative that the little woman should be embroidering by the fire and making a lovely domestic haven for her man to come houmet. Now we think of that as just being old fashioned, like that's an idea that's always been there, but it wasn't. You See, this is a new idea. What the men who and it is generally men that are always who make money through being capitalists by owning factories.

For the first time, there's a real social mobility that's possible for working class people. If they have enough money to buy a factory to set up production of matches, say, which is actually quite cheap, it's quite a low capital in kind of thing to do, then they can start to rise up a social scale in a way that

Jess wasn't possible before. Suddenly they've got money, Suddenly they have status, and they look around and think, well, what are we going to do about the fact that we're still looked down on by the upper classes who say a gentleman doesn't work. Now, these aristocratic sorts, you know, they're always a bit short of cash, so they're very happy to have their sons marry our daughters. They're very happy to borrow money off us because they're always short

of the old readies. Aren't they to heat their hope their massive country piles. But they look down on us. No gentlemen would be involved in trade. We can't have that. So they decide how they want to be seen, and obviously they scrapped the idea that no gentleman can be involved in trade. But what they take from the aristos they like this idea of the lady of leisure. They

think we'll have some of that for ourselves. We like that, we like the idea of being able to show our far wealth and stages by the fact that our daughters and wives don't work, and that they can be decorative and that they can keep a lovely home for us. So they take that idea. You have to be able to hold at least two contradictory ideas in your head at anyone time to be a Victorian really really important if you're going to be a middle rock class Victorian.

So you have to consider that these men are going in two factories where the labor is very often female. Seventy five percent of the workers who industrialized first were women. So women have always worked, despite the myth that they hadn't. So you have to go into work, make your money from sort of Elsie and Mary and Martha and all those women who are making your fortune for you. Then go home and say, well, women shouldn't work, disgraceful women

working as Darib was not respectable. They should be the piano and riding horses and looking pretty. So it's very very strange, and us have an effect on the people that it's criticizing. It really does. We do see women saying working class women who said they didn't work after they got married, because this was the idea. You know, once you're a married lady, you shouldn't the breadwinner wage of things, which never existed and was a complete fantasy.

Your man will look after you. You should be at home, looking after the children and making the house lovely for him. This myth does penetrate the minds of working class women, and you can see that when you're going around trying to do all history interviews and saying to people, tell me about your your granny or your great granny or your mom. Did they work? Oh? No, they never worked after they were married. Well, I mean they took in laundry, and they did a bit of canning for the local factory,

and they actually made match boxes at home. And in fact, these women never start working. They worked any four seven. But it's the narrative gets adopted to the extent of people saying, oh, yes, I'm not really working because you know, I'm just working to pin money. Not true at all. And we also see the working classes sometimes completely rejecting this respectability narrative, which is the big thing for Victorian's respectability.

They love a bit of that, at least in theory, not so much impractice as it turns out, but they adapt. It's really interesting. So you'll get people who will say, well, my family were respectable, but the Pitaways down at number seventeen, they definitely weren't respectable, or we were respectable, but two streets over they weren't respectable, so everyone redefines it to

suit themselves. Factory girls are the most looked down on, probably, and they're looked down on by servants as being really common and rough and probably a moral But they in turn look down on servant women and say, well, you're basically enslaved. You we are free. So everyone's are keying for position and defining and redefining, but they are very creative with it. They don't and obviously they can't just accept this notion of respectability and say, oh no, we're

not respectable, we're terrible people. We shouldn't be working. They know they have to. But we also see people completely rejecting it. We see people whose parents who are trade unions, are very poor and working class will say to them, don't ever let anyone look down on you. Who We'll walk them around London and say, look at these beautiful buildings in brush London. Who do you think built them? That was our lord, that was us from the back slums.

Always remember that, remember who has created London really, from the navies, you know, building the railways and the canals. We have made this and always be proud and always remember that, so you do get a lot of that resistance as well. It's a really fascinating time for that.

In writing about middle class stereotypes, you describe the symbolic triad of the good wife, the celibate spinster, and the prostitute as kind of the three categories that were possible to imagine for women, and you also write that, of course, as you've been saying, working class women who were working outside the home, particularly alongside men, they didn't exactly fit any of those three, but they risked classification, mostly as prostitutes, if they were going to be shoehorned into one of

those three. Would you offer a few more comments on on perceptions maybe of sex work and factory work for women at the time, and why it was so easy for especially middle class Victorians to equate those two. It's no coincidence that the term working girl becomes a euphamiss them for prostituted women or for sex workers at this time.

A study of Victorian literature really fascinated me because they conclude to that if a novelist wanted to have her reader sympathized with her there down on their luck heroin, they would make her a prostitute rather than a factory girl, because nobody had any sympathy with factory girls. They're sort of worse in some ways because at least with prostituted women. There's this fallen woman narrative, which the Victoria's get terribly excited about. They love a fallen woman because a fallen

woman can be redeemed. You see, she can realize how ghastly and beastly her behavior has been, and she can come to Jesus and she can be forgiven. But somebody who's working, well, that's a little bit different, isn't it, because they're probably going to continue doing it. You see this incredible judgmental and very sexualized by the way narrative.

Even in labor reports of the period, there was one mining commissioner, you know, who knows what working life is like, you would think, and yet he looks at the terrible conditions down mines where you've got girls, women, boys, men crawling through tunnels all day on their hands and knees, you know, naked to the waist with chains around their waist, pulling carts of coal. Absolutely horrific. Imagine that heat imagined the difficulty in breathing. Imagine the physical horror of that.

But he looks at that and doesn't say, well, yes, the conditions are pretty awful. He writes about it as if it's some sort of orgy going on, because the women are partly dressed, partially dressed as you would be in those conditions. You're not gonna wear your best dress, are to crawl on your hands and knees through a coal shaft. And he says the conditions that the site, the spectacle of these women at work was absolutely revolting, disgusting.

It was seen. No brothel can beat it. And first that you think, well, Mr Mining commission you seem a bit well versed and exactly what a brothel is like. I wonder what Mrs Mining Commissioner might have had to

say about up that one. But also how bizarre, how bizarre, and how sort of pervy really and slightly fetishistic do you have to be to look at children, you know, in those awful conditions and say, oh, good grief, they're partially closed or they must all be having you know, they must be all be having sex with each other, disgraceful and disgusting, as if these people I must have thought, well, a chance to be a fine thing. You know, these

people are exhausted, they're absolutely exhausted, and they're starving. And yet that is what we see. We look at a factor and we see women working alongside men and we say, well, she's clearly no better than she should be. But again, that's a lovely way to be humanized people. It's a lovely way to stigmatize them and blame them. Well, you no wonder you're Paul. Look at the way you're carrying on.

It's absolutely disgraceful. And yeah, that symbolic triad is absolutely fascinating in this the fact that working women don't figure in it at all. When we do hear about working women, there are always comments on their morality. We have people like Charles Booth, who reported an investigated London posit poverty, and he will always say about groups of women, well, you know, they're a bit rough, but they're not too

bad morally. That's always significant. One of his causes of publicies I really love actually was having a drunken or fectless wife. I think we'd all like to be that drunken and effectless wife. But these are the judgments. There's always is incredible sexual judgments, and they're only really put on women, they're not really put on men at all.

And we see it in the Contagious Diseases Acts, where the government decides to act as if women are giving themselves scenarial disease in cases of prostitution, as if women are doing prostitution all by themselves. No one else is doing it. There can't be anyone else in bold. Of course, the reality is that midd class and upper class men are sneaking into poor areas and using them as sexual playgrounds. Who on earth is visiting the artles Paul Working men

often can't afford to. And there are also lots of incidences of people, you know, sexual predators, trying to drag women and children as well away from groups down the darkened back alleys. That's a very dangerous place. But we do get this siren idea that it's it's the women of the Eastern, the women of the poor areas, alluring these poor innocent men who are just trying to get home to their wives. Leave me alone, you wretched women.

They're being dragged into these brothels. It's incredibly bizarre, and even the people who are supposed to be in sympathy with these women, you're Josephine Butler's and your child's Dickens. There's incredibly patronizing and judgmental language about the women, as if they are somehow corrupt, as if they are somehow

eugenically degraded. And even if, like Charles Dickens did, you can save them from themselves and rehabilitate them from prostitution, you better and get them to move abroad, because we don't really want them staying in London. Josephine Butler who has a dying prostitute to live with her at the end of her days, which sounds lovely, but she assures everyone she's not letting her children go anywhere near this woman or see this woman, this poor girl who's tying

and consumpted, because they could be corrupted. So there really is this horribly eugelic idea of bad, bad women, contrasted with the angel in the house who you know, oh reathed in clouds of glory, the shining example, ghastly poem.

I have to say apologist to Coventry pat more fans, but ghastly poem epic poem by Coventry back pat more, where he writes about the life of the perfect you know, surrendered wife really, who completely subjugates herself to the needs of her man and casts herself down the gulf of his old necessities more falling and flinging and casting. There's an awful lot of that forman A currently written about his first wife who died young, and I could only say,

I really don't blame her. I think if I had to listen too much epic poetry like that, I would have chosen to die young as well. So again it's just incredibly hypocritical, and a woman's place in the East End of London is in the wrong. You can't do right for doing wrong at this period. That gives us a pretty well rounded picture of how middle class Victorians

were thinking about working women in the East End. Um. But a lot of your work has been to try, as you've said, through talking with Descendance um and through the other kinds of research that you did in archives and and all the rest, to try to get a

sense of what life was like for those people. And maybe could you offer us what life was like for those people in the East End if if we're when they could have expressed it themselves, what was life like actually in the East End, Not through the eyes of a Victorian journalist or a Victorian Victorian novelist, but from a Victorian worker. M Again, there's obviously no one East End life and no one account of East End life, but you can draw out some common themes for children

in particular. People look back on their Eastern childhood and they would tell me that they remembered the warmth and the comfort of very close families. I mean literally very close, because you'll be sleeping six to her bed sometimes if you had a bed, of course, but they remember that it's really comforting. And later, if they did make enough money to move out and have their own places, they kind of missed that, I kind of missed having their

brothers and sisters all around them. But then they would tell you it was incredibly hard. Mean, being poor is exhausting. It's exhausting now, it was particularly exhausting. And then you're working long hours and you may be all snugg in that bed together, but also your room is probably crawling with insects. It was a nightly process for kids to get their shoes and bash the black beetles that infested

the tenements. And the rooms of the Eastern so that they could go to sleep without being woken up by being bitten. And people would sleep outside actually on rules if they couldn't to the nineteen twenties to escape that. So nighttime, when you desperately need to sleep, is really noisy.

There's always dogs barking, drunk people shouting, people doing moonlight flips, the fine eestent tradition to try and get ahead of the landlord and the rent and load everything into a cart at midnight and flit off to your next address. But people do remember extraordinary solidarity, really, and the ingenuity that people used to help each other, but to do

it so everyone could preserve their dignity. So if you knew that someone in your tenement was really struggling, and perhaps husband had been laid off at the docks and they had no money, you wouldn't help them in that sort of patronizing, lady bountiful way that you know you resent being helped yourself by the middle classes. You send little Jimmy over to knock on the door with a saucepan and say, oh, all right, Mrs Jones, mom's made

too much food tonight. You know, silly old mayor. She made too much food, so she said, could you please use this for us, because we're just going to have to throw away otherwise. So you really would give people your dignity their dignity. The way that the poor organized themselves into these incredible communities. Every street had its queen, every street had its auntie. They weren't by different names, but there was a woman in every street who was

the go to gal. So if you were skinned, if you were in trouble, you would go to this woman and she would help you out. And this could be by the woman who was an official midwife before the NHS, the unofficial undertaker, and the person who would tell you which butcher you could go to if you were really skinned, and he'd give you the bones out the back door

so you can make soup out of them. Who tell you which shopkeepers would give you tick, would give you credit, Who tell you when to go to the market to pick up what they called the specs that the fruit and vege that got dropped on the ground. So it was all about your mates. You could survive. You had to be quite popular. Your social skills had to be pretty good, because if you're obnoxious. No one's going to help you. When the landlord or the bailiff comes knocking,

no one's going to look after you. But as long as you played by the rules and have this community spirit, people will help you. If your husband's violent, your neighbors will come in and help you. If dad is trying to sexually assault or attack the children when he comes home drunk from the pub, your neighbors will pull your children over the back fence and hide them in theirs until dad's calmed down. But it would be wrong to say that all these dempool were drunken, violent, not at all.

They couldn't have survived. There had to be very, very sensible, very practical, very hard working people, often women, who could make something out of nothing, who could feed ten children on not much more than fresh air, really, and make do and mend and repair and keep your place as clean as you could with no running water, you know, going down three flights of stairs, bringing the water up, heating out over the fire to get any sort of hot water, and yet keeping things just hygienic enough so

that everybody survives. It's a mammoth task. It's the policy Olympics. You wonder how anyone managed to survive this, let alone to thrive. But they did. And people look back with incredible respect on their moms and their grandma's who had all these skills and all this ingenerity. So it's a very very mixed picture. Of course, there's misery. Of course, there's death and horror and disease and violence. Of course, there is in starvation hunger all the time. But there's

also people who are very united. And they're particularly united because they know that they're judged and their look down on by everybody else, so they unite. So they take on this Eastender identity, which is an insult by the way. That's how it starts. East Ender is an insult, and they what we call revalorize that. They turn that around and they say, know, we're very proud of our streets, We're proud of our community. We're proud of our friends

and neighbors. We all work together, we all stick together. And they had a great deal of totally justified pride in that there were incredible people m and thinking about how these neighborhoods were changing shape around the working people. UM you talked about in Industrial Industrialism Reshaping London. UM in the book, you mentioned that when the St. Catharine's Docks were built, they displaced eleven thousand, more than eleven

thousand people who undertook that dock building project. And what happened with those people who were displaced? What did that look like for this east end of London where these communities were living. This was a disaster because even though their houses were pretty grim and pretty ghastly, they were at least houses. This was their home, this was near to work. Often these were dockers often who were displaced by the building of this new docks. A dock company

was set up. They've been trying to develop this area since the seventeen hundreds. They could see the profit in it. And it was Robert Telford and the famous Robert Telford, the engineer. It was his only big building and development project in London. And it was not just St Catherine's Docks. This happened as well when they built the underground they were just knocked down poor houses. Are that so much as by your leave? If you were better off and

the property owner, then you've got compensation. If you didn't tough on, you go. And we presume because nobody bothered to record where people went that they just went deeper into London. They just increased the overcrowding everywhere else they would have had no choice, perhaps stay with friends, go wherever you could. A lot of them would just have been homeless, and there was a large increase in homelessness.

But again this is very typical of London. We think of pulling down the tenements as a good thing, of flump clearance as a good thing, and of course getting rid of insanitary housing is a good thing. But if you're not providing any alto latives for people, how can it be? And that's what's so extraordinary. Very few people at the time wrote about that. They wrote about isn't this wonderful We're getting rid of all this awful housing? Was Hello, there are people in those houses. Where are

they going to go? They probably rather have a really grotty, dirty roof over their head with their family and friends and neighbors around them than no roof over their head at all. And of course if they're homeless, they get

judged and castigated for being homeless. And it's really it's quite surprising that that has still been talked about as this really interesting, huge development and how good that it got rid of terrible slums, And there's been very little comment even now on what a disaster it was to lose your home and how completely discombobulating. As if life wasn't bad and uncertain enough, suddenly you've got to move and you need to be near work because you can't

afford to get public transports, so you're working. So it could be a disaster. Couldn't it have to be four or five miles away from your work? Just everything just makes poverty worse. That's really what happens in London of this series, just about everything that happens happens to the poor and makes their lives so much worse. MM. So you've you've talked a little bit about that middle class

culture that shaped Victorian thinking about poverty in London. UM, let's talk a little more about the role of journalism specifically and especially stories like The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon series or The Bitter Cry about Castle London UM in creating an imaginative geography of the East End for London readers. Like we've talked about those two pieces you mentioned in your book, how influential were they and what kind of substance. Did they add to the the general

ideas about the East End. Yes, it's a very interesting period for the sensationalist press. And it all comes about because they dropped a tax on newspapers, so suddenly it's possible and quite cost effective to publish daily and in

order to keep readers interested. We get these serializations have often very dramatic and quite salacious stories, so we certainly get that with W. T. Stead, the journalist who wrote the Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon, and what that was about was the supposed sex trafficking of young London girls to foreign bruthels. And again, you know the foreign it's much easier to be outraged and to deal with and look at these things when it's not bruthels here in England.

It's those foreigners taking our girls. But what he actually did, I'm gonna said, don't think you get away with this now, was smuggled a young girl away to France just to prove that it could be done. He struggled to get accounts for various reason of that really proved this was happening extensively. So he did this too, at least show that it could be done, and to be honest, the

whole thing was highly dubious. He seems to have paid this girl's mother to effectively by her, and there's no suggestion that anything went on between him and this girl. I should stipulate, but the whole thing, you know, it's highly ethically questionable, to say the very least. But of course readers lap this up. Innocent young girls have been trafficked into prostitution. You can see how that's going to sell papers. But it also casts the people of the

East End in a ghastly light, doesn't it. They're selling their children these awful It proves everything, doesn't it that we've suspected about these people who are degraded and not really proper humans and their animals. And they will even sell their own children, that's how low they will go. So well, he's trying to get the age of consent raised with this, and ultimately he does achieve that, so

his aim is good. It's just is more demonization of the poor and more suggestion that the East End is this ghastly in moral criminal place where all these ghastly acts begin. And in fact, there was this idea that the poor didn't love their children which is a really strange one. How separate of a species have you got to be considered if people question whether you love your children? And there are even some commentators who say, you know, I've talked to some of this poor pl and jin

know they actually do, they actually love their children. The poor used their children. Well, they're very surprised about this. Why shouldn't they well, of course because their children are working. And again the ludicrousness to modern eyes of making people so poor that everyone in the family has to work from six years old and then saying well, do you love your children? I feel making them work is so

hypocritical to eyes. And then we have means the bitter cry of Outcast London, which again is a very very famous piece, but outcast the very language of it. You know, there are people who are beyond the pale, that outside normal society, and it is judgmental. It's very top down. We're looking down on these people. Were saying, well, they don't attend church very often, they're not regular attenders at worship.

Men's talks about that. An awful lot talks about immorality, very obsessed with that, the fact that in these crowded houses and what people are sleeping together in the same head. You know, there could be incests, there could be immorality. That's always the implication, and that if we're not careful in means his eyes, one of the reason we should do something about this, and definitely is saying that we shouldn't do something about this because we might have revolution otherwise,

and revolution the ultimate terror. So it's not let's be fair to the pool because it's fair, or let's stop people starving and die because we're a very rich country and nobody needs to starve and die. It's there will be consequences if we don't. There could be revolution if there don't. There could be people having the wrong sort of sex with the wrong sort of people if we don't.

So there's always this need to justify why on earth we should help these people who are you know, in the East and there within a stone strow of Posh London. They're so close to Parliament. And that, by the way, is another reason that the Eastern becomes so feared and watch and people are keeping an eye on it for signs of revolution because they there is this uneasy awareness

that's so close to the sender to repower. Are all these thousands upon thousands of people who we are working to death basically, and who we are making staff to death, and my goodness, we're all in trouble if they get a bit upperty m hm hm and over and over again.

This is something that you mentioned a little bit earlier, but I'd like to explore with a few more comments, um, the way that writers compared East London to the Imperial borderlands, and the kind of mystique, the kind of Orientalists thinking that was used to talk about the Middle East or or India were applied to bethnal Green and whopping um, could you give us an example of that kind of

writing that drew the imperial logic into London itself. We hear it absolutely constantly when people talk about the East End. It's the mysterious East. It's the darkest East. It's a terror in coordin eater, it's a darkened land. It's a place that we cannot find on a map. It's this alien culture. And of course that's again super handy if you want to justify the fact that you are letting people start is to say, well, they're not like us. To see, we can't really comment on how other cultures

in other countries live. That's up to them. That's not our business how they run themselves. And this is a separate country within our own country. These are not really people like us. They're not even really human. They're certainly not really normal English people. So what can we do? They choose to live like this, and it's another way of demonizing people and other in people. And we see

the result of this in what's known as plumbing. What people like to do who had read these sensationalist, dramatic tales of the Darkest East was to go and visit it, often with a couple of policemen who were paid to accompany them, and they would go around and stare at the poor. Basically, so they would go into the slums, into the tenements and look at how they lived. And it was supposed to be I suppose sometimes somewhat philanthropic. Oh dear, they could exclaim about, oh dear, how terrible.

You know, I do at least understand the conditions of the poor, because I bothered to go and see it. But then there were a lot of posh, young ladies and gentlemen who just thought it was a laugh, really, and it was a freak show. So it was akin to go and laugh at the bearded lady at the circus, to laugh at the freaks, and how awful that must have been to experience. I worked on a TV show for the BBC a few years ago called The Victorian Slum.

Loved working on it because they recreated a plum, essentially a tenement, and for an as geek historian like me, that's as close as you were going to get. It was gremendously exciting to be in those beautifully recreatible I said, beautifully that horrible living a conversation, but to be almost in it was incredible. But what I've never forgotten about that, and I'm still friends with some of the people that were the cast. When I say the cast, they weren't acting,

they weren't trying to pretend they were Victorian. They were sending modern people to dress like it and live like it, and see if they could earn money, see if they could survive without the welfare state. It was really eye opening. But I remember one day I went into do filming and they were furious, so angry and so agitated, and I said, what on earth it's wrong with you? You

all you've all got faces like thunder. And they said, oh, we filmed this thing this morning where people came slumming and they came into our rooms, they came into our boarding house, as they came into our courtyards, and they filmed us. They actually like we weren't there. They didn't talk to us, and they were even though they knew that this was the two thousand's, even though they knew these people had, you know, were not really laughing at them.

It hurt them emotionally. It caused them so much pain and in fact, one of the fathers that one of the families had to have counseling after doing that. Chauffeur, I think it was three weeks because it was just so awful not to be able to protect and help your family, not be able to protect and help his

children and his grandchildren as he wanted to. So I think that gives you some idea of what it's like to be right there in London and to have people saying, where is this mysterious country that is strange and mysterious denizens living And you're thinking, Hi, I'm right here, can you not see me? But you're being cast adrift. You are being outcast by your own society and community. M HM. I will say in in I love that that program. I watched it last year. Um. It's marketed in the

United States as slum House. I think I hope for any listeners of unobscured who want to get a little more of that tangible feeling, who want to try to experience some of the rhythms of Victorian working class life, uh slum house or the Victorian slum that program is brilliant for that. UM. So I really commend that too. Listeners, go check it out, give it a watch. It's it's very,

very worth it. In in striking a Light, Louise you right, um that the socialist groups which have been so well studied, um, they only represented a very small minority of the people who actually lived in the East End, and that membership was generally highest among the middle classes and men from

more affluent sections of the working class. UM. And if most of the socialists or the radical known to us today we're a middle class people, what can we actually say about the politics of East London's working classes and and poor. And what's so interesting is that we've just gone ahead and assumed that working class people in the East End were not political, as if somehow, just because you hadn't read car marks cover to cover the fact that you were starving and dying and being worked to death,

wouldn't wouldn't really occur to you. You wouldn't really realize unless somebody middle class came and told you. And even some historians that I greatly respect have written about that and said, you know, politics stirs them very little. Was the phrase that was used at the time about the

working classes. They're not moved by politics. They're just so busy trying to get ahead, trying to get work, try mine to live, that they will climb on each other, you know, they will do each other down in order to survive. And you could understand it, frankly, if that had been the case, because working those hours, that struggled to survive, that struggled to feed your family, what does it leave you for political thinking? But what's so fascinating

is it's not true at all. Working class people again and again have told us when talking about their childhoods, that they were incredibly politicized. It tends to be assumed that literacy, that being able to read is the be all and end all and if they were illiterate. I've often been told this, you know, don't you think you make too much louise about the poor being? Don't you think you're romanticizing them when you say that they were political,

because after all, they couldn't read all right. Well, humanity hasn't been able to read all right for a great deal of our history. And yet you know, we've managed pretty well. And for example, the Irish community maintained a

real sense of politicization through telling tales around the fireside. Literally, families would gather of an evening and they would, as one man called John Gibbons his reminiscences, unpublished Reminiscences of his Childhood I read, said, we would tell the tales of Erin's wrongs, and they would talk about all the terrible things that the Bricks had done in Ireland, and my goodness, there were enough to keep you going for

several evenings, I would imagine. And he they would talk about Robert Emmett, the Irish rebel who was executed and how he died, and somebody would recite his speech from the dock, and he said, how can we not grow up to be dreamers? Of them? Roast romantic dreams. How could those people not become passionate about Irish home rule, about Irish affair is, how could they not become passionate about their people? And this was recreated with non Irish

people as well. I mentioned before that one doctor's daughter remembered her dad taking them around for Sunday walks and saying, look at that beautiful building. Are people built that? And there were organizations like the Clarion Cycling Club. There was also a journal that was really widely read and Marry England, the wonderful book by the Clarions Robert Blatchford, which people would read. And there was a tale that I read

of a little girl's thinking. I remember that my dad would read to us from that from Mary England, and my mom would shout up the stairs, those children should be in bed, it's past their bedtime. Stop reading to them, let's go to sleep. And he would say, what I am telling them will do them much more good than sleep. So there was this awareness by parents that we have to politicize our kids, we have to give them a

sense of class pride. Another um reminiscence that I read was ever woman saying, well, we were told we were supposed to look up to our so called betters. But you know, my mom was was in service and she dusted the sideboard of old Lord Ponson b Smithe and she knew what he was like. She had to pick up after him. We weren't impressed by these people because we knew from our parents we were told that they were no better than us. And in fact, there are

constant attempts to unionize. There are constant attempts to protest and to rebel by working people. It's just that they often get their skulls broken by the police and the armies when they try it. It's not that they don't

try it, but then these stories also get misrepresented. There was an incident in six that led to violence when a protectionist group, so a group that are supposedly representing working people, are speaking in Trafalgar Square and they're saying we've got to keep these foreigners out of our British jobs and all that awful rhetoric that unfortunately is still with us, and this led to violence. This has been written about by historians saying, look you see, you see

this is what working class people were like then. They were so ready to fight foreigners. They were so ready to be sort of borderline racist and xenophobic, and they were so ready to riot all the time. But actually it doesn't take much research to prove that that whole thing was a front for employers organizations. It was them who are up on the posiums in Trafalgar Square speaking about the need to get rid of foreign workers and

to fight foreign competition. It wasn't genuine working people, and in fact, genuine working people who were listening were pretty disgusted and fought back against those speakers, and that's what caused the violence. And yet even comparatively re historians have written about that as an example of these uneducated, selfish,

a political poor people. But I would say you couldn't be a political and survive as a poor person in the East End of London if you take politics in its widest sense, if you didn't have enough sense of solidarity to say, look, we're all in this together, we all need to help each other, we all need to make sure Mrs so and so next door has got enough food because it could be us tomorrow. That very basic sense of basically important sense of networking and solidarity.

People brought that into factories and women in particular bought their networks of support and solidarity into the new factories and the new industrial jobs, and why wouldn't they? And really these things get dismissed sometimes by the serious label historians. Oh, that's not really a form of politics, but I think it's definitely, to my mind it is. And that was really the basis for trade unionism. For modern trade unisn't begins with this idea that we all need to help

each other. We know who, we know, we have class enemies and we all need to unite to fight them, and a wrong to one is a wrong to all, if you like, that's a lesson that you learned pretty quickly in the backslums of the East End. What's jumped forward a little bit um. What was it like to be Irish in London's East End? What was distinctive about the Irish community there? What was that experience like and was it typical of the Irish experience in other places

in London. Yeah, there's no one Irish experience in London, of course, but certainly it's a very different experience. If you're arriving from Ireland and extremely poor, with perhaps nothing but the clothes you stand up in and settling perhaps around spittle fields. That was always the zone of transmission, that was where people often began. Then if you'll say an Irish lawyer or a playwright, or if you're Oscar Wild, you know there's Irish people in Irish people at this time.

But it was said that if there was one thing an English working person despised more than a policeman, it was an irishman. So there were these awful divisions of Karl Marks commented on that. He said, oh, we have to stop this racist conception where workers don't unite together. They see the Irish is competition and they try and drive them out of the employment market. They need to

unite with them. Isn't that always the problem? And it's also a problem for women workers that male trade uniors would see them as taking their jobs because they were forced to work for less. So we do see Irish people being accused of causing their own povericy. This happens with Jewish people as well. It happens with most waves of migrant workers. They're accused of bringing down wages, they're

accused of causing overcrowding. To set against this, they do have really strong networks, so through culture, through music, through pubs. There are a lot of Irish pubs in London at this time and they're very important to the political life of London. And through the church, Irish people are very united, and we see a lot of what they call chain migration, which means you go to a certain area because your friends are there, so your friends are settled in London,

you come over and settle there. And we see entire streets becoming categorized as Irish that is an Irish area. And from the seventeen hundreds we hear people saying yes, in certain districts of London, you won't hear English spoken at all. People are speaking Irish or people speaking gaily. There's a priest who says, because I speak Irish, I'm really in demand for giving confession because most people can

only access to English priests. So I'm working flat out dealing with all the Irish people, and I never hear English spoken from morning tonight. And we also see in the seventeen hundreds horrible anti Irish riots in which people are actually killed. It's it's not written about it very much, but there were some awful periods of xenophobia going to attack Irish hands. I mean, how terrifying must it have been?

You know, for several days and nights, English people were told to put a candle in their window to show they weren't Irish, otherwise they could get their house pulled down. Irish pubs were attacked, Irish homes were attacked, Irish people were attacked. Apparently an Irish person was shot and actually killed in Brick Lane in the seventeen hundred. There's very

little evidence of that's not written about very much. So Irish people are dealing with all of that, and there is a tendency, certainly from middle class commentators to look down on them even more than they're looking down on the English working class that we hear about, you know, the dirty Irish and the black Irish and all Irish and drinkers, all Irish criminals, they're all tinkers. Terrible bias, not helped by the fact that the Victorians, of course,

we should never forget that the Victorians begin eugenics. You know, the Nazis really do a lot with it. We have

fair they really pick up on it. But it's another wonderful thing that the British invented around this period, and one of the justifications for the conditions of poor, working class Irish people was that the Victorians decided, on no basis whatsoever, that they were a black race, a Negroid race, and therefore, of course inferior to the only superior people who were white English upper class men, incdentally considering a lot of the people that were writing the studio science

were white English upper class and then they just happened that they were the superior ones. So you're really up against it, I think it's fair to say if you're Irish. But they do have the advantage of these strong networks and solidarity, and also this politicization that I've talked about. They are very politicized by what happens back home in Ireland, by their treatment at the hand of the British, and they come over here and they're very unenthusiastic about the British,

just as much as we are about them. They're not grateful, and people complain about this. You know, they're coming over here and they're not at all grateful. They don't like the English. I mean, how dare they were giving them a roof over their head, So they were already pre politicized if you like, and that is a great weapon to fight being mothered and being demonized and dehumanized is

your sense of self. And this is something with the Irish community that's quite remarkable is that even three general rations in London ISS would say I am Irish, even if they've never been to Ireland. They really maintained that sense of identity and that was very important. That's how you survive, I suppose, when you're really up against it, by a sense of pride in your identity. When you're talking about um, politicized communities and political forces working on

some of these groups and in these neighborhoods. Um, would you describe the influence that Fenian movements and the Fenian bombings of the eighties had on Irish life in London at the time. M Yes, just as the community I suppose was getting a little bit more settled and a little bit more established. I wouldn't say massively accepted, but

getting that way. There was First of all, in eighteen sixty seven there was the bombing at Clarkenwell Prison which was to release Richard was Sullivan Bok, who was an Irish rebel leader who was being held there and unfortunately it went horrifically wrong and six people were killed, and

it was working class people who suffered. They put gunpower against the prison war, but there were crowded, you know, working class houses cheap by jail, right up against the prison And as Karl Marks remarked at the time, people have previously shown great sympathy for the Irish cause, and there was an awful lot of sympathy for it, but they will be driven into the arms of the government

by this. You cannot expect the English proletariat to accept being blown up just because it believes in the political cause. So this did cause a lot of descent within the Irish community as well. The cause was a good one, but yes, when you kill working class supporters, it's never going to be a good move. And then there were the eight and eight three bombs at train stations and at underground stations, and that's why Special Branch was set up, of course, So suddenly you have all the these in

four months from the Irage community. And within the Irage community, you know, you are the most suspect group in London. People write about the Irage at this time or they're all Fenian terrorists. Fenian was used as an insult against Irish people. There was an area of London around Gayle Street that was known as the Fenian Barracks. And Charles Booth writes about a policeman telling him about the Fenian Barracks, and he says, men here are not human, they are

wild beasts. If you try and arrest anyone, he said, from that area, they all unite together. They will barricade themselves in. They will throw anything they can get their hands on, furniture, anything at you. They will never allow one of their numbers to be arrested. And he says, not an Englishman nor a Scotsman would live among them. So here we are, even in the East End, which is being divided from the rest of London, even the working class, which has been divided from the rest of society,

is dividing itself. And we're guessing these divisions, these false divisions between Irish and English, and the Irish are coming to personify the worst and least respectable poor of all, and all suspects, all being suspected of terrorism. Mhm. Of course you write in Striking a Light that many of

the Metro when were Irish and you've mentioned that again today. Um, you have a section of your first chapter dedicated to perceptions of women who worked in factories, and again you've talked a little bit about the factory girl in the middle class imagination. What was the reputation of factory women in the neighborhoods where they live. Yes, now that is a very different thing. Of course, how push London, how they're so called betters, viewed them, and how the local

spewed them is completely different. So taking the match women as one example, because they are the largest pool of female so called casual workers in the East Stand at that time, so they're quite a good example. They were so looked down upon by commentators, you know, a rough set of girls. Their own employers said said that about them, and people would write about the incredibly patronizing lee or they're always drunk and they're always consorting with men of

the very worst type. And they're also written about. When they're not written about like that, they're written about us children. So match girls, it's always match girls, and they're written about being a little bit simple, having no intelligence whatsoever. So they're the lowest of the low really because they're east Enders and Irish origin and industrially working women factory girls. That is three massive strikes against you. This is appalling.

You know, it's bad enough being a woman really in Victorian England, but insisting on being working class and Irish only standa isn't really taking the proverbill. So the way they're looked at in their area though, is completely different. So fascinating. You could get away with a lot of sins against the Victorian narrative if you were the right sort of woman, So if you were really gutsy, if

you fronted it out. That's a really important term in the East End, fronting it out, you know, having the competence, holding your head high and not taking any nonsense from anybody, having self respect I supposed to. Really, you could get away with an awful lot of stuff. You know. There are women who had lovers, which were supposed to be a terrible sin, and yet they were still a great standing in the community because they were just wonderful people.

They were good to their friends. They were the aunts and queens of the street. They were the midwife, they were the undertakers. They filed incredibly important functions. So where we are told any woman who does anything immoral, is completely outcast. Nobody would speak to her, her reputation is ruined. That's not true at all. That's the middle class perception. And the Pool were a lot less judgmental and a lot more flexible, and the match Woden were kind of

really the cool girl gang in the neighborhood. Actually, or despite the way, it's such a contrast between the way that the middle classes looked down on them, they were the ones who knew all the musical songs of the day. I discovered that when I've read a magistrate who lived in the Eastern complaining about, Oh, these match women they wake me up, you know, occasionally when they have enough money to go out, maybe on the back holiday, they come back from the musicals and they're singing all the

way home. They're singing Tar Bundier knocked him in the old Road. And I'm trying to sleep, I've got caught in the morning and I'm being woken up by them. But when you think about what that means, you could only know the words of musical songs if you manage to get into those performances. And they were their hit the coolest songs at the time, so it's like dropping bars from the latest grime artists, being able to recite those songs, being able to sing them walking arm in

arm down the street. That's pretty cool. That makes you pretty cool. They all said something else they loved about them, which gave me a real clue to their personalities. And it's really common of working class people over the world, actually not just in England at this period, and certainly not just in the East End, was that when they could go out, which was rare, but sometimes somebody, one of the better paid workers would stand treat as it was called, and who said I'll pay for you all

to have tea, and they'd be really excited. They might get a cup of tea in a cafe and jam on their bread. This was a real highlight, maybe even some cake. And when they got to go out, they were going to look their better as a matter of pride and partly as a retort to the people they knew were looking down on them. They were going to look absolutely dressed up to the nines and probably the

tents when they were walking down the streets. They couldn't afford it though on their own they couldn't afford to buy the beautiful hats that every Victorian woman needed to be really cool. So they formed what they called feather clubs, and actually a lot of factory women did this. The match women had a feather club, and what was it. It was a communal hat club. Feather club. Because the hats were so befeathered at the times, entire flocks of poor little birds died to make these hats, and they

would pay in to the club. And I presume that when there was enough money, Elsie would pop up to the milliners, or perhaps somebody would make a hat. I don't know, but they would have these beautiful hats. So they knew when they walked down the bow row, when they promenaded down the bow row with their friends singing these really a lot, you know, up to the minute musical songs, they looked incredible. And that was a kind

of political resistance. Really. It was like, Okay, you might want to look down on us, but look at us. We look bloody fantastic, and we know we do. And the descendants that I talked to, we're really good at explaining how these notions, these received notions that were forced on them from above, were rejected and were turned around and he said, I'm really glad you're writing about my grand and her friends, because they were wonderful and nobody thinks they were. And I had to grow up with that.

I had to grow up with these incredible powerhouse women, strong characters, brave, amazing, you know, did the impossible on a daily basis, fed huge families, and people treated them like dirt. And people would say they weren't ladies, but to us they were. They were East End ladies. And that's so key, that distinction between women and lady. Anyone can be a woman, but certainly not everyone, according to the Victorians, could be a lady, and a lady was

an absence. Really, what is a lady? Well, it's what she's not. She's not loud, she's not drunk, she's not sexy, she's not having a good time. Really, she's sitting quietly, as quiet and still as you can possibly be, as as devoid of humanity as you can possibly be. It's no coincidence that the angel in the house that an angel isn't human, is above humanity. But the east Enders rejected this. They had their own much more liberated, I suppose.

I mean, it sounds strange to talk about. I'm not suggesting that every doctor was a rampant feminist in this period, but they had far more liberated conceptions and far more real conceptions of what a woman was than they're supposing. Betters m What did working women in the Eastern think of the police? Did they have a relationship with the police that was antagonistic? Was there was there a general class alignment of the London police at the time that

was very evident? What can we say about that? This kind of fascinating because the police had a healthy respect, shall we say, for working class women, and there were reasons for this. You hear policemen talking. Sometimes commentators like Child's Booth will seek out the opinion of the police are sort of respectable authority figures who also know the working classes because they're from the working classes on the whole. About people like the matchwomen and they will tell them, well,

the matchment are very well respected in the area. They have a famous sense of unity. They settle all their disputes really quickly. But if they have a dispute and you know you're working with people, they get on your nerves. If they have a dispute at work, they can't resolve. Well, let's just say they had a rather non Industrial Relations approved method of sorting that out. So this police been said, a ring will be formed, they will fight like men,

and we, as the police, do not interfere. So they'd have punch ups if they really couldn't sort out a problem at work, and the police would back off. Isn't that interesting? The police were scared or certainly respectful of these incredibly tough working class women. And then one of the other tales that I was told was that, in order to amuse themselves of an evening, of course there

wasn't much on Telly because there wasn't telly. Working class people would observe the coppers who were parading around their neighborhood, and who would often go in pairs because famously we always here, don't we. You know, you wouldn't patrol that neighborhood with less than two of you because it was so dangerous and also dark. So they'd watched the coppers strolling around and they think, interesting, their walk over a manhole there, and that's quite a large manhole. I wonder

what would happen if we removed that manhole cover? And it's dark and the coppers wouldn't see that. So one of their forms are fun was to remove the manhole covers the poor coppers walking around, and they wait and see if one of them just dropped and ended up beneath the street, down the manhole, and then, as if that wasn't bad enough, if they if they could, if they could get away with it, they sneak out and put the manhole cover back on and leave the poor

bobby down there. Now I don't think forever. I mean I presume eventually his workmates got him out. I don't think they're still down there skeletons of policemen below the streets at the east End. But I think this gives you an idea of the shall we say, mischievous regard in which the east Enders held the police. Now, there wasn't a great deal of respect there because they saw the police on the whole as forces of the establishment. You know, they're the people that are on these damned

plumbing tours. So these are people coming to your neighborhoods, leading the knobs, the talks, the posh people laughing at us. They're being led by police. So how can you see them as being on your side when there are demonstrations and protests. Who who's hitting over here with a truncheon. It's the police. So no, there isn't much class solidarity. There are some police at the time who say, well, we are trying to do good for our neighborhood and you know, we need a job. We're not trying to

oppress our working class neighbors. But now I think it's fair to say that they're not incredibly well thought of by the people of the East. And when the match from the strike happened, I was really interested to read in the local press that battalions of police were rushed into the area. I love this idea of women on strike and young women girls in many cases, being so terrified to the establishment they're all police leave was canceled. Oh my god, people eye on these dangerous match women

said police are rushed in. But I think another reason is probably the local police were not key at all on trying to police the match women strike. They were like, no, it's fine. Let let people from outside who don't know what they're dealing with it and we can see the spirit of the match women. There was an event in the seventies when match workers were protesting against a proposed tax on matches which have been really bad for their trade. Now I have to say that their employers were really

happy with them, encouraged them to protest. Actually, so that's not a complete revolution. React that they marched to Parliament and they're very young, a lot for people marching, and they have banners that they've made themselves to say two MPs do not don't bring this tax in. Now the police cattle them like this might have been one of the first examples ever of cattling, when the police around protesters and they try to snatch their banners and there's

an all all out, free for all punch up. By the side of the tents, there are match women throwing rocks at the police, very well aimed apparently as well. They're they're finding their targets and breaking through, refusing to surrender their banners. Banners are a very important thing in protest at this period. It's like an army. You don't let the other side take your banners. And there's some of them managed to get free and they managed to get as far as Parliament to present their petition. But

that gives you an idea as well. These are children on the whole. But my goodness, they can be fierce and they can fight, and the police, you know, the police know it. Mhm. Let's step forward a little in time, but follow those girls, those women who protesting in the seventies. Um, But what was the context in which they were working. Let's hear a little bit more about the factory. What's her little bit more about Brian and May. How significant

a company was it? And you know in the book you've you've described that that company had an irresistible rise from quaker grocers to powerful and ruthless cartel. Can you offer that story kind of in in brief they're really the Victorian dream Brian to May. There is an original mis to Brian and then Mr May. And they start out as grossest, they're not particularly rich. They're trying a number of things, trying their hand at various things, so

making candle making, all trying to make their fortune. And eventually they come to London because they're from Plymouth originally, and they leased this factory site on the Fairfield Road, very near the Bow Road, one of the most important roads in the East End. It was three factories. That's how large their ambition is really. And they construct this incredible Gothic castle. It's it looks like from the outside in which to make matches. They become this huge, huge firm.

There are a household name. Matches are hugely important of course at the time, because you've got no lighting, you've got no heating, you've got no fire, you've got no hot water, you've got no hot food, let alone lighting your fag, your cigarettes or your pipes or your cigars. So matches are everywhere and they're an absolute essential for every household. And they very quickly because it is a low investment industry, huge profits, very little money to put in.

They become massive within a generation. The original Mr Bryan and Mr May are still alive when this firm really carries all before it, and they're incredibly in with the Liberal Party that in the politicians. They're very significant. They become huge exporters as well, something factors all over the country. It's not just in the East End of Well This is a very significant one in the East End. And they're so important to the government that the government will

tailor it's policies to Briant May. So, for example, the ghastly white phosphorus that they used to make matches gets banned in the rest of Europe quicker than it does in England because we don't want to aspect Brian and made. That's how important they become. The original Mr May, who's the nicer of the two. Francis May, I think, gets forced out by the Bryants. We don't know why. I'd love to know why something happens. He alludes Mr May to this terrible thing that Bryants have done that he

can't forgive. I would love to know. I love a bit of gossip, but we don't know. The sons of the original Brant takeover and they are absolutely ruthless, capitalistic bastards in a very modern sense too. They've got a huge regard for public relations, so they're constantly showing rich people in journalists around the factory and saying, look at our lovely working conditions. Obviously they're making everything look good

for those days. The girls are dressed up in their finest clothes that they probably got out of the pawn broker, so they're really aware of their public image and they just become second to none. They're one of the most successful countries in the company, so people assume that conditions must be good, it must be all right working for them, because look how rich they are. They've become a firm Innate and eighty four and very quickly shareholders they're getting

return on their investment. That's massive. Also, shareholders are often liberal MPs because they're very tied in with the Liberal Party and clergymen. So again people think, well, they must be a fairly kindly respectable company because look at all these good men who are very concerned about the pool, who are investing in them. And it's really not until the strike that the match when managed to show us what's really going on. Behind this facards that looks like

this gothic castle with gatehouses and turrets. Women are working twelve hour days and starving to death. Women are contracting necrosis from white phosphorus. Their jaws are rotting and decaying while they're still alive. But it takes this huge event that a striper comes to show us this because we don't want to see it. We want to assume Brian

to mayar this lovely success story. And we all have their match boxes at home, and they have this wonderful patriotic designs on their match boxes, and it's all very Imperial. It's all very royal. We want to believe that they are good employers as much as we would bother thinking about match match work is we want to believe that they're good, but they're not. And they're also buying up

rival firms at an incredible rate. So when people hear about conditions and they want to boycott Branton May, they say, right, well, will buy our matches from Bells or from this other companies instead. They don't realize that Briant to me are chuckling wig go and go on them because we actually own those companies. Sometimes they would buy out rivals who would maintain their own name. So you know, really it looks like David versus Goliath. It looks like the matter

and have no chance. They've done everything to ensure their positions. They've not only managed to push wages down for no reason, doesn't need to be done, but wages are lower in eight and they were in eighteen seventy eight, just because why not, you know, more profits for the shareholders. And they've done this relentless pr campaign. They're in with government who can possibly stop them, who is possibly going to

take them on? They think no one but of course they've underestimated the women who are right under their noses. Can you describe what kind of life was possible on a branton May wage and how did it compare to other sorts of are available in the in the East End. It was lower paid that brianton May didn't even know that. That's what's so fascinating. They just paid as little as

they could get away with. During the strike, when people start saying, you are paying your women a very low rate, even the best pay, because everyone got different ways they're paid, depending what they did, how how long they've been there, how good they were at the job. You are paying your women way below the average. And brianton May say, we're absolutely not. But behind this scenes, if you look in their company correspondence file, they're desperately writing if the

other factors going what do you pay? What do you pay? Can you please tell us what you pay? And they find out that yes, pretty much everywhere is paying more than their pay, so very little life a toy. We can't really call it a life. When you look at what some women were earning, they'd be earning a few shillings four shillings a week, the rent of one room, would be two shillings, and then you've got your bills, and then you've got food, so you are just about

scraping by if that. And they're constantly having to rely on each other. They're in and out of the pawn break at Broker's like a revolving door. You know that wonderful song, Pop goes the weasel up and down the city road in that diaesel, Pop goes the weasel. What that means is you're popping your pawning your weasel, which wasn't dressmaker's iron. So working women are constantly having to pawn even the tools of their trade to get them to the end of the week until I get paid again.

And that was certainly the case for the match women, palling everything they could, their clothes, their boots and their hats that probably didn't have jewelry, but anything they did have, and helping each other, lending to each other, constantly supporting each other. So when they were sacked by Brian and May for anything, oh god, it could be anything, you know, getting pregnant if you weren't married, laughing, any kind of

in subordination, you would just be sacked. And they would literally pass the hat, and it was a hat and probably a beautiful feathered one for each other. So life was impossible, and it was starvation rates unless you were helped out, and even those who did have the support of their friends were so malnourished by that When Annie Besset comes along and meet some women for the first time, she notices they're very small and frail, even for working

class women at this time. They were not healthy and robust. You don't have a chance to be. But they're particularly small because these low wages. Brian and Mayor pushed the wages down, so they're lower than they were ten years before. So you're a young girl, you're getting that terribly below starvation rate of pay when you should be hitting puberty. So you're just not developing properly. You're just so malnourished that you're unable to grow and develop as you should

have done. So really very little life was possible. Yet they still, you know, girls just want to have fun. Still, they would enjoy life whenever they could, their feather clubs, standing treat going out to tea whenever they could. They would still enjoy life, So you know, they weren't as beaten down and as oppressed, as their employers like to think, and as you think they might have been. They had this incredible spirit and they had pride in being matched women.

They decided to turn that around. Other people may look down on us, but we are proud. We are the match girls. Who the hell are you? And they were proud of their identity, and still some of them remained friends, you know, forty forty years after they finished working in the factory and still went drinking together whenever they could. M. Can you describe the kinds of work needed to produce

a briant in May match? M. Yes, it wasn't supposed to be skilled work, but in fact, the way that we decide what is skilled and what is not as pretty arbitrary. Generally decide that if men do it, it's skilled. Even when a job has been female, when it becomes male,

suddenly we decided that it's skilled. But they had to work incredibly fast and incredibly accurately, not just to earn their wages, but to avoid being fined, because Bright and May would put illegal fines onto their wages if they made the slightest thing wrong, if the matches caught fire in the process, so you would initially have would that was divided into splints, which would go on to make the matches. Each splint was divided into two to make

a match. These were set into a frame. The frame was then dipped into the white phosphorus, this horrible toxic chemical, and that was what made these matches so incredibly flammable. They were then left to dry. They were then cut down and they were then boxed and the fillers, by the way, the people who filled the boxes were incredible. Could throw any kind of different box or any kind of different match at them and they would hardly stop.

Their fingers were just moving all the time. They knew exactly how many matches to grab to fit into a box. They were just incredibly skilled women. But a note on white phosphorus. People who have heard a little bit about the match them may have heard of Fossey jewel, this ghastly industrial disease. The thing about it was it's completely unnecessary.

Brianton May didn't have to use it. Red phosphorus was available and it was safe, but it was more expensive, it was more difficult to produce, it took a little longer to produce, so why should they bother? They claimed, they didn't know about the effects of Fosse jewel. They claimed they didn't have any cases of it in their factory. They absolutely did know, and they absolutely did have people

dying of it. And what would happen was that if you went into the area of the factory where the phosphorus was, you would immediately smell the ghastly fumes of phospterus. Absolutely stinks phosphorus, and you would perhaps be sick straightaway. People would vomit immediately on breathing it in, or they would pass out. That was really common. Whomen had to go outside and faint and then go back to work.

If it caught hold of your teeth, as the women said, if it got into your jawbone, often throw holes in your teeth because you couldn't afford the dentists in those days. It would start to rot and decay your jawbone. So you're still alive, but you've got this horrible, separating, stinking abscesses. Sorry, I thying was just eaten in your gun and pieces of bone, your own bone. You're spitting them out there

working their way out through these abscesses. It was a horrible disease, particularly because sufferers couldn't always live under the same roof as their families. Loved ones couldn't stand it. You know, you're living tend to a room. People just couldn't stand the smell. So later factory inspectors will find match women living on the outskirts of hounds and sishes, almost like lepers in the final stages of the disease,

and match men as well. There were matched dippers who were often men, and they suffered from it as well. As If all of this wasn't bad enough, Brian and they constantly made it worse. And one of the reasons they made it worse was they should have provided a separate dining room so that women could eat out of

the fumes, eat their own food. By the way, Branton may weren't going to provide them a single crumb, but perhaps their own bitter, stale bread if they were lucky that they brought him for home, so they would set it on their workbench until it was time to eat, and then cram it down as quickly as they could

when they could. And if you imagine, the phosphorus particles in the air have settled now on your lunch, so you've got this deadly seasoning and so it's immediately in your mouth and it's got a way into your guns. And Briant and May's attitude to this was complete indifference. If they saw a woman who seemed to be coming down with the foss, perhaps your doorbone would start to swell and you look very toothache and a bit mumpsy. They would stack you. So the women would cover up

their faces with kerchiefs. And even though they knew this disease was deadly, it didn't always kill you, and it didn't kill you as quickly as starvation. So that was the kind of awful calculations and accommodations that they had to make. While brianson May were literally living in oh, the most incredible country estates. You know, Mansions isn't in it.

One of them was the Sheriff of Buckinghamshire. I always think it should have been the Sheriff of nottingham Shire, like in robin Hood, because they were such terrible people. But they're making a fortune, that's the awful thing. While this is happening, the company is absolutely flourishing. Would you describe from the Gladstone statue and what what kind of

reaction it provoked? Now this is absolutely fascinating and this really gives us a flavor of the spirit of the match women and their eye for a good political gesture. So Brian and may as I said, we're very well in with the Liberal Party. And Gladstone was always being Prime Minister during this period, is prime minister for several different terms. So the ultimate act of sucking up my goodness talk about as kissing Brian. And they just said they will build a statue of William Gladstone and they

will build it on the Bow Road. And it's actually gesturing with the right hand towards their factory. Such humidity. You know, there's Gladstone saying you look at this wonderful factory. So they decided they're going to build it. They could have paid for it themselves. They could have paid for a thousand statues themselves, I'm sure, very easily. But again, why would you when you can make your work is pay.

So what they do is to take involuntary deductions, forced deductions from the girls, already incredibly low paid, to pay for this statue. Women not happy, you could understand, women not pleased at all with this, but they don't have any say in it. And then they announced the foremen, who were the sort of line managers I suppose, and often quite violent. They would hit the women and they were really unpleasant to them, and they were real company men.

They'd lived on site, they had lovely cottages on site, so they were really brought and painful. Came in and said, oh, you're all very lucky. You're getting half afternoon off tomorrow. You're getting half the day off to go and see this statue being unveiled. And the women are like, well, are we being paid for that? And they say no, you're very lucky, you're getting some time off work. And the women say, you know you can stuff that. Basically

whether's son doesn't shine. We don't want no holidays on those terms. Quite rightly, they want to be paid. And the former say, look, if you want to work here, you're going to turn up in your best bib and tucker your best hat and you're going to be pulled light and you're gonna stand and pullaue put applaud politely while this statue and right in the middle of the

bow road it couldn't be more prominent, is unveiled. So the match, when we have a plan, they say all right, then we'll be there, and they are there, and you can just imagine the scene. The great and the good are gathered because Brian and may never miss an opportunity to show off. So all the Brant boys and their wives and their children, and their shareholders and prominent liberals are all there, and there are features and it's all tremendous.

And finally this statue is unveiled and then the match were in move as one. They run up to the posire of the statue shouting out, our blood paid for this statue. And they pricked their fingers, which must have been with happins, because of what else would you do it with? They have these incredibly long, sharp, vicious happens which they used a self defense when they had to, in their beautiful hats prick their fingers and held their hands and dripped their blood onto the statue and said,

our blood paid for this, which is just incredible. It's a shame it's not recorded anywhere, but I would imagine that Bryant's must have been incandescent. Talk about ruining their moment, but it was absolutely brilliant. And that if that's not political, and if that's not resistance I don't know what is because they waited for their moment and they just timed

it beautifully. Ah. So let's start talking about who some of these who some of these women were, and one especially, let's talk about married risk call Um, who was married risk all A. Mary Diskill was only fourteen at the time of the strike, but that wasn't one of these.

That wouldn't have been one of the youngest girls. She's in if anyone's seen that, the most famous photograph of the women, when they're actually standing outside the factory and they're looking into the camera, they look very nervous and very pale. She's the allst woman at the back wearing a hat. His granddaughter came up to me and said, I think that's my grandmother now. She was born in eighteen seventy four. Both her parents were Irish and had

come over from Ireland. She started working when she was a very young girl, and she was really prominent in the factory. She was very well respected, and her granddaughter told me that although she was quiet, she was quite a reticent woman. She had what Joan called an Irish temper, and she absolutely took no nonsense. So later in life, when one of the women in her street is being assaulted by her husband. It's Mary who goes out there with the poker from the fireplace and chases him down

and tells him to stop beating up his wife. And at the time of her strike the strike, not just Mary but her sister Paul, also known as mog because people do very strange things, was named in the Victory period and also known as Margaret. It's working there as well. And in the picture Paul has her hand on Mary's shoulder. And I've seen pictures of these two going right towards the ends of their lives where they always stand like that.

They're so close and so fond of each other that one's always got their hand on the other one's shoulder. But Mary had an incredibly hard life. She married a dock laborer, and that's really common as well. Match women and dockers tended to marry each other. Not surprisingly, they lived in the same streets and houses. They were all pretty much Irish heritage. They had all those connections. They were the casual workers of these dens, and the docks were a huge employer of men. The match works were

a huge employer of women. But she had a really hard life with him. He was an alcoholic and he was violent occasionally as well, and in fact, when she was pregnant. Once during one of her pregnances, he knocked her down the stairs and she miscarriage and was extremely ill afterwards. When Thomas eventually died, it was on the docks, although there were stories that he'd actually got into a fight,

so it wasn't really an industrial accident. However, Mary finally got a stroke of luck because she got compensation because of the doctor's strike, which had followed on from her own strike. Conditions were better and there was workers compensation available, so this made a huge difference to her, and instantly she was incredibly sensible and went and bought herself a shop. Now that sounds really fancy, doesn't It Only a shop, But shops at that time we're tiny. They could be

quite whole in the corner of fairs. They could be just front rooms of little houses on East end streets that she eventually owned two shops, a corn chandler's like a general groceres and a cat's meat shop. Now, when I say cats meat shop, people often say, oh my god, were there that poor? Were people eating cats? Well? No, not as far as we know. Not on the whole.

This was meat forecats, because people, even though they were poor, they wanted to have pets and they still loved animals, so they would buy the cheapest cuts of meat for cats. She was an amazing shop owner, according to her granddaughter Joan. She said that although she never learned to read or write,

my God, could she add up? She would know anytime she could be running total in her head of exactly what was in the tills, exactly how much should be in the tills of either shop at any one time, and when the aunts, when her daughters would want to sneak out on dates, she'd be, where are you going? You're supposed to be working in the shop. So really

everything was dedicated to this family business. She did reasonably well for herself in that God, but she was also so interesting political to the extent of being a huge fan of the Irish rebels, and her granddaughter Jones, said that whenever she was in drink, when she'd had a gym,

she did enjoy gin. She would sing Irish rebel songs as she would sing the bold Robert Emmett, and she had pictures of Michael Collins in the nineties sixteen uprising much later in her life obviously, and Robert Emma, and she didn't own much, but those were never pawned or sold. Those were taken with her to every house that she lived in. Now. She enjoyed the gin to an extent that she had a mother in law that the mother of her cruel and abusive husband, so she didn't get

on with either. And she took out a small life insurance policy on her mar in law. And when mother in law died, she was so delighted. She had a party and she spent all of that life and she wants money on Jim. She was the most amazingly strong woman. She survived to the blitz of World War two, and Mary remembers her telling the story that when the bombs were falling, one of Mary's daughters had a baby terror.

What a terrifying time to be giving birth, but she gave birth and Mary ran through the streets with this grandchild in her arms. Goodness says what the new mom thought about this in order to get her baptized, because she was Catholic and it was really important to her to get this baby baptized. Joan absolutely adored Mary. She was the matriarch of the family, absolutely no question about that.

And because Joan's own mom was ill, Mary basically brought her up to the point where she adored her grandmother so much that her own mother would say, well, she has got her faults, you know, she's not perfect. But the accommodation she was living thing, and Mary just there was a very fastidious woman. She was very house proud where she could be. But she was living in a house with black beetles all over it, with no toilet, with no running water, toilet out in a courtyard of

shared toilet horrible. And when one of her daughters moved slightly out of the East End into one of the new semi detached houses, Mary was, for the first time in her life, absolutely speechless. She just stared at this house, very very small house, you know, too up to down, but with his own toilet and its own bathroom, and she said, oh, my goodness, this is a palace. And she was so pleased that her own children were doing

better than she had done. And she died finally during World War two, and her granddaughter Joan was in the Women's Army and had to plead to get leave to go home and see her beloved granddaughter. Grandmother in her last moment went So she was furious with her sergeant who didn't want to give her leave, and she said to her, it's only your grandmother. And Janes said, she might seem like only a grandmother, but she's all the world to me and just just the most incredible woman.

M there's one little story that you tell in the book about her attitude towards the Salvation Army in the East End when she was young. Do you want to read tell that little Yes, she was not stupid. There were no flies on Mary. She was a very clever woman, and like all Eastern moms, she did whatever she had

to do to survive. And the Salvation Army, the Sally Anne was some of the people that would do good work amongst the poor and crucially ran soup kitchens and would give out soup and give out free food and Mary. But only if you were, you know, a good Protestant. They were not in the business of giving it out

to Jewish people of Catholic people. So Mary train all her children to sing Salvation Army hymns and they would go along to these soup kitchens sing these hymns, you know, passionately pretend to be religious, a salvation army who would be terribly impressed, and they would get their free soup. Oh now, what sort of work did Mary do for

Brian and May? So she worked in She and her sister both worked in the key workshops for Brian and May, and throughout their careers there did various kinds of jobs. So they would be working in the book stores, they would be filling the match boxes with matches and also doing cutting down and it was all very arduous because it was all done standing. You had to stand at your workbench, you weren't allowed to sit down, and it

was at least a twelve hour day. You weren't supposed to talk, and you weren't supposed to laugh or joke with your fellow factory hands. And then I mentioned before, there was this business of burnt The matches dipped in white phosphors were incredibly flammable. I mean, obviously matches are

supposed to be flammable, but these were dangerously so. What they called lucifer matches, which were people's favorite matches at the time because you didn't have to buy a whole box and carry it around, which is quite expensive thing to buy. You could just buy a few matches and carry them with you and strike them anywhere. Them called strike anywhere matches. So men used to apparently like to show off to the ladies by striking them on the

flies of their trousers and on their boots. And I don't know if that would have impressed in women then, I'm not sure it would now. But they were prone to catching fire in the process. Absolutely not the workers full and yet they would be fined for it, So you know, it was really grim and arduous work. M Who was Martha Robinson and and how old was she at the time of the strike. Martha Robertson was the

grandmother of one of my best witnesses and friends. I'm glad to say I became very friendly with her grandson, ted lewis a wonderful man and only died a couple of years ago. And she was born only a nation two, so how on earth? Because she had been working in but she was she was making matches for Brian to May, and she was such a matriarch in her family that we do have a wonderful record that was recorded by the family they wrote down some of her reminiscences, and

thank god they did. You know, this is the whole story and stream, isn't it. I was like, give me that book. I kept borrowing it and looking at it and finding more things. And it was hand written with photographs as well. But it was a scrap book really, but it was really wonderful memoir of the family. So she would get up as a six year old. I always tell my son this, you know, when he doesn't feel like doing his homework or doesn't feel like helping

around the house. And you could have been working from the age of six, my lad. She'd get up at five in the morning and lay sweep at the fireplace and lay the fire for the family. She was one of six children, then later another three, so she became one of nine. She would look under the stairs where the shoe collection, the family shoe collection was, because you didn't have your own pairs of shoes. It was just

whatever you could find. You know, you might find a shoe in the street and bring it home and try and make it fit by stuff with newspaper. Because shoes were so expensive, she tried to find a vaguely matching pair pad them out if she had to, and off

she'd walk to the factory. She would pick up everything she needed from Brian and May to make the matchboxes, so the cardboard, and she would have to buy her own paste and come home and make as many of the boxes as she could and then take them back to the factory and get paid, so she'd get paid like on her piece work. And then she'd walk home six years old. Again, I have to stress and buy bread for the family. So if she didn't do that, she wasn't feeling well. One day they didn't get to eat.

So it is the most incredibly responsible position. And she got married to James Laken and he was a rifleman in World War One. She was still working at Brianton May then sometimes in the factory. Between children, people generally would work in the factory and then when you had a new baby you might switch to making match boxes again at home. And he went missing. He was missing in action, presumed dead, and Martha had three children by them, and she was one of these incredibly well respected women

in the community and in the street. She was there. She was the one who call if someone died. She would help you lay out the dead because of that. She was so well respected that the army came to her because they had a problem. They had a number of soldiers who had been so badly wounded in the horrors of World War One that they were unidentifiable. They were alive just about, but they were impossible to identify.

They couldn't speak, they'd lost all their identity tags. There was a whole ward of them, and so they bought him women in good standing in the neighborhood to help if they could identify some of their neighbors. It's just absolutely bizarre, isn't it that the army could not have known who these people were. And she went around with her sons, and she was drawn to one man in particular,

who was just completely bandaged from head to toe. I picture of being like the invisible man wh she can just about see his eyes and that's all and you can't speak. He's just sort of making noises. But she feels drawn to him for some reason, and he's trying to make eye contact with her, and she suddenly says, Jim, is that you And she realizes that yes, it's her husband who was supposed to be dead, and she fainted. She fainted into the arms of her son's and then

she had to look after him. Now, forget about any kind of help to do that. Don't forget no NHS, no natural health, so there's no benefits whatsoever. She's just expected, whilst working, whilst looking after her kids, to look after this man as well, who's completely deformed and disfigured by the way. He's had half a face blown away and in the photographs it's bad that the deformity is really bad, and it must have been very difficult for him to

even eat, and he was never the same again. They went on to have three more children together, but he really was never the same person. He was very I suppose depressed and probably had what we've now called PTSD, you know, post combat stress. So he was really a miserable brother, I think, and he would just sit in the corner and shout at the kids. That's what everyone remembers of him. But she stayed with him until he

and she did marry again. She married a longstanding sweetheart of hers and had a much happier second marriage until he died as well. But what a character she was. She was absolutely one hell of a force. And her grandson Ted Lewis told me what she was like. He said, well, we'd go out drinking, because he, again, like Joan Harris, adored his grandmother and spent an awful lot of time with her as a boy, and when he was old enough to drink and they go to the pub together,

he said, she was always the same Martha. She was really artful, she was really cunning. You'd say to her, oh can I get you a drink and she'd say, oh no, no, no, no, dear, no, no no no no you you you keep your money, and she'd make you insist, oh no no, no, Granna buy you a drink, all right? Then dig Or bets you. So he'd always end up paying for the drinks. But if there was a fight in the pub, and there often were fights in the pub, she could to fight back, even as

an old lady. He remembered. Once she'd had a hip operation and he took her out as her first time out in public since she'd had this operation, and they were in a pub and it all started to kick off. So she heaved herself up from her chair and she said, right, said, propped me up in the corner, give me my stick and our bloody take all the buggers on and she did as well. And even when she was ill and she was in bed in her house, friends would come and see her. She was always she always had open

out house. When she was a younger woman, people will come back from the pubs with her and played the piano. And it sounds such a cliche, you know, around the old Joanna, the old cockneys having your knees up, But you know this cliche has come from somewhere. They really did. She always managed to pay the bills and keep a good roof over their head. And Ted said this was

because she got about a bit. So she had a lot of lovers basically, and I think the landlord might have been one of them, because he would visit and say, you're supposed to have only three people in here, and you seem to have about seven or eight. They're always new children. But she managed to charm him somehow so they didn't get evicted. And finally, when she was dying, her room was always crowded because she was still holding court.

That many people would come and visit her. And she always said that she didn't need an alarm clock because from where she was in bed she could hear a man who sold pots and pants, a street trader who'd walked down the road about seven in the morning with his barrow, and she said, do you know, Love, there's a dodgy manhole cover and he always hits it, that silly bugger. He always goes over it and he loses the look. And hear his whole his whole will barrow,

his whole barrow, everything falling off it. And she would laugh herself sick at this. I wonder the poor son's got anything left us out? And she said that was better than alarm clock, and that was what always woke her up in the morning. So again, there's just this incredible spirit. She when she was even though she was often without food, she would always make sure that the children ate, and later her grandchildren. She had ducks in her tiny little backyard, and when Ted visited, he'd say,

what are we having for dinner, Grandma? And she always look at him and smile and say, duck. Do you think, Oh no, she's eating with ducks. Were eating the ducks. That's terrible. And she was just winding him up because then he realized after a couple of years, hang on a minute, there's always the same number of ducks out the side, out of the back. She was just using them for eggs and they were probably eating baggots, really

cheat cuts and meat or something completely different. But you know, she's the archetypal I suppose woman who just has, on the surface, on paper, such a terrible life and goes through so much, but still manages to be a community leader and a real force, not just as in her family, but in her widest streets and neighborhood to you know, a highly respected queen of the East End. Um, let's talk a little bit about the strike itself. What were the events that kicked off the walkout and how did

the strike committee for mm hmm. I really had to dig to work this out because when it came to it, all I knew was that there had been a strike and that it had been led from the outside. So obviously, because of that, we had no details about the real strike because it was supposed to have been a case is women were just told to go on strike by them with the classes. But what actually happened is so

much more fascinating. Annie Besson was this middle class journalist and fabian a kind of socialist society that George Burnet Sure was a member of two and she was at a Fabian meeting in June and heard someone speak about the terrible conditions that working women particularly experienced in the East End and the terrible exploit a ship. She didn't know enough about the match were going to realize that the speaker was actually talking about box makers. The match

box makers the homeworkers who worked in their homes. She assumed, well, as a brand and mayfactory in Fairfield, and it must be them. So she thought, well, I'll go and see if that's true. She wasn't convinced that it was. She went down and she waited until some of the women came off shift there. They worked different shifts and came out of the gates and onto the boat road, and she stopped them and said, I'm a journalist. I would

like to talk to you about your conditions. It was that from this that we know everything that we do know about their conditions, From what those women told her about the fossy jaw, about the finds, about the fact that they were earning less now than in and the wonderful story of the statue. This all came out in that initial interview. She went back and wrote it up

really hard hitting piece called White Slavery in London. And now there we can hark back to the maiden tribute to modern Babylon and this kind of obsession with the sexual exploitation of working class women, because white Slavery was one of the phrases used to refer to that. It's

a very good title. I think. Also I wonder if any Beston wasn't having a pop that one of the Bryants who had been named Wilberforce Bryant after William Morberforce, the abolition campaigner, And I wonder if she wasn't having a goal because she's basically saying to Brian, and may you treat these people actually worse than enslaved people, because enslaved people at least are usually fed, you know, just enough so they can do the work, probably not well,

but they are usually fed and housed. And your women girls don't even have that. They have to pay out of these terrible wages, terribly low ages after you find them, and the wages have gone done even further for all of that as well. And it was meant to be incredibly hard hitting, and it was, and to make sure that Brian and they knew about it. She telegrammed them and said, please do buy my paper, which is called

The Link, a socialist journal, Please do buy it. I think there's nascar we're going to be very interested in. And of course they did buy it, and we're incandescent with rage. What was she hoped was not for a strike. There's no mention of that at all in White Slavery in London, despite the fact she's been called a strike leader. And in fact, one of the first things I was able to do, thanks to Brian to May, was to look at the initial the original article White Slavery in London,

because it was in those boxes. I looked at in the archive and they'd ripped it out. It looked like it had been angrily ripped out of the paper it was and thrown into the archives. But I then looked at the whole edition of that paper in the newspaper

library and it was quite illuminating. She's written a little bit further on about the idea of unionizing the casual poor, the very poor, the underclass women like this, and she actually said consider the women of Bryant Made that I wrote about in another column, and she's arguing against unionizing them. By the way, it would be impossible because if they tried to go on strike, they would just be sacked.

And there's such high unemployment in this London that all their bosses are going to do is to hire someone else. It just wouldn't work. She's saying, it's not the way we do it, which is kind of interesting, isn't it a strike leader arguing against strikes. Well, you might think perhaps she's been tactical, she doesn't want the employers to know what she's up to. But in fact, the faber

in society were really against strikes. M. George Bernard sure busterly complain about strikes and what they cost the economy. What they want, there's a much more respectable reform. They want the upper echelons of labor, the labor aristocracy as they're called then, to be the ones who are in trading is because you know they're they're proper people with top hats. They might be working class, but my goodness, at least they're decent people, not like these underclass proles.

We don't really want anything to do with them. So she was absolutely typical of her class of socialists in suggesting that striking was a terrible mistake. So then Brian to May get this article and they are furious. But rather than what she thinks they're going to do, which is to sue her, and that's what she wants. She thinks, right, they'll sue me, I'll go to court and defend myself. She's done this before, and this gives me a forum. This will be reporting the papers forum for my message.

I can then say these workers are being treated terribly and I can advise people to boycott brant to May. I think about that she's not talking to working class people. She's talking to consumers. That's middle class to middle class, over the heads of the workers. But in fact Brian to May threatened to see what they never do. They

probably know they haven't got a leg to stand on. Actually, what they do is to gather together the workers, give them pre printed statesments which are laid around in every work for him by the foreman, which pre prepared and they say, you know, we love working for Brian to May. They're wonderful employers. We don't mind about the fossy journey. Didn't actually say that, but this is the idea. They're supposed to say this journalist has lied. Nothing she said

is true. We couldn't be happier. And they know they'll be sacked if they don't sign those papers, and they need their jobs, they need them desperately, but they refuse. Every single one of these women, I'm so proud of them, refuses to sign. And when the foreman come back into the room, there are these blank sheets of paper and they absolutely livid. So what are the employers going to do next? While employers haven't been a trade unis, I

can say they do the absolutely typical thing. And they pick on one young girl, one worker who's very popular with the others, and they sack her on a pretext. They're clever enough not to do it because they think she's one of the ones who's spoken to Lesson. But I think she probably is. They suck her and so she's not doing her work properly. How she goes now,

talk about underestimating your workforce. As one the women laid down their tools, wipe their hands on their aprons, and stream out of these imposing gates of the fair Field Works Match factory, onto the fair Field Road and onto the Bow Road. What do they do then? Well, if they were these a political people who you know, weren't educated and didn't really realize what their conditions were or

that they were being exploited. Well, what they're done. They would have was in gone all, BlimE me, Elisa, we've gone on strike by mistake. What shall we do now? What are we like? And I don't know, gone down the pub or something. But they didn't. They swung into action. They had an election there at the gates and they elected six women from all the major significant workshops within the factory, one from each to go back in and put their demands. So instantly they walked back in and

they confront the directors. I can just imagine how this went down, and said, right, we'll come back, but only if you let us form a union. BlimE me. They were not bright and they were not expecting that, and they immediately widen their demands. I didn't just say we want that girl room, stated they said, we want a union. And I tell you another thing while we're here, we want a separate dining room to eat our dinners in

to each our breading. Because they knew about Fossy Jewel Bright and May told them to do what I can imagine the language must have been pretty strong, because they would have been out rage How dare you you know? How dare you underclass women? How dare you tell us what to do? So back out the women go and they tell their colleagues, no, go, we're going to have to strike, and as everyone else comes on shift, they

gradually pull all this workforce out. It's a huge workforce, by the way, we have four hundred people on strike by the end of the day. Now what do you do. You don't have access to the press, you don't have Twitter or Facebook. I can tell you as a historian, we did not have those things in those days. So how on earth do you tell people that you're on strike? How on earth do you get strike funds? Well, surely that if Annye Bessel led the strike, she would have

been there. No, she's nowhere to be seen. So what they do is rather wonderful. They march around the streets of the East End arm in arm On maths hundreds of them, and they sing very loudly and very rude I'm afraid songs about their employers and what they would like to do to their employers, which are not nice. Though is mentioned of hanging old Brian On a sour apple. Tree's absolutely suposed to the tune of John Brown's Body, which is so interesting, isn't it that they're using battle

him if the Repubic. They're using that tune to sing their protests on which they've just made up on the spot. But you know, there's are women who like musical songs. They're they're very creative. They enjoy lyrics, and as they walk around people hear them, obviously, and this draws attention. People come out onto their balconists, they open their windows, they come out to their doors, and what earth are you lot doing? And they say, well, we're the match women,

as you probably know, because they would have known. They all had very distinct styles. You could tell a much woman. And we're on stripe because our bodies are a bunch of bastards and they've sat one of us for talking to a journalist and they treat it supportingly anyway, And we're bullied by management and our wages are shopping and we're not having any more, and we're on strike. And so people threw down to them coins, whatever money they could get their hands on, and the women wore these

long white aprons to cover their dresses. And they caught them. They helped them out and they caught these coins in their aprons and that was their first strike funds. It's really impressive. Then they held mass meetings on mile end Ways, traditionary place where people met, and they had speakers. People came along to hear them. Other trade unionst Lewis Lions, famous from the Jewish Taylor's Union of famously militant trade unionsts,

came along and they really started to garner support. The Star newspaper sent down its journalists, who was, you know, most discombobulated by the site of poor women looking poor and also by the fact that they were in Telliger. This was a real shocker to the middle classes, just like to the MPs when they finally marched a parliament.

This journalist is saying, what goodness is women actually quite eloquent, and they're actually expressing themselves quite politically, and they're saying, we are typical of working people who are treated like this and we can't put up with it anymore. They're really rather surprised. This is not what we've been told about the inhabitants of the Darkest East. They're supposed to be all savages, and animals. You know, savages is a

term that it's literally used about them. So they carry on meeting and at one point Annie Bessent finally, finally, a couple of days on from this, enters the picture a bit weird for a supposed strike leader. And I looked at her journal and she says, well, I was working in my rooms in Fleet Street and I heard a commotion and I looked out of the window and there was just s gaggle of of you know, quite rough looking girls, hundred or so, and they were blocking

the pavement. You know, my goodness, this is nice London. People are trying to walk past, and there's working class people. It's a bit of it. It's it's you know. It causes a bit of an uproar. So she sends a note down and basically says, who the hell are you now? That should put the kai bosh on the fact that she was a strike leader. You can't recognize a strike you can't recognize your strikers. And they said were the match women. She entertained a couple of them to tea.

She wouldn't have them all up. We'll go down to them because they are they're not quite sure what the rebel is going to do, and she says they're quite respectable. And they tell her they're on strike, and she is not pleased. She writes in her political paper, the Link the match Women, the Revolt of the Matchmakers. The match women have gone on strike, but she says the girls will go back to work. In this huge ban of headline,

they will go back to work. Desperately hoping they will, and she says, you know, this was so ridiculous that they went on strike. They should have let a few people be sacked. We could have afforded to support a few people. But my god, now we have fourteen hundred people on strike. What on earth are we going to do to feed them? Again? This is not the rhetoric of a strike leader. Is that she's supposed to know about this strike. She's supposed to have brought it about.

Why hasn't she got funds in place? Women march to Parliament. There's a lot of public key that's really helps with that. She writes letters to the newspaper attacking Brian to make she writes to the Times, Times published her, they published Bryant and May's response, it's like tennis. It goes back

and forth. Everyone's accusing everyone else and things the matter in march to Parliament and this is where people are so shocked to see these poor girls out of their area that they get shouted at, you know, can't stop in the streets. Things are thrown at them, what on earth are you doing? Get back to the East End. But they won't. They help, They hold their heads high, and when they're finally in with the MPs again this

fascinating clash of classes. The MP's are probably never sat and talked to an Eastern woman on an equal basis or a working class woman. They might have talked to their own servants, but that's not an equal relationship. So when they're in the room, one of the girls, who's about twelve, takes off her bonnet and they see that she's balls completely bald on top of her head, and

she says, can you see my head? I've been working for Brian and May since I was an infant, carrying palettes and matches on my head, and it's worn my hair away completely. Now this is brilliant because they've probably got young daughters about the same age with those beautiful Victorian ringulets, and this really hits them where they live. These reps have invested in Brian and May. This is

all rather embarrassing, isn't it. Liberal MPs who were supposed to support the poor, and yet they're profiting off this. They tell them about fosse A jewel and the MPs are impressed that they're so intelligent and so eloquent. They start to swing on side, but brianton May fight a

great rearguard action. A lot of the newspapers are on their side and saying, look at this disgraceful situation, these poor women and the worst sorts of people parading around the usea and I mean, how dare they It's disgraceful, They've got jobs. They should be grateful Brian to their gentlemen, all that rhetoric that we're so used to. But the tide starts to turn very quickly, because once the MPs are on side, respectable people are on side. They call

for an independent investigation into conditions at the factory. And this investigation shows that what any bestness said wasn't quite right, because actually conditions are worse. Things are far far worse than she'd touched on in white slavery in London, Brian and they have nowhere to go at that point because their shareholders are coming to them and say, for God's say, you've got to do something about this. You know, share prices are dropping, that's capitalists do care about that, don't they.

You're going to have to back down. The government are telling them that they do need to back down at this point. And they're so angry about It's so angry you can see it in the company archives. They're feeling about it absolutely decade whenever there's a mention of this type. But they have to climb down with the worst possible grace. You know, it's not Christmas Carol type scenario. They haven't been visited by ghosts and become nice Scrooge and in

the error of their ways at all. They're forced into this as they see an undignified climbed down and within a little over two weeks they had to grant these women the right to form the largest union of women and girls in the entire country, and better rates of pay, and their separate dining room to eat in, and the right to take their grievances over the heads of the

foremen to the directors. I love to think of how furiously piste off the foreman must have been about this, that the women could go sailing out of the room and say, sorry for it. I'm going to complain to the directors that don't like the way you're running things down here. It was a complete rebalancing of power, and they swept back victoriously into work and I would imagine they would have had their beautiful cats from their feather

clubs as they did. So, absolutely victorious, absolutely unexpected. Nobody expected that was going to be the upcome. Not the first strike by women, by the way, not even by these women. They've been on strike before. It was the only weapon that very poor people had but to win, and to win against one of the most powerful employers

in the country was absolutely unprecedented, brilliant. So um, the strike was June, right, yeah, second in July, I think it started, Yes, it did, okay, okay, So the peace white slavery in London that came out in June, and then there was just this little bit of build up,

right um. So of course, then in this season of Unobscured, we are following the murders in Whitechapel investigation and we're really going to be looking at you know, what the police were doing and the tourism on Hanbury Street, you know, starting with any Chapman's murder, that kind of thing, and all of that is in the months after the September um.

But at the beginning of October, no kind of the middle of October um that that radical newspaper The Star reports that Briant and May have received a letter signed signed by the Ripper. Um. Do you have the text of it there? Do ared you be willing to read that for us? And then? And then and then tell us what does that letter reveal to us about how working women who lived across the East End we're experiencing the panic that fall, which some writers have called the

Autumn of terror. How would that have been felt by the people whose neighborhoods this was. It's so interesting and it's so revealing. So we hear from the newspaper. Intimation was given to the city police on Saturday morning that Messrs Brianton May had received a better signed j Ripper and couched in the following terms. I hereby notify you that I'm going to pay your girls a visit. I hear they are beginning to say what they will do

with me. I'm going to see what a few of them have in their stomachs, and I will take it out of them so that they will have no more to do on the quiet, Signed John Ripper, p S. I am in Popular today. Well, it's an incredible letter, whether or not it was a hoax, what it says is so revealing even a few lines if we break it down. So this person says the reason is going to attack the match women? Is I hear they are beginning to say what they will do with me? Well,

what does that mean? That means that the match women, rather than being understandably terrified that there is a killers talking their streets, are furious because what this means they're going to say what they will do with me? They're presumably saying, right, we're going to find that bastard, wait till we get our hands on him. They are threatening the Ripper, basically, and there weren't the only ones doing that. Of course, there were vigilante commitsteers who are going around

trying to keep an eye on the Ripper. It would be fascinating to know whether the match were men were doing that themselves. I love to think of them parading the back alleys of White Chapel with that happens at the ready just in case. But that's what he's retaliating against. They're threatening him. And then of course he issues his disgusting threat and says they will have no more to do on the choir. And that is about prostitution. So whoever this is is implying that as working girls, they're

also doing things on the quiet. They are also engaging in sex work or prostitution. So for just a few lines, it really tells us a lot. Now we know people were scared. Of course they were scared. We know that women working in prostitution were trying to get into workhouses overnight, and that was unusual. The poor fear the workhouses like nothing else. That was the real nightmare scenario was being placed in a workhouse, awful conditions. If you had children,

you were separated from them. It was really really brutal. But for once they're thinking they are safer off the streets, but not the match women, and I would bet not all women either, because the sad truth of it is, although this these murders, this murderer gets so taken up by the press and get so sensationalized. People killing women is nothing new in the East End. People killing prostituted

women is nothing new in the East End. Had it not been so dramatized and sensationalized, perhaps they wouldn't would scarcely have known what was happening. But certainly two people like the match him and this was just a sense of outrage. These are our streets, this is our manner. How dare some bloke come on to our manner and behave like this? Two women like us to Eastern women and girls, they're absolutely outrage and I think that's tells us an awful lot about their spirit. M hm hm, brilliant.

Do we actually know any details about the lives of, um, some of the girls like Mary Driscoll, Martha Robinson in those months after the strike while these things were happening, Um, what were the first few months of you know, union life like? Yeah, the union was really active and they were probably more concerned and busy with that than they would have been worrying about the rip. I'm not saying they didn't worry. I'm sure when they walked down the

streets at night they were concerned. But you see, they were always in danger the Eastern was never a safe space if you were a working class women, so they always traveled in gangs. Middle classes hated this because there were noisy gangs, and they were disrespectful gangs, and they would be singing and they would be using terrible language, and people would get their kids off the street when all the match women are coming off shift. Come along,

deer inside inside, stop your ears. These vile women are out in the streets being being a bit rough and working class. So they always did that. They were really used to taking precautions, so probably life didn't change that much for them, and you always had someone in a family. All the women had to learn to fight, you know, not just because they were horrible violent people, because you

had to. There were always people trying to grab you down a you know, drag you down a dark alley, and those were often people from outside the area who would come in and people would be raped, children would would be kidnapped. Their awful things used to happen in those dark streets, so they had to defend themselves. And there was a wonderful story I got from one of the descendants about how how good the women were at forcing, which really illustrates the fact that outsiders, like posh outsiders

were really noticed in the Eastern as well. And he told this story about one of his relatives being in a book is. I think it was one of his great antswers in the book is one day lining up to place her bet and behind her incomes a top with a top hat, a rich guy for some reasons in the area and stands behind her to place his bet. And some of the local lads who are in there think this is an opportunity here for a bit of mischiefs. So they reached around said top and they pinch aunt

his bottom. Now, she does not ask any questions at this point, by the way, she just wheels round, leading with her fist and knocks the bloke out with one punch. So one good right hook and this port off top hat, doubtless flying across the blacks floor is spark out on the floor. So that tells you how violent, you know, how dangerous life was for women. They had to be

prepared to come out fighting and no questions asked. So I think in that respect they would have been much more careful, but they were always used to being careful. They were always used to being on their guard and to not being particularly safe in their own streets. And the union was so busy because you said they didn't rest on their laurels. If they hadn't been involved in their own strike, if they had been passive puppets, you imagine they would have just thought, well, we've done it.

Now we've got a union, we've done really well. Life goes on. But actually they didn't. They kept unionizing. They kept taking the message to other groups of workers. So the girls that worked in nearby confectionary factors, the sweetie girls who worked in jam factories, the wives of eastern dockers, they were constantly having meetings and trying to unionize them

as well. And there's a really amusing account from one of the lead weeks of with the class women, philanthropic women who were trying to organize working class women but in a bit of a middle class top down where we didn't always go down very well with the women themselves. But they recorded at the time that they were absolutely worn out with these match women because they kept coming to them as saying, all right, um, we want you to help us, because we want to have another union meeting.

Please with the jam factory girls, and we'd like you to help us find a venue please, and then we would like tea and cakes, and we would like some Irish music. And they were like, oh my god, you know, I've got to try and find an Irish musician. How its short noticed, But I love this idea of a union meeting that involves tea and cach and Irish dancing.

How fantastic. And I have a little match Wents festival every year right close to their old factory and bow and I have music and tea and well not so much tea and cakes as gin, but anyway, I like to think it's very much in the spirit of the match women. So they were incredibly busy unionizing, you know, they weren't messing about. And it's so interesting that they

took this message to the dockers as well. Now, the big Great dock Strike of nine has traditionally been what historians of the labor movement, the union movement looked to as a big starting event, very important. This is where modern trade Juanism, that is, trade unism with a political objective to liberate the working class really as opposed to just sort of boys club really that the previous unions were to keep people out of the profession, to organize apprenticeships,

to keep your own labor price high. This is a very different thing when trade Juanism, and it's been dated from the dock strike, and historians, those historians have even bothered to write about the match women in a line or two have said, well, this was just a vague, sort of minor harbinger of the dock strike. And you think, what does that mean exactly if it happened first, is it not part the same movement but the start of it?

Would you not think that I've had his story. Say to me, Olouise, you're really failing to understand the way this work. As I'm standing, come from a trade union background, are not real an academic, but now this is not really the way this happens a dock strike. These were just girls dock strikes far more important. Well, I went back, in my sort of nerdy peeky way and started those months after the match from strike really intensely, really really intensely.

I got out the record of incidents of strikes, which were recorded for like every week after the match from his strike and every week before. I looked at the years and years of this stuff, and I found that strikes shut up, shut up right after the match from a strike. And there's no other way to explain it, because I looked. I went right back and looked at averages and years. Everyone in the East End is going

on strike. The tailors, the seamstresses, you know, the jam factories, the furblous everyone's going on strike, you know, because working people aren't stupid. They see an example here. Oh look, they are workers like us. They're supposed to be powerless, blimy. They're now trade union leaders and they've got better conditions. You know, how dumb do we think working people are?

But this would be lost on them. Of course, it wasn't lost on them and the doctors union we find go to the matchments Union and they say, can you help us? Basically, can you help us? So so far from what historians have said, Oh, these are two totally different groups of workers. There's no connection, and there's a year, by the way between the strikes, so it can't have any cart of be inspired by the match froom. Actually

they try to strike in the autumn. That was totally inspired by the match women who said so the leaders of the Dockers unions said so themselves. You know, their people came to speak to us. We tried to strike. It wasn't successful, but it was a rehearsal for nine. In eighteen eight nine, they pulled this strike off big time. It was a humongous strike that spread to become almost a general strike really, and spread to other countries as well.

They had support from other countries. The whole of London was almost doubt. It was like a city of the dead, because in those days you could take what's called second reaction. So if someone comes out and strike, you can do a secondary strike. You can come out and strike to support them. I'm old enough to just about remember those petty days and you can still do that. You can't now.

So everyone came out and supported them, including match women, by the way, came out and strike and supported them. Now can we prove though, that Dockers were inspired by match women when all the mainly manly historians have said they definitely weren't. Well, apart from the fact that I looked at census records, voy did I look at census records. I haunted those censors offices, and Mattalin and Dockers are

so much the same people. Practically. Jim Best, one of the descendants I've talked you, said, no, they're the same people. There's no separation between these people. Matched were married doctors, matched women and the mothers of offers. The sisters are offers, they're friends of doctors. You know, working people do inspire each other. They do talk, of course, and this strike is unquestionably a huge event, but it's unsuccessful at first.

The Dot company really fight back and John Burns, one of the key leaders who goes on to bring MP says, drough the strike to a mass meeting of hundreds of thousands of men. Don't give up, stand shoulder to shoulder. Remember the match girls who won their fight and formed a union? Well, I mean wow. And he says that kind of thing constantly. By the way, he doesn't say, oh, some match women. You probably haven't heard of them. They

were from Brian to May, down the road. They apparently had a strike, he says, the match girls, and he knows everyone knows. Hundreds of thousands of men listening, they all know damn well who the match were. Enough, that's how inspiring they are. When the leaders wrote their memoirs, they said things like it was the match women that started it. They they were the first signs, They were the first encouragement, the first inspiration. They were the start

of new unions. And what more do you need than that? And yet historians have seen that presumably if I can find it, you can find it, and just missed it and said no, no, no, no, match girls not really important. Two different from the doctors, wouldn't have influenced them. Too distant a year apart. Absolutely, the two strikes had nothing to do with each other. And when you look at

all the evidence, that is absolutely extraordinary. So yes, long story short, the match women weren't really busy throughout all that time. They came out on strike to support the doctors, as I've said, but also as doctors wise, they were involved in rent strikes. Rent strikes really incredibly powerful weapon that women often employed, actually employed a great effect. And

they strung a banner I presume made of sheets. I don't know how else they would have done it across the commercial road and they said, our husbands are on strike. For us wives, it is not honey, So we do not think that it is right to give the landlords money. In other words, tough lads, you can whistle for your rents. You're getting nothing until this strike is settled. So yes, there was one hell of a lot more going on in this period than one, you know, inadequate psychopath murdering women.

M And you mentioned that this was the beginning of this new unionism in Britain. Um, what ended up being the fruits of this period of unionism? What did it? What did it bring? What did it result in in Britain? In British, Well, it comes right down to the Labor Party today. This is a chain of events. This is hundreds and thousands of the most explode woitted workers who have been completely left out of any kind of consideration of unions and before on the whole saying we're going

to do what they did. They used to strike as a means to force open the door to unionization. They forced the employers to let them the union movement. They didn't bother waiting for them to get around to them, which is what you're supposed to do if you're very poor, politely respectively wait to your turn, and maybe eventually the big boys of the union woman might bother to get around you. Probably not, but you never know your luck.

But no, they forced the pace. They used strikes to force the right to form their own unions, and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them formed across the country as far Awaars Island too. It's incredible how news traveled in those days, and Irish theams just as unions wrote and said, we've heard about the match women, please come and tell us how to do it. We want to unionize as well. So it really was striking a light, you know. It really went like a fire.

It just read and spread and spread. Although the employers fought back, I mean, of course employers always will. They fought back quite viciously, and a lot of those new unions did fold, but in a way that didn't really matter because things never went back. Things never went backwards. The Match Women's Union stayed active until nineteen twenty when it was merged into the g MB General and Municipal Boilermakers,

one of our big unions. So it stayed through all that period and people that have written about it um and not many people have written about the strike itself, but I did read one paper that suggested, oh, it can't have bring an important strike because the union only lasted till nineteen twenty, well, rather outrage of the match

men's behalf. Not only did it survive all that time when employers were kicking and fighting back with everything they had, but it survived and continued to become part of one of our most major unions. So it's an incredible achievement. And it's out of that modern labor movement, that modern trade union movement that the Labor Party of course began significantly. Whether or not it likes to remember it today, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but it's completely beholden to

the union movement. And I was really pleased, after oh gosh, twenty years of plugging away at this message, flogging away at it, that these women were so important that Jeremy Corbyn said, um, I think it was an international women's dye in sixteen. He said we should hail the mothers of our movement, and he acknowledged my work, and he acknowledged the match women as the mothers as the trade union movement, and you know, I felt my job is done.

I was incredibly happy with that. And maybe as a final grace note on our conversation today, can you describe that Glandstone statue? How it's still treated today. Well, this is so fascinating. The statue is still there and I have my match Womens Festival right next to it, actually in a lovely little venue called bow Arts on the Bow Road. It's still there. But there's one very significant thing about it that you would notice if you were walking along the borough and having a look at Gladstone.

As I said, he's got one of his arms outstretched, one of his hands outstretched, and it's pointing kind over the direction of the Branton May Factory. You were to look fairly closely, you'd notice that that hand isn't red. It's a slightly faded red, but it's definitely red. Now, why on earth is that? Well it harks back to the match woman rushing the statue and saying, our blood paid for this all those decades before. I was told

by Ted Lewis, the grandson of Martha Robertson. Actually it was his grandma and her friends who first threw paint over it. This statue kept annoying them. They were not done with this statue, from charging at it and dripping their blood on its. It was a constant source of annoyance to them. And you can imagine that it would have been. They had to walk past it at least twice a day in and out of work, and they must have thought our wages paid for that bloody statue.

Why are its hands still read now? Though? Well? I've tried to find out who done it, and you can understand why people might not want to tell me, because I suppose it is criminal damage after all, isn't it not that I would dog them into the police. But they don't necessarily know that. But it's been done at least since the and by that I mean the hand regularly painted red. It may well have had paint chucked at it by match women as well for many years.

But this is when the factory became a gated how was in community Brianson They moved their operations, they were taken over by Swedish Match and in the eighties this became what we used to call yuppy flats in those days, and there was a lot of anger about that in the neighborhood, this gentrification and Gladstone's hand, as far as I can tell asking the council has been painted red ever since, and the council not happy by the way

at all, and they've just given up. So what they used to do was to clean it every time the hand was painted red. But this was really expensive and it kept happening, so they just gave up and they've left it red, which I'm very pleased about because there's a lovely little historical reminder. I've asked and asked who might have done it, because I would like to shake them by the hand, whether or not it was covered

in red paint, and buy them a drink. I was told once by somebody at talk I know someone who did that. It was one of my mates. But it wasn't massively political. She was just a bit drunk. She's been in the park and she happened to be walking past it. Now I love that story, but I don't buy it because this statue is up a massive flint in the middle of the bow rows. Now, you would need a ladder, and I doubt that you'd be in the pub with a pot of red paint, a paintbrush

and a ladder in your handbag. I just can't see it. I really hope though, that one day I find out, and if you're listening and you know, please tell me. I promise I will not tell anybody. I would love to have the satisfaction of knowing who does it. Oh, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. I think that's where we'll wrap it up. Fantastic, Louise, thank you so much for telling the match women's story again for Unobscured and our listeners.

It's such a pleasure to have you and to have this story to include in exploring the East End and beyond. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a pre you of what's in store for next week. We figured that the killer had to

know White Chapel. He had to be able to move around White Chapel in Spittlefield without causing suspicion, and I had to know all these dark alleys and cut throughs. He had to appear to avoid police patrols, particularly as more and more police were put on the streets, particularly following the double event. So this is someone who needs to know his local environment, and that doesn't really fit with a doctor from outside, or a slumming top or any of these other people. It has to be a

local man. I think you had to have somebody who had a clear motive for wanting to kill. In many of the books I've read about JACKI Ripard, I can't really understand why he would do the things he would do. That's kind of a bit that the writers don't tell you why would you do that? Now? I understand, of course that without knowing who the killer is, m without a confession, we can never know why somebody chooses to murder.

But I feel you had to find a try and identify a motive, and in this case we found somebody who had the mains motive and opportunity. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad

Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at History unobscured dot com, and until next time, thanks for listening. Unobscured as a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Mank. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.