The Bryant & May Factory — The Matchgirls' Strike

The former Bryant & May match factory on Fairfield Road in Bow, London, is where fourteen hundred female workers staged the historic Matchgirls' Strike of 1888 against lethal phosphorus working conditions and unfair fines. Originally built in 1861, the six-acre site produced 300 million matches daily before Annie Besant exposed worker exploitation. The victory led to the creation of the country's largest women's trade union on July 27, 1888.

London · from the walk “Steam, Soot & Steel: London's Industrial Revolution” · Generated

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The Bow Quarter, 60 Fairfield Road, Bow, London E3 2QB

Why did workers strike at the Bryant & May factory in London in 1888?

Look around you. This gated residential complex... with its sleek apartments, private gym, and landscaped gardens... was once one of the most Dangerous factories in Victorian London.

In eighteen sixty-one, William Bryant relocated his match business to this three-acre site on Fairfield Road in Bow. The old candle factory was demolished, and a grand new works was built in the mock-Venetian style popular at the time. By eighteen eighty-one, the site had expanded to six acres with a workforce of over five thousand, producing roughly three hundred million matches per Day.

But here's what the glossy architecture concealed. White phosphorus was added to matchstick heads to create those convenient "strike anywhere" matches, and the demand was enormous. The women and girls who worked here — some as young as Six years old — breathed in phosphorus vapour with every shift. And the phosphorus did something Terrible to their bodies.

They called it "phossy jaw." Phosphorus necrosis of the jaw was a truly horrible disease. Workers developed unbearable abscesses in their mouths, leading to facial disfigurement and sometimes fatal brain damage. The gums even developed an eerie greenish-white Glow in the dark. And what did Bryant and May do when a worker complained of toothache? They were told to have the teeth removed immediately... or be Sacked.

The women worked gruelling six-day weeks, up to twelve or fourteen hours a day, for very little pay. And even That meagre wage was slashed by fines — for talking, for having an untidy workbench, even for being late.

Then, in June eighteen eighty-eight, a social activist named Annie Besant stood right outside these factory gates. She and Herbert Burrows distributed leaflets to the workers leaving after their long day. Besant then published a damning article revealing that shareholders were receiving over twenty percent dividends on the backs of women earning an average of just eleven shillings per week.

The factory bosses were Furious. They tried to force the workers to sign a paper denying Besant's claims. The women refused. Management then dismissed a worker on a false pretext... and that was the spark. Approximately fourteen hundred women and girls refused to work by the end of that first day.

Picture it — hundreds of young women, many still teenagers, marching through the streets of East London. Those who saw them pass by cheered and offered their support. They even visited Parliament, where the contrast of their poverty against the wealth of Westminster was a confronting sight for many.

After just three weeks, Bryant and May Broke. On the seventeenth of July, the company agreed that all fines and deductions would be abolished, that there would be no victimisation of strikers, and they would recognise the Union of Women Match Makers, which formed on the twenty-seventh of July. On its creation, it was the Largest union of women and girls in the country, and it inspired a wave of collective organising among industrial workers.

This moment right here, on this spot, helped ignite the Great Dock Strike of eighteen eighty-nine and the entire movement known as "New Unionism" — a wave that saw unskilled workers across Britain form unions for the very first time.

In twenty twenty-two, a blue plaque was unveiled right here at Bow Quarter by actress Anita Dobson and Sam Johnson — the great-granddaughter of strike committee leader Sarah Chapman. If you look for it near the entrance, you'll find it. A small circle of blue... marking the place where fourteen hundred women lit a match that changed British history.

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