Victorian Girl Workers of London: 1. The Match-Box Makers

If you’re researching your family history, part of its fascination is the chance to understand how your ancestors lived.

I found this article in a book owned by my great grandfather, George Millman. In 1897, Young Woman magazine published this series of informative articles about working conditions in various jobs for women in London.

As George’s father James Millman was a London City Missionary, he would have been interested from a sociological point of view – these were the poor people of London his father was trying to help every day.

GIRL WORKERS OF LONDON.

1. – THE MATCH-BOX MAKERS.

It is an education in itself to understand the various castes among the London poor. The starving shoeblack who said, with tears in his eyes, that “he could not be a sandwich man – it was so low,” finds a parallel in his East End sister, who works regularly for sweating wages at some factory, but who would not be seen talking to a flower-girl or street-seller, though the latter’s weekly earnings doubled hers, because such an intimacy would lower her for ever in the eyes of her neighbours.

Hence the sellers of matches in the street have nothing to do with the makers of match-boxes, and as are as far removed from them, in their social sphere, as a duchess from the village doctor where her country estate is situated.

And the progress of civilisation seems to deepen this tendency: the girls may be as radical as you like with regard to their employers, – their ideas sound socialistic in the extreme when they are airing their grievances – but they never apply the principles of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, to those of a lower grade. They may be kind to them when in trouble, but they do not make “pals” of them in the genuine sense of the word.

There are many reasons for this. In the first place, the average match-box maker derives a certain standing from the fact that she works at home. However poor that home may be, it shelters many little makeshifts and economies which the factory-hand must betray to her fellow-workers. The girl who works at home can slave in the shabbiest costume, and appear resplendent at night in gilt earrings, trailing feathers, and blouse of brilliant hue. There is no one to scoff at her scanty meal, or pass scathing remarks at raiment in rents or hose in holes. She is independent, and that is the acme of bliss to the lawless, defiant, bold-spirited young woman, who flaunts before her little world with a freedom of tongue and abandon of manner that completely deceives the casual spectator, who never guesses how assiduous she is at her work between those four mouldering, damp, rotten walls, nor how self-denying she can be when sickness lays low a relative whom she loves.

A curious anomaly is the East End working-girl. Starvation cannot cow her spirit; bad air, deficient ventilation, vicious surroundings neither wholly contaminate her frame nor her moral nature. Her Board school education has stirred her ambition, but she is not developed enough to control it with reasonable limits; her Sunday-school instruction has awakened aspirations which too often dissipate in vapour for want of a genial atmosphere. Rampant with youth, and the maimed vitality which inherited disease and dwarfed opportunities too often poison at is source, these girls have their fling in the only way they know, and count their pleasiures in life by the number of youthful adorers who will treat them to sweets ad libitum, penny gaffs, and shows of a sensational order.

To comprehend their craving for such amusements, we must realise the monotony of their work and its intellectual limits. Then we must grasp the sordid poverty of their homes, and how the combined monotony of work and poverty presses on the mercurial temperament of budding adolescents.

Let us describe the actual labour first. The materials are fetched from the factory and carried back when made into boxes. Where several girls in the family work at the trade, some make nothing but the case, others but the tray, the two parts of a match-box. To make the tray or drawer deftly requires delicate manipulation. It is formed of a strip of wood notched at each corner. Bend it wrong and it snaps at once, and the wood has to be thrown away. Some thin coloured paper is then folded round it. The third operation is to fold the upper edge down over the upper rim and flatten the lower edge out to support the drawer. Lastly, the bottom is dropped in, and pressed flat upon the paper already pasted.

The process soon becomes mechanical, and quite tiny children take a share, though many think it more difficult than the making of the case, which is done thus: the wood is shaped and fastened by the pasted paper, which requires much careful smnoothing to be of requisite flatness. The final operation of fixing the sand-paper onto the side is always disliked by the beginner, as it invariably hurts the finger used. The drawer and case must be quite dry before they are fitted together. When completed, a novice is told off to tie them up in packets of a dozen. The work has one advantage: it is is cleanly, also it is not in itself unhealthy. The sight is quite picturesque of a floor strewn with strips of coloured paper, the heaped-up boxes in one corner, while those that are drying are spread before the fire. In summer, some try to dry them in the sun; but if care is not taken, they warp and shrivel and so much labour is wasted.

Putting it as accurately as one can gauge it, if a worker is in constant employment and works twelve hours a day, she can make nearly a shilling a day net earnings, which means at the rate of a penny an hour. But in making such calculations there is always the all-important “if.”

Practically, no girl does or can work for such a length of time. Who could or would stand it? They want their meals, they want movement, they want relaxation to the frame, they want the relief of speaking. The body aches, the fingers get cramp, the eyes become dazzled by the bright strips of paper.

So the work is pushed aside, and after a stretch and a yawn the weary white slave elects to “chuck” it. The everlasting tea and bread and butter is partaken of – the food which has done duty for breakfast and dinner, and dinner and breakfast, week after week; the cracked, blurred mirror is brought into requisition, the curling tongs emerge from their retreat, and after a happy half-hour a transformed creature, smartened up and bedecked, leaves the murky dismal room to wander with her boon companion along the gaily-lighted streets, drinking in avidly every sight and sound that savours of change and sensation. Can we be surprised that she lets the happy “he” treat her to whelks or tripe, with a sup of gin or a dash of rum; that she revels in a certain amount of lawlessness in language, as a vent for the stern suppression of the long day’s labour; that audacity takes the place of fun; and that she rushes into revelry both unholy and unwise, for the stimulus it gives to her imagination and the quickened flow of blood in her veins?

Otherwise, she would soon stagnate into an imbecile. Home is so dull, so dirty, so overpoweringly nauseous to mind and body. When is there time to clean the one or two rooms huddled with filthy furniture to make room for the work? Who feels inclined to scrub and to scour when limbs are aching and tempers tried by the constant, constant grind? Who has time to cook an appetising meal, if funds were forthcoming, when hands might get grimed with smoke and unfit for work; and never yet in the dwellings of the poor was a fire made to cook at for the grate is always wrong.

When philanthropists ponder over the upraising of the sweated masses, they must remember how trifles tell where money is next to nil. Economy has to be practised with regard to fuel and light; one cannot work in the dark, clean in the dark, or do much sewing in the dark, so somehow the young are forced into the streets for air, for exercise, and for food.

The streets seem their legitimate playground; the sunless courts in which they have sent the day are forgotten then, and the glare of the flaring torches of the gutter booths holds a fascination peculiarly its own. One almost wonders sometimes if the match-sellers, much as they are looked down on, have not the best of it, in spite of their precarious livelihood. They have the fresh air and freedom, and the variety to ear and eye which has such an unconscious charm.

But the match-box makers are not without friends now of their own sex, and no sketch of their position would be complete without mention of them. Permeating the East End are Clubs and Classes with the special object of giving these girls, so rich in possibilities, a chance of developing in the right way; and such efforts are thoroughly appreciated, though here again the curse of social status creeps in and mars the good.

If Miss So-and-So has joined the class, then Miss So-and-So must perforce remain away. Polly Jones does not wish Louisa Smith to see she is wearing last year’s hat, so she forgoes the pleasure of the Magic Lantern Lecture or the benefits of the gymnasium.

Such class prejudice can only be broken down by patience, tact, and example, and until it is, very little moral good will be effected.

And now to ennumerate the virtues of the match-box maker girls. Humour, genuine and responsive, must have a first place; for it is a quality which makes their life bearable, and gives a flash of brightness where otherwise all would be gloom.

They love a joke, they appreciate wit; the retort (not always) courteous is ever on their lips; they give and take in verbal warfare with a spontaneous good-humour which seems to be infectious, and a sharp reply is as much appreciated by the the one against whom it is levelled as by the one who utters it.

Another virtue (and a new one) is, we may hope, a harbinger of better things. Taken as a class, they are decidedly more temperate than the match-box makers of, say, ten years ago. They are learning foresight and they know that a night of drinking incapacitates their working powers next day. As knowledge here has wrought improvement, does it not point to the fact that many of their follies proceed from ignorance, and show that common-sense instruction might save a vast number from crime?