Story of White Slavery in London: The Matchgirls’ Strike of 1888
The Story of Sarah Chapman and the Matchgirls’ Strike
In the summer of 1888, around 1,400 women and girls at the Bryant & May match factory in Bow, East London, walked out on strike. Their action against low pay, arbitrary fines, long hours and dangerous conditions became a landmark in British labour history.
It showed that even the poorest and youngest unskilled workers—many of them teenagers—could organise successfully. One of the key figures among them was Sarah Chapman.
The Factory’s Beginning
In the 1860s several match-making companies operated in east London. Bryant & May was among the largest. Two Quaker businessmen, William Bryant and Francis May, established the firm, and by the 1860s–1870s their Fairfield Works in Bow had become one of the area’s best-known industries. The company mass-produced cheap matches for Britain’s growing urban population and employed well over a thousand workers at its peak in the 1880s, the great majority of them young women and girls from poor East End families.
Men and boys usually handled the mixing, dipping and drying of the matches. Women and girls, who formed the bulk of the workforce, removed the matches from frames and packed them into boxes. The firm also relied on large numbers of home workers to make the matchboxes.
By the 1880s the factory generated substantial profits and high dividends for shareholders. Management kept costs low through an ultra-cheap labour force of roughly 1,400–2,000 people, many aged between 13 and 20.
The Factory and Its Choices
Bryant & May’s Bow factory was producing matches on a large scale from the 1860s onward. By the 1870s medical journals and reformers had already documented the horrors of “phossy jaw” (phosphorus necrosis) caused by white (yellow) phosphorus. Some countries, including Sweden and Denmark, had begun to restrict or ban its use.
Bryant & May continued with white phosphorus. It was cheaper than the safer red phosphorus and produced matches that ignited more easily, helping sales. Switching would have raised costs and risked market share. Even though the health risks were known, the company prioritised profit.
The Work Environment
Workers commonly faced shifts of up to 14 hours a day, six days a week. Pay was extremely low—often under five shillings a week for many girls, with averages around 4–8 shillings depending on age, skill and piece rates—barely enough for food. Fines systematically drained even this meagre income. Workers could lose three pence to a full shilling (sometimes half a day’s pay) for arriving late, talking, having an untidy workbench, dropping matches, or using the toilet without permission.
Supervisors were often harsh and verbal abuse was common. The factory used white phosphorus, a cheap but highly toxic chemical. Girls worked long hours inhaling the fumes. Their teeth rotted, jaws decayed, and many suffered chronic illness or died young. Those who showed symptoms of phossy jaw were frequently dismissed without compensation. This was deliberate cost-cutting: the owners knowingly exposed women and children to a poison while treating the illness as an ordinary occupational hazard.
The Exploitation and Disease
White phosphorus caused phosphorus necrosis, or “phossy jaw.” It typically began with toothache and swelling. The jawbone then decayed, sometimes emitting a greenish glow and a foul smell. Victims were often sacked and left to die in poverty. Doctors and reformers had warned about the danger for years, but Bryant & May delayed switching to safer alternatives because red phosphorus cost more.
Most of the workers were white working-class girls and young women from London’s East End—poor, often undernourished, and desperate for any income. Many were of Irish descent; some were Jewish. A number were as young as 12 or 13. They lived in overcrowded slums and walked long distances to the factory. Inside they sat at long benches packing matches, breathing fumes all day. The chemical clung to their hair and clothes; many developed sores and persistent coughs.
The Spark of Rebellion
In June 1888 the journalist and activist Annie Besant investigated conditions after hearing reports at a Fabian meeting. On 23 June she published the article “White Slavery in London” in her paper The Link. She catalogued the low pay, the punitive fines and deductions, and the dangers of white phosphorus. She also publicised the contrast with the sizeable dividends paid to shareholders (often cited around 20–23 per cent).
Besant wrote of the workers: “Born in slums, driven to work while still children, undersized because underfed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as soon as worked out, who cares if they die or go on to the streets provided only that Bryant and May shareholders get their 23 per cent, and Mr. Theodore Bryant can erect statues and buy parks?”
Bryant & May reacted by trying to force workers to sign statements denying the claims. When some refused, management dismissed those it regarded as troublemakers (accounts speak of one to three women). That dismissal was the breaking point.
The Strike and the March
On or about 5 July 1888 approximately 1,400 women and girls walked out. One striker later recalled that it “just went like tinder—one girl began, and the rest said ‘yes,’ so out we all went.” The next day around 200 marched to Annie Besant’s office in Bouverie Street seeking support. A deputation of three—Sarah Chapman, Mary Cummings and Mrs Mary Naulls—met her. Although Besant had preferred a consumer boycott and was initially cautious about strike action, she agreed to help with publicity, fundraising and organisation.
The workers themselves had initiated the walkout. They formed a Strike Committee whose early members included Sarah Chapman, Mrs Mary Naulls, Mrs Mary Cummings, Alice Francis, Kate Sclater (sometimes Slater), Mary Driscoll, Jane Wakeling and Eliza Martin. They held meetings on Mile End Waste and in Bow and Stepney, collected donations, gained sympathetic press coverage, and won support from social reformers, the London Trades Council, Toynbee Hall and some Members of Parliament.
Sarah Chapman, then in her mid-twenties and an experienced matchmaking machinist (or “booker”), emerged as a calm, articulate spokesperson and one of the central organisers. The public was struck by the courage of these mostly teenage and young adult women challenging one of London’s profitable companies.
After roughly two to three weeks of pressure, on about 17 July 1888 Bryant & May agreed to negotiate. The company abolished the system of unfair fines and deductions, promised no victimisation of strikers, improved some aspects of working conditions (including better arrangements that reduced exposure to fumes), and recognised the new union.
Aftermath and Legacy
The Union of Women Matchmakers was formally established on 27 July 1888; by the end of the year it had become the Matchmakers’ Union and admitted both women and men. It was the largest union of women and girls in the country at the time. Sarah Chapman was elected to its committee and became its president. She was chosen as the union’s first representative to the Trades Union Congress and attended the 1888 International Trades Union Congress in London—one of the early women delegates in TUC history. She later attended the 1890 Congress in Liverpool as well.
The strike was a historic victory not only for the matchworkers but for the wider labour movement. It helped inspire the “New Unionism” of the late 1880s and 1890s, including the great dock strike of 1889, and proved that unskilled and low-paid women could organise and win.
Campaigning against phosphorus poisoning continued. Newspaper exposés in the 1890s revealed that Bryant & May had covered up cases of necrosis. In 1898 the company was prosecuted for failing to report 17 cases of phosphorus poisoning. The fine was a mere £25 9s—a trivial sum for such a wealthy firm. No owner was jailed or personally punished in any meaningful way. The real legislative change came with the White Phosphorus Matches Prohibition Act of 1908, which finally banned the substance in Britain after decades of pressure from matchworkers, reformers and trade unionists.
Sarah Chapman (later Dearman) continued her working life and lived until 1945. In recent decades her role, and that of her fellow matchwomen, has been more fully recognised. Historians such as Louise Raw have shown that the workers themselves, not middle-class rescuers, drove the action. A blue plaque now marks the site of the former Fairfield Works.
Suggested Reading
Louise Raw, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in Labour History (2011)
Lowell J. Satre, “After the Match Girls’ Strike: Bryant and May in the 1890s,” Victorian Studies 26:1 (1982)
Seth Koven, The Match Girl and the Heiress (2015)
The matchwomen’s courage in 1888 remains a powerful reminder that organised collective action by the most exploited can force change.
Annie Besant’s Later Life and Connection to India
The Annie Besant who helped publicise the matchworkers’ struggle in 1888 went on to live an extraordinary second act. In 1889 she joined the Theosophical Society and soon became one of its most prominent leaders. She first visited India in 1893 and eventually made it her permanent home.In India she worked in education (helping establish the Central Hindu College, which later became part of Banaras Hindu University), social reform, and politics. During the First World War she launched the Home Rule League in 1916, demanding self-government for India. Her newspaper New India became an important voice for the cause.
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