Necessity and Rage: the Factory Women's Strikes in Bermondsey, 1911

Bermondsey demonstration, August 1911: women workers at Pink's jam factory, with their supporters. Another of their banners proclaimed 'We are not white slaves, but Pink's slaves'.

In 1935 George Dangerfield, looking back at the industrial crisis of 1911, described the Bermondsey factory women's strikes as encapsulating the essence of that summer's turbulence:

The story of the Bermondsey women seems almost to have isolated – with its mingling elements of unreason and necessity and gaiety and rage – the various spirit of the whole Unrest. One stifling August morning, while the [transport workers'] strike was at its height, the women workers in a large confectionery factory, in the middle of Bermondsey, in the 'black patch of London',¹ suddenly left work. As they went through the streets, shouting and singing, other women left their factories and workshops and came pouring out to join them . . . The women were underpaid and overcrowded . . . Yet they were oddly light-hearted, too. Many of them, dressed in all their finery, defied the phenomenal temperature with feather boas and fur tippets, as though their strike were some holiday of the soul, long overdue.²

Dangerfield was commenting on strikes that took place in the southeast London borough of Bermondsey in August 1911, when industrial action by dockers was also going on along the Bermondsey and Rotherhithe riverside. They were initiated by around 15,000 women and girls employed in local jam, biscuit, confectionery and similar food-processing factories, tin-box-making, glue and other manufactures. The strikes, which lasted for about ten days, began as a series of spontaneous demonstrations calling for improved wages and conditions, but became more structured with the intervention of National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW) trade-union organizer Mary Macarthur. The factory women's action ended successfully with wage increases estimated at a total outlay of about £7,000 per annum for all workers.³ Unionization of many of the strikers was signalled when Mary Macarthur announced the establishment of a permanent NFWW branch in the area.⁴

In 1915 Barbara Hutchins, a member of the Fabian Women's Group, also described the Bermondsey strikes. According to her account:

In August 1911 came a great uprising of underpaid workers, and among them the women . . . The tropical heat and sunshine of that summer seemed to evoke new hopes and new desires in a class of workers usually only too well described as 'cheap and docile' . . . Most of them regarded the conditions of their lives as in the main perfectly inevitable, came out on strike to ask only 6d. or 1s. more wages and a quarter of an hour for tea, and could not formulate any more ambitious demands.⁵

In contrast to Dangerfield's rhapsodic evocation of the strikes, Barbara Hutchins's more matter- of-fact assessment is nearer to three interpretations of the August unrest made by Sheila Lewenhak, Sarah Boston and Norbert Soldon in the 1970s and 1980s, which located the strikes in the context of the development of women's trade unionism and the 'forward march of labour'.⁶ These three accounts, like that of Hutchins, rely to a large extent on factual evidence from trade-union and press reports, whereas Dangerfield drew largely on Mary Agnes Hamilton's admiring biography of trade-union organizer Mary Macarthur.⁷ Yet Dangerfield's vivid rhetoric evokes a sense of the strikes which is not provided by the other more prosaic assessments.

These writers provide valuable retrospective views on the strikes, but there are limitations on the immediate evidence available for an examination of the unrest. The data which can be accessed is usually based on middle-class documentation. There are very few working-class sources relevant to Bermondsey in the early twentieth century; and a time gap of nearly ninety years means that it is impossible to obtain oral life histories from people directly involved with the 1911 events. Primary material is drawn mainly from official reviews and statistics, trade-union reports, press coverage, commentaries by social observers and biographical studies...