One day Maud Pember Reeves glimpsed something unexpectedly beautiful, cutting into the unrelenting struggle of the streets just as a rainbow illuminates a sky dominated by dark cloud. She saw a seven-year-old lad hopping, crutch in one hand, the other encircling ‘a pot in which was a lovely, blooming fuchsia whose flowers swung to his movement.’ Something at that moment about his look ‘of glorified beatitude’ in the middle of a world of extraordinary hardship gave Miss Pember Reeves ‘a pang of the sharpest envy’. Even a child seemed to recognise that there was hope for another dimension to life, if only he could reach it. As she watched the crowd milled around him and he hopped away, vanishing as quickly as he had appeared.

  If the women were to take any action to alter the poverty of their lives, many knew that a second missing wage packet would place an extraordinary strain on the family budget. Those most fearful of the repercussions of voluntary idleness strung several large ragged bed sheets across Tower Bridge Road with the cautionary words ‘No work, No rent’ written across them. But a great many women had suffered enough hardship, and were ready to risk their income for what they believed in. The factory workers of Bermondsey, in particular, were no longer prepared to spend long days sitting on hard wooden benches, filling earthenware jars with sticky jam, without objecting.

  Industrial action on the part of womenwas not new. In 888, the year Jack the Ripper was stalking prostitutes in Whitechapel, 700 femaleworkers in the Bryant&May match factory had lit ‘the small spark that ignited the blaze of revolt’. The theosophist andwomen’s rights campaigner Annie Besant had been to the factory to interview women for her article ‘White Slavery in London’, and found conditions beyond her belief. Pay was derisory and unreliable (less than five shillings for a 70-hour week), but the most disgraceful aspect was that the phosphorous used in making the matches was ruining the women’s health. Skin turned yellow, hair fell out, and the jaw turned first green and then black with ‘phossy jaw’, a type of bone cancer. Death always followed. Annie Besant helped the women to organise a union, and persuaded George Bernard Shaw to be the treasurer of the strike fund. They were successful, and phosphorus was dropped from the production process of matches.

  At around the same time, women cigar makers in Nottingham and cotton workers in Dundee were joined in strike action by women in a tin-box factory in London who pelted the men with red ochre and flour when they refused to join in but remained behind on the shop floor. Conditions in women’s work places were intolerable. At Murrays, where white sugar mice were assembled into after-dinner bonnes bouches for the salons of Belgravia, women emerging from their factory shift looking as if they had been drenched in volcanic ash were a commonplace sight. The sugar seeped into every crevice and the workers never felt properly clean.

  The Idris soft drinks factory provided the lemonade that was drunk on velvet lawns at summer country-house lunch parties. The women who bottled it stood ankle deep in poorly drained water, and the weak tea served at their short midday break was boiled from the same water that had already been used to slop down the floor. In 1910 the proud resilience to such conditions finally failed these women and they walked out of the factory gates singing their own strike anthem to the tune ‘Every Nice Girl Loves a Sailor’.

  Oh you great King in the palace,

  And you statesman at the top;

  When you’re drinking soda water,

  Or imbibing ginger pop;

  Think of some who work at Idris,

  For very little pay;

  And who only get nine bob for a most unpleasant job,

  A lack a day! A lack a day!

  Now then girls all join the Union,

  Whatever you may be;

  In pickles, jam, or chocolate,

  Or packing pounds of tea;

  For we want better wages,

  And this is what we say –

  We’re out to right the wrong, and now we shan’t be long,

  Hip hurrah! Hip hurrah!

  The employees at the chain-making factory in Cradley Heath near Birmingham moulded iron rods into plough chains, work described by one observer as ‘the process of grinding the faces of the poor.’Babies wrapped in filthy makeshift hammocks were hung from hooks in the ceiling while slightly older children lurked among the dangerous embers spilling onto the floor at their mothers’ feet. Sweat poured down the womens’ arms and legs, and flying sparks continually burned through their clothes and on to their flesh. In 1910 500 women chain-makers – half of all those employed in the industry – decided they had endured enough, and went on strike. The courage of the women of Cradley Heath, led by a young Scottish trade unionist called Mary Macarthur, played a significant part in raising the morale of other undervalued, victimised workers in the Midlands, both male and female, thousands of whom, with Mary’s help, began to organise themselves into unions. But conditions and rates of pay in the ‘sweated industries’, whether home-based or in the factories and workshops, were still intolerable in 1911. In the manufacture of match-boxes, umbrellas, bicycles, paper bags, coffin tassels, safety pins and baby clothes, women were rewarded with awage even lower than the derisory amount received by a man doing the samework.Aluckywoman might earn between seven and nine shillings aweek, but thousands of girls earned as little as three shillings. With rent at an average of five shillings a week, and a hundredweight of coal at a shilling and threepence, the sums required for a half-way decent standard of living did not add up.

  Jam-bottling, traditionally a female occupation, was inevitably seasonal. Work in the cold winter months was scarce, but during the cloudless days of the late spring and summer of 1911 the soft fruit had ripened speedily in England’s sun-drenched fields, and gooseberries and strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants and black-currents in succession had piled in from the countryside. The unpacking rooms at Pink’s factory in the Old Kent Road, a hated place nicknamed ‘The Bastille’ by the locals, were filled with women with red-stained fingers preparing the raw fruit for steaming. Alexander Paterson was familiar with these workers. ‘The jam maker betrays his whereabouts to everyone within half a mile,’ he wrote. ‘The flavour of strawberry lives in every mouth . . . It comes in through the window in the sultry night, fills the streets and lurks in the very police station.’

  Here was a sisterhood, a circle of good-humoured women not averse to a joke. According to a study in the Christian Commonwealth Magazine, these women knew they would be teased if they didn’t talk in the dialect of their district, but it noted that ‘there may be occasions on which factory workers wish to talk fine and the result is often amusing.’With affectionate though patronising tolerance, the magazine admitted that ‘to the refined the everyday language of women factory workers will sound shocking and their general behaviour will appear coarse and vulgar,’ but cautioned sternly that ‘they are not so in reality’ and, further, that ‘it is very unfair to judge the lives of factory workers from the standpoint of a cultured lady. They are hardworking honest sober faithful wives and good mothers.’

  Pride was their dominant emotion. And pride manifested itself in appearance. Their Sunday-best clothes were an outer symbol of self-respect, summed up in the motto, ‘better be out of the world than out of fashion.’ One factory worker, Priscilla E. Moulder, described her colleagues’ fascination with modishness and their ‘delight in sudden change’ in appearance. ‘One year the hats are severely plain in shape, very little trimming, scarcely any brim, and small in size; the very next season the shapes are the most fantastic imaginable. In size they may be akin to car wheels and as for trimming –why, they look likewalking flower gardens, while the brims flop up and down with every movement of the head.’ Miss Moulder celebrated her co-workers’ love of colour: ‘at one period greens are all the rage’, whereas ‘in recent years heliotrope has been a favourite.’ On the women’s return to work after a Sunday or a rare day off, the Christian Commonwealth Magazine observed, ‘strong iron shod clogs have taken the place of glacé kid boots, harden mill skirts [to protect the dress] and shawls over the head and shoulders are worn instead of tailor made costumes.’ They were determined not to be outshone by the beautifully turned out suffragettes for whom nothing less than their immaculate uniforms would do when they marched to express their own demands for equality and fairness. The fashion-conscious factory worker saved every spare penny she could to dress as becomingly as possible. As Miss Moulder explained, they ‘love pretty things just as do the women who occupy higher social planes, and they experience the same craving to gratify the instinct.’

  Word spread of the collective intention of the women of London’s East End to go on strike, and in the middle of August a very large woman pushed beyond the limits of her own endurance dressed herself up in all her Sunday finery. Her striking docker husband had not been bringing money home, she was exhausted by working so hard for so little, and these evils were exacerbated by the effect of the intense heat on a woman of her size. She called in at more than twenty factories in the Bermondsey neighbourhood, and wherever she went, she beckoned to the girls inside to come out and join her. Into the stiflingly hot streets came the pickle-makers, the biscuit-makers, the tea-packers, the cocoa-makers, the glue-mixers and the girls from Pink’s, walking out into the brilliant sunshine to join their men.

  Fifteen thousand women left their work places that hot August day, ready for the signal to abandon work, defiant and already wearing the best clothes in their possession, irrespective of the heat. In fur coats, with fur stoles or ‘tippets’ draped around their shoulders, in feather decked hats, starched skirts and heavy polished boots, smelling collectively like some great unrefined sugar mountain over which a tidal wave of molasses had been poured, they began to march. Their jaunty song and sweet stench filled the streets of the East End as they walked, an exhilarated, liberated crowd of women. Behind them in the silent factories ripe fruit rotted, biscuits lay unbaked, tea remained unpacked and cocoa powder unmixed. The factory owners, not anticipating the strength of feeling to last, locked the factory gates after them, expecting that thewomenwould soon realise they could not afford to miss their wages and return, begging for the gates to be opened.

  Theirwalk-out coincided with the near-paralysis of the country through the transport strike, and therewas an atmosphere of gaiety as the women joined the men gathered in Southwark Park, chanting as at a football match the question ‘Are we downhearted?’ to be met with the resounding refrain ‘NO’!

  There, even before Ben Tillett had climbed on the platform to address the crowd, Mary Macarthur, a vivacious blonde woman with an infectious laugh, stood before them to pledge her unwavering encouragement. Mary, the heroine of the successful Cradley Heath chain workers’ strike, was the daughter of a committed Conservative Glaswegian shopkeeper. At the age of 15 and to the horror of her father Mary had revealed socialist sensibilities, and her political convictions were further enhanced when she fell in love with Will Anderson, a member of the Independent Labour Party. Refusing Will’s proposal of marriage, she threw herself with confidence not only into her job as Secretary to the Women’s Trade Union League but also into founding a monthly newspaper called The Women Workers. In 1906 she had organised an exhibition at the Queen’s Hall in London for the ‘Sweated Industries’ which Queen Mary, as Princess of Wales, had visited. The women and children whose story was told in the exhibition inhabited a world of which she knew very little, and the Royal visitor had been deeply affected by Mary Macarthur’s conviction, and by the evidence she had produced both of appalling working conditions and of derisory wages that paid one woman sixpence for a shirt that would be sold in Bond Street for 25 shillings.

  By 1911 Mary Macarthur had become Secretary of the National Federation of Women Workers (their badge declared they were there ‘to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong’), and Will was chairman of the ILP. Mary was seriously (if privately) considering his proposal of marriage.

  If the London dockers had a defender in Ben Tillett, their wives now had their own champion in this young Scottish woman. At first she could scarcely be heard above the sound of cheering, but on Monday 14 August she went straight into action and set up a small office in Clerkenwell Row as the administrative nerve centre for the women’s strike. Barely sleeping or eating for the next few days, she worked non-stop in the office, outside the factory gates, cheering on the dispirited, advising on the health and well-being of the women and of their children too. She enrolled four thousand new union members that week. Much of her time was spent either in direct negotiation with the employers, or in raising funds for the strike subsidy accounts (the Peel Male Choir gave an impromptu concert on Clerkenwell Green and took a collection for the cause). Like Ben, ‘our Mary’, as she was always referred to, was able to hold an audience.

  Most people responded to Mary Macarthur. Despite the severe shortages brought about by the dockers and railwaymen’s actions, she appealed for food for the strikers and their families. Well aware of the power of the press, she wrote to the editors of the national newspapers: ‘We want at least a 1,000 loaves of bread at the Labour Institute, Fort Road, Bermondsey, SE. If possible by noon on Monday. Who will send them?’ The papers published her appeal and the Federation headquarters were swamped with supplies. Not only did the bread arrive on time, but crates packed with cans of condensed milk were delivered to her office, as were six full barrels of herrings from a Fleetwood fish merchant, who addressed his offering to ‘Mary, Wholesale Fish Merchant’ so it would not be stopped en route. The queues of women and chil- dren waiting to receive the thousands of loaves and other supplies that appeared, as if by biblical intervention, stretched far into the distance. Any sign of unpleasant behaviour, of anyone trying to jump the queue, or of parents using babies who were seen to be doing double duty by being handed from ‘mother’ to ‘mother’, received a swift jab from a Sunday-best hat-pin.

  One man was impervious to Mary’s charm, however: Lloyd George was unaffected and ‘rated her like a schoolgirl’. He was irritated by Mary’s unconstrained appeals through the newspapers, and by the fact that she gave the union’s financial figures to the press and they were published before he had had a chance to see them himself. Mary felt forced to hand over negotiations to her colleagues Constance Smith and Marion Phillips, while she concentrated on the immediate welfare of the women.

  Most of the women returned to work in the last week of August, following many hours spent by Mary and her colleagues in negotiation with the employers. They emerged pleased with the result. Wage increases ranging from one to four shillings a week amounted to a collective minimum of £7,000 a year. Mary felt the greatest achievement was ‘the new sense of self reliance, solidarity, and comradeship which has been so gained, making it certain that whatever the difficulties they will never again be, like those of the past, without hope.’

  The momentous events of the month of August had, however, not prevented all those who were rich enough, had saved enough, or were young and carefree enough from spending some time mucking about at the seaside, a part of the summer that few were prepared to forego.

  9

  Late August

  The exquisite print of the sand and shingle underwater, luxuriously hurting you.

  A.L. Rowse, A Cornish Childhood

  BY LATE AUGUST lassitude had begun to further weaken the nation’s energy, as the hot weather hung over England like a brocade curtain. The relentless sunshine seemed to have bleached the colour from life, replacing it with an oppressive haze. City dwellers were worst affected, and that year holidays as a means of escape were in fashion as never before. Summer holidays had been increasing in popularity over the years since the 871 Bank Holiday Act had entitled everyone to a day off on Whit Monday in May and another in early August, just as everyone was due days off at Christmas and Easter. But these new work-free days were intended for unrestricted freedom in the sun, rather than for religious contemplation.

  On 9 August two days after the 1911 Bank Holiday, The Times remarked somewhat tetchily on the new habits of the new generation. ‘In our grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s day, man was content with the annual expedition from the country to London or the town to the seaside, and those who could not afford this stayed quietly at home,’ the correspondent grunted, continuing: ‘Now, not only is the annual holiday a recognised necessity for every middle class household but the weekend habit is more and more invading our periods of work and people seem to be always on the move.’The frequency and reliability of trains and the avail-abilty of cheap tickets meant that for the last fifty years travel had been available to almost all classes. If the very rich did not go abroad to the stylish resorts of Biarritz and Monte Carlo, they visited the spa towns of Bath, Cheltenham, Harrogate, Leaming-ton Spa and Tunbridge Wells. The middle classes often went on bicycling tours, and picnics became increasingly popular, more practical nowthanks to the newtravelling gas stoves and the invention of the paper bag. Many others stayed at home in the semi-rural comfort of Garden City suburbs like Letchworth, which offered the recreational facilities of tennis and golf. The poor, if they could manage to make savings, went to the seaside. If the budget could not stretch to a day or two on the beach, the East Enders of London went hop-picking.

  Augustus John and his family seemed that summer to live life as if the whole thing were one long holiday. Augustus was one of the most famous painters of the decade, acknowledged by his contemporaries to be the most talented draughtsman of his generation. An authoritarian upbringing inWales had been alleviated by a less conventional grandfather, William John, who encouraged his grandchildren to ‘Talk! If you can’t think of anything to say, lie!’ The itinerant Irish tinkers who came to camp in the fields near Augustus’s Tenby home held an immediate attraction for him, and from his earliest years he planned to embrace the travellers’way of life. He taught himself the Romany language, and his fluency brought him a rare acceptance in the gypsy community, a bouillabaisse of Eastern European races that criss-crossed Europe in their brilliantly painted caravans, united in their shared love of the open road. Untrammelled by the bureaucratic restrictions that seemed to be encroaching on so many aspects of twentieth-century life, gypsies, the essential anti-capitalists, demonstrated their belief in an asset-free life by their insistence on the burning of all personal belongings at death. Physically Augustus sometimes seemed indistinguishable from the true gypsy, an intensely male presence, and although not quite reaching six foot, he appeared taller with his slim build, long red beard and exotic violet eyes. For many years his own existence had been itinerant, travelling through Europe and England in vivid blue and canary-yellow caravans, returning irregularly to London and to his studio just off the King’s Road in Chelsea. During the spring of 1911 his caravans and their six horses had been parked in a corner of Battersea Park, convenient for his frequent escapes. Putting on his large black felt hat and giving his family no notice, Augustus would clatter out of the Park in the direction of the Home Counties, or across the Channel to France. His fame and his reputation as the English counterpart of Gauguin and Matisse notwithstanding, most of the Bloomsbury circle were suspicious of him. Lytton Strachey was entirely unnerved in his presence: ‘When I think of him,’ he admitted, ‘I often feel that the only thing to do is to chuck up everything and make a dash for some safe secluded office stool.’