The Allotment Girls
by Kate Thompson
Inspiration for the novel
During the Second World War, life in the iconic Bryant and May match factory is grimy and tough. Annie, Rose, Pearl and Millie carry on making matches for the British Army, with bombs raining down around them. Inspired by the Dig for Victory campaign, Annie persuades the owners to start an allotment in the factory grounds and the girls eventually carve out a corner of the yard into a green plot full of life and colour. In the darkest of times, the girls find their allotment a tranquil, happy escape and bring about a powerful change, not just in the factory, but their own lives.
Kate Thompson took inspiration for her book from the strength of character displayed by East End Women, like Sarah Jarvis, who lived in abject poverty with her husband and nine children in two small rooms of a slum in Bethnal Green. During the early hours of Boxing Day 1897, a fire broke out while they were asleep, huddled together for warmth on a freezing, foggy night. When firemen entered the house, there were no survivors. In a primal act of pure maternal instinct, Sarah had clasped her eight-month-old daughter close to her, shielding her, so that, while she was badly burnt, her baby’s body was almost untouched by the flames.
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The Jarvis family’s world was similar to many of London’s poor, eking out a meagre living as match-box makers. Although the whole family was engaged in assembling matchboxes, their wages were so inadequate, they were left starving. Kate wanted to weave this event through The Allotment Girls as part of Elsie’s story, to illustrate the brutal poverty that working-women of the Victorian
era lived through. Elsie might come across as a woman quick to bury bodies and scandal but she is also a product of her generation. Tough, embittered by experience and forced to endure miserable living and working conditions.
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​It was these same conditions, forced upon workers at Bryant and May, that instigated the famous Matchgirls Strike in the summer of 1888, when 1400 women walked out of the Fairfield Works in Bow and into the history books. The strike has been depicted countless times with the women always cast as vulnerable victims, living in grimy, soot-encrusted slums, forced to work for a pittance and falling prey to the infamous phossy
jaw, the grisly disease caused by white phosphorus that caused the sufferer’s jaws and teeth to crumble and putrefy.
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​The exploitation by greedy factory bosses is true, but the Matchgirls’ role as meek, waif-like victims has been misunderstood. It is a commonly held belief that the women were led out on strike by Annie Besant but, in reality, the strikers needed no outside help and were far from downtrodden victims.
Using strong bonds of working-class solidarity and female resourcefulness, these courageous girls and women organised themselves and instigated the strike. With bold swagger, this tough tribe of women marched defiantly from Bow to the Houses of Parliament in their velvet, feathered hats, forcing their bosses into an embarrassing climbdown, in which they ceded to the strikers’ demands.
As part of her research Kate talked to Ted Lewis, whose grandmother Martha worked at the factory in 1888. He recalled a tough woman whose life was a continual fight against poverty. Martha was a child when she started work making matchboxes, her day would begin at 5am, when she would clear the grate and light a new fire, before
walking to the factory to join the queue with many other children for work. At 13 she began working full-time for Bryant & May. Martha was married with 5 children when the First World War began, her husband, James, enlisted as a rifleman and she was a woman of standing in the community, respected and entrusted to deliver babies and lay out the dead. It took great strength of character to carry on when she received notification that her husband was missing, presumed dead. In 1916, the army asked her to help identify local soldiers who had been badly wounded. Walking the wards, she was drawn to a man who was bandaged head to toe. Looking into his eyes, she just knew it. ‘Jim, is that you?’ she gasped, at which he broke down in tears. She promptly fainted as her husband came back to life.
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The Matchgirls’ victory brought about unimagined improvements in the lives of future match workers. To erase the shame of the strike, the bosses set up a welfare scheme that was second to none. By the time of the Second World War, workers enjoyed onsite medical care, a dentist, library, pension fund, a generous savings and hospital fund, and social and sports clubs, including the Match Girls’ Club, which organised pottery, needlecraft, keep fit, dressmaking, debating and singing lessons, as well as an annual beano and dance. Everyone wanted to work there and there was such camaraderie and friendliness amongst the girls.​
Before writing this book Kate visited the match factory to try and get a sense of its history. Surely the robust spirit of the Matchgirls would sing from the ancient walls. Sadly, no ghosts remain, the factory has been developed into a luxurious housing complex. The top floor is now a string of split-level loft apartments offering a metropolitan dream; a far cry from when girls packed matches there for twelve hours a day as the Luftwaffe tried to bomb them. The place where the rocket struck in the yard is now a luxury leisure complex and gym, and the site of the old allotments concreted over, proving that you cannot inhabit the past. Kate hopes you can perhaps get a sense of it through reading this book.
