Category: My Own Work

I’m not sure why, at least according to the BBC, celebrations for the ‘Grand Old Man’ of Victorian politics, William Ewart Gladstone (29 Dec 1809 – 19 May 1898) should be launched today, but his was a story linked with Bow, where I went on Sunday for the Three Mills Loop guided walk, which takes place roughly monthly.

The first half of the walk took us from the mills through the centre of the Olympic site on the Northern Outfall Sewer (rebranded in the 1990s as the ‘Greenway’) and then along the Navigation tow-path to Hackney Wick, where we turned down the Hertford Union canal, crossing this to go down Parnell Road. Here, where the walk leader went into the newsagents to buy an ice-cream, we were close to a part of the story linked to Gladstone, although the statue comes later.

Further on we passed Bow’s most famous factory, the former Bryant & May match works, set up by two Quaker businessmen in 1861. It’s a fine brick building, now a gated yuppie ‘village’, but was notorious in the 1880s for its low pay, poor working conditions and “phossy jaw” a disfiguring disease that led to early death for many of the young women workers caused by the white phosphorus used to cut the cost of making matches. It earned its place in labour history when Annie Besant went there and organised the Match Girls’ Strike in 1888, winning better working conditions and more pay.

But it was really the Salvation Army that changed the match industry, with William Booth buying up an empty factory close to that ice-cream shop in Lamprell Street and making ‘Lights in Darkest England‘ safety matches which used the more expensive red phosphorus in place of the cheaper but highly dangerous white allotrope.  Booth also paid his workers more and gave them safer and better working conditions  – including tea-making facilities. He promoted these matches through the cooperative movement and also with consumer power, harnessed by the ‘British Match Consumers League’ which he set up, urging members to harass their shopkeepers at least twice a week until they sold the army matches.

It was this campaign that forced the other match manufacturers to switch to the safer red phosphorus and in 1901 Booth was able to close the factory having virtually eliminated the problem, although it took another seven years before the use of white phosphorus in matches was made illegal at the end of 1908. And yes, it’s that same material as Israeli forces have been caught using illegally in densely populated areas of Gaza.

In 1871, Gladstone’s chancellor decided to impose a tax on matches, and there was a public outcry. Although the government went as far as actually producing 1/2d tax stamps with the catchy motto “ex luce lucellum” (from light a little gain) pressure from campaigners (including the Queen herself) led to the proposal being dropped. The match workers from Bow took part (urged by their employer who had threated to pass the tax on to them) in a massive march to Parliament, which although described by some as “entirely peaceful” actually involved some massive and brutal brawls with the police in Trafalgar Square and on the Embankment.

After the proposal was dropped, Bryant and May celebrated with the erection of an ornate drinking fountain in 1872 opposite Bow Road Station (it disappeared when the road was widened in 1953, but a small plaque marks the site) but the workers were less happy when the management docked their wages to pay for it. On the day it was unveiled some of the women slashed their arms in protest, dripping the blood onto the fountain.

It was Annie Besant who got this story mixed up with the statue of Gladstone shown here, sculpted by Albert Bruce-Joy and donated by Theodore H Bryant in 1882, and it seems unlikely that workers either had their pay docked or celebrated its erection with their blood. But in 1988, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the strike, the Gladstone statue was daubed with red paint. After the council cleaned it, someone came back and daubed it again, and you can still see it now on the plinth of the statue and also on the hands in this picture.

There is a good illustrated account covering some of the above and other relevant local history on the Kingsley Hall web site.

More pictures from the walk on My London Diary.

I’m not sure that this is the picture that MP John McDonnell would want to put on his election leaflets, but it did amuse me – and some of his constituents who were there with him at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 to voice their opposition to the expansion of the airport and in particular the building of another runway – the so called ‘third runway’ which will go through their village and mean they are forced out of their homes.

I don’t like airports. I grew up under the flightpath to the main runway (I think in those days it had five runways, but they abandoned some and built a terminal on another) with planes passing over just out of reach, and for a while was a keen aircraft spotter writing down their numbers in my book. They weren’t hard to spot – you needed to look through the wrong end of binoculars to see the whole plane.

Seeing some going over with flames from the engines led to nightmares but fortunately I think it was only in these dreams that I saw and heard them crash.  But back in those days of the Brabazon and Comet, aviation was a brave and exciting new frontier and I was caught up in its glamour, thrilling in visits to the airport where my oldest brother worked and I actually got to go in a plane, and later with him to the Fanrborough air show.

But when I grew up I studied science and became interested in the environment, and even over 40 years ago it was obvious that we had to do something about airports and air travel – and now you have to really stick your head in the sand not to believe it.

Last week’s announcement approving the expansion of Heathrow and the building of a third runway from transport minister Geoff Hoon came as a shock – how can any government be so stupid?   But the protesters who came to Heathrow’s T5 on Saturday are determined to keep up the campaign to stop it, and it seems more than likely it will never be built.

For the planet’s sake I hope it isn’t.

More pictures on My London Diary, where you can also see pictures from last year’s flashmob at the Department of Transport and march at Heathrow, the 2003 march against the Third Runway and more.

The British branch of the Islamic movement Hizb ut-Tahrir were also demonstrating in London last weekend over Gaza, but their attention was as much on the corrupt Arab regimes as the Israeli aggressors. They call for an end to the various dynasties and dictatorships set up as western puppets in the Middle East and a return to an Islamic caliphate as established in the early years of Islam.

They also call for the Muslim armies to go to the support of the Palestinian people, and visited the embassies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria to pour shame on them for colluding with the attacks on fellow Muslims.

As expected, this demonstration was highly organised and kept in order by the stewards and there was really very little need for the police other than to direct traffic.

I’ve had a busy week doing odd jobs and have got a little behind with putting my work on the web and writing blog posts. Last end was a busy one, and I’m only just catching up with things.

Gaza of course is still very much on all our minds, and on Saturday and Sunday I photographed two very different demonstrations. The first was the huge national demonstration in London on Saturday, when perhaps a hundred thousand marched from Hyde Park to the Israeli Embassy.

Part of the reason why things got rather out of hand around the Israeli embassy has to be the lack of planning by the police for the numbers involved. It’s one thing to issue derisively low estimates of those taking part in marches, but quite another to base the policing on similarly ridiculous figures, and make it physically very difficult for the march to actually get past the likely flashpoint.

When the front of the march reached the southern gates close to the embassy, apparently there were still people leaving the assembly point near Speakers Corner a mile and a half behind, with the mainly wide roads between fairly densely packed with people.

Obviously people would stop – at least for some minutes – close to the embassy, and using barriers to narrow the road there more or less brought the march to a halt. Trouble started both at this point and at the northern entrance to the road containing the embassy, where demonstrators thought the march had been halted by police and started to get angry.

March stewards got angry too, and I was assaulted by several of them while attempting to photograph the front of the march. But I went home early as I had a party to photograph in the evening, and the demonstration continued for several hours after it had been expected to finish. More about the event and of course more pictures on My London Diary.