CONTINUED
The Terror of Victorian Match Making
by Cynthia K. Brown
Young women between the ages of 14 and 18 made up a large percentage of the workforce in the match factories in Great Britain. We’ve heard a lot about factories where the workforce was in a dangerous job, but this must have been one of the worst. In one 10-to-14-hour shift, a match girl could create the basic match base that would result in 10 million matches. The workers toiled in very harsh environments, which included being fined for an untidy workbench, a burnt matchstick at their station, and coming to work with dirty feet, even though shoes were considered a luxury for this class. They were lucky to take home enough pay to barely squeak out a meager existence. Many were also expected to pay for their own working supplies. Lunches were eaten on the factory floor, which meant that their food was also being exposed to the phosphorous.
The match girls, exposed to phosphorous on a regular basis, were at a high risk of developing an ailment called “phossy jaw.” This malady, also known as phosphorus necrosis of the jaw, started out as an unrelenting tooth ache. The unsuspecting workers were given the choice of having teeth removed or getting fired. The earliest bones to be affected were usually in the lower jaw. The poison continued by moving to other bones and eventually caused organ failure. Weirdly enough, the affected bones were known to glow in the dark.
The workers in England began to stage strikes, with no initial success against the greedy factory owners. After receiving what we would now call negative press, the well-known matchstick makers Bryant and May finally changed their manufacturing process and began using red phosphorus rather than the deadly white phosphorus. This was more than 60 years after the original health problems were discovered.
Consumer products have gone through numerous changes in the past 150 years. The change for improved and safer working conditions could have happened faster, but the Industrial Revolution was a fully functioning dynamo with very little to stop its forward motion. Workforce safety be damned. These young women, who were put at such risk, also battled the factory foremen, who were making money based on the number of matches produced. And if one worker got fired or died, “there were always more where that came from.”
There are similar stories in the watch-making industry, which used radium to paint watch faces. This practice continued until 1970. The bones of these ghost girls, as they were nicknamed, will glow in their graves long beyond the lives of those of us reading Doyle’s story—radium has a half-life of 1.600 years.
In “Blue John Gap,” matches are a minor piece of the puzzle, but they prove to have a significant impact on the life of one man, and in Great Britain, upon a whole generation of working women.
WHO IS CINDY?
Cindy has been a Sherlockian since she was a young teenager and discovered the world of English mystery writers. Her love of Agatha Christie novels led her to the even bigger world of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. She discovered and immediately became a member of the Crew of the Barque Lone Star in 2005. She is the Secretary and Assistant to the Third Mate of the Crew, and is an active member of many other scion societies across the country and in England. She is the Committee Chair for the Jan Stauber Grant Program for the Beacon Society, which is devoted to education.
She has created presentations and toasts on a myriad of Sherlockian subjects, and written articles for publications from the Crew of the Barque Lone Star, other societies, and the Baker Street Journal.