Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History

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They were extremely popular and in the 1820’s, more than 20,000 items were sold in Germany and Great Britain. Rather than quickly striking two objects together and producing oxidising metal particles, friction methods work through grinding solid combustible materials against each other or a hard surface, until their temperature is increased, and an ember is produced. Exothermal chemical reactions, meaning chemical reactions which release energy into their surroundings, can produce heat strong enough to set tinder on fire.

Other substances may also be charred and used as the spark-catching platform, including small pieces of "punky" or slightly rotten wood. They are said to have developed independently and not based on their predecessors from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, but this is heavily debated.Although most modern flint-and-steel fire-makers strike the steel with the flint, apparently in the Viking Age the actual method was to strike with the steel in the dominant hand. In 1925 Hannington was one of 12 members of the Communist party convicted at the Old Bailey under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 (in the run-up to the general strike of 1926), and one of the five defendants sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. However, other newspapers such as The Times, blamed Besant and other socialist agitators for the dispute. Even feminist historians failed the match women; they were reluctant, according to Raw, to compromise their own credibility as serious scholars working on muscular subjects, albeit with a gendered perspective, by association with such a tired old saw as the Bryant and May strike. It is composed of short, tubular fibres, compactly arranged in layers, one of which is added every year.

In this very well written and engaging book Louise Raw provides a new interpretation of events which is more vibrant than the orthodox version and shows that the women themselves, not celebrity Socialists like Annie Besant, began it. Kinship, marriage, neighbourhood and community: all bound the match women and the dockers together, providing support for Raw's allegation that the Bryant and May strike was a forerunner of, and indeed the inspiration for, the Great Dock Strike. She debunks the received view of most historians that the strike was led by Annie Besant and other middle class socialists rather than the match women themselves.It was a solid attempt to acknowledge the agency of the working class women themselves and how that has been distorted by time. It was collected by John Whitehead, a British naturalist and explorer, who in the late 19th-century gathered natural history specimens to bring back to the British Empire.

While some are designed as pocket versions to start fires on the go, others are made for domestic use to light hearths, fireplaces, and candles in the home.Dear Lady they have been trying to get the poor girls to say that it is all lies that has been printed and trying to make us sign papers that it is all lies; dear Lady nobody knows what it is we have put up with and we will not sign them. Found all over the world, they come in different shapes and forms, ranging from simple to elaborate designs.