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.

Read more… Nickel plaques marked 'matches' for striking a light will remain, although the smoking ban means that they are now redundant. As so few of the matchgirls (if any) were sole breadwinners, they could all have survived the three weeks of the strike with family help. It is heated at high temperature in the absence of oxygen to drive off flammable solids in the form of gas, leaving a black cloth which catches and holds a spark, smoldering with a hot ember rather than flaming. William Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Henry Hyde Champion of the Labour Elector and Catharine Booth of the Salvation Army joined Besant in her campaign for better working conditions in the factory.Depending on region and the fire-making tool that is used, easily combustible tinder includes natural materials like amadou made from fungus, wood or bark shavings, dried leaves, grass, pine needles, and other plant fibres, as well as artificial materials like paper strips, steel wool, char cloth, or petroleum. Now obviously I knew about the matchgirls strike - then I read this and realised I knew barely anything. The standard myth about the matchgirls’ strike is that, inspired by Mrs Annie Besant’s discovery of their plight, some 1,400 matchgirls went on strike and, with the help of a ‘strike fund’ set up by the Fabians and with Mrs Annie Besant as their strike leader, the matchgirls marched after a three-week strike to total victory. Viking Age Fire-Steels and Strike-A-Lights Dear Viking Answer Lady: How did the Vikings start their fires?

New Unionism is the name given to the movement that developed in the 1880s to set up unions open to all workers, including the unskilled, unlike the traditional craft unions, which tended to protect only the interests of better-off skilled workers. Raw also questioned the fact that labour historians are always seperating the women's strike from the docker's strike a year later. and had very good results and good service, but I have not myself purchased any of the items listed below. 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.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. As we have explored, the universal need to create a lasting spark has occupied human minds for millennia. These generally fall into one off the following categories: percussion, friction, compression of air, chemical, solar, and electrical. Likewise, the help that the wages of female members of the family gave the all-male striking dockers and gas workers needs to be acknowledged. Striking a sharp-edged flint or hard stone, such as quartzite, chert, or chalcedony, against a fire striker of mineral or fire-steel, causes hot, oxidising metal particles to split off the fire striker and ignite tinder.

At last, the match women escape the condescension of posterity and, as trailblazers of new unionism, take their place in the mainstream of labour history. The steel does not have to be in the classic "C" shape of most Viking steels, though this is a handy configuration that ensures a good grip and protects the fingers on the striking hand.However, while Louise Raw identifies the strike leaders, she has not traced (perhaps she could not) the full internal details of the strike. It was a solid attempt to acknowledge the agency of the working class women themselves and how that has been distorted by time. 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. Identifying these women not only puts real faces on the Victorian stereotypes of the downtrodden but enables Raw to link the strike back to the families and communities of the East End, and in particular to connect the match women with the other great unskilled activists of the era: the dockers. The two most common methods of fire-making before the advent of matches were friction and percussion.