In the summer of 1888, Bryant and May’s match factory in the East End of London announced large profits. Shortly afterwards a reporter visited the factory to investigate working conditions. Annie Besant waited at the factory gates to talk to the employees, who were mostly teenage women.

Besant reported in her article ‘White Slavery in London’ that the women worked an 11 1/2 hour day in winter and a 13 1/2 day in summer, standing all day. For this they would be paid 4/- a week. Their pay was subject to fines for petty rule breaking. Many of the “Match Girls” were debilitated and disfigured from “phossy jaw” an illness caused by having to eat at their workbenches. Their hands and food were in contact with phosphorous. “They eat disease as seasoning to their bread”,
wrote Besant.

After talking to Besant, three women were sacked and called liars by Frederick Bryant, the managing director. 200 angry women marched from the factory gates to Annie Besant’s Fleet Street office. From there they organised a strike that would involve 1,000 workers. They took their case to parliament and met with MPs. They struck for three weeks without pay, surviving due to donations from supporters. Eventually they won union recognition, the first group of unskilled women workers in Britain to do so.

The former factory has now been converted into residential apartments known as “Bow Quarter”.