Women Chainmakers Festival

This is a guest post by Cherie [blogging as Cherry Pie at Cherie's Place] and she illustrates a truism that not all the excellent bloggers have to be political.

The apolitical sphere is quite large but the top bloggers there are not widely known by the politicos because the two generally don't mix; however, Cherie's name in that sphere is highly respected, so much so that when we set up Bloghounds, I went out headhunting for six of the best to join the team and I'm going to boast here now that Cherie was one of the prime catches.

In real life, as in the blogging, she is a facilitator, coordinator, an administrator and a friend who keeps whatever she touches on the straight and narrow, with sheer common sense. Her eye for detail and for the way a post fits into the whole is inspiring - cast your eye down this post and that is typical Cherie.

Enjoy ...

On Saturday, the 99th Women’s Chainmakers Anniversary took place at the Black Country Living Museum, Dudley. The event is held annually and commemorates the struggle of the women chainmakers to earn a decent living wage.

In 1910 the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath fought a successful 10 week dispute to establish a minimum wage for their labour. The dispute was led by union organiser and campaigner Mary MacArthur. By the end of the dispute the women chainmakers had managed to increase their earnings from 5 shillings (25p) to 11 shillings (55p). The victory helped to make the possibility of a national minimum wage a reality.

Women chainmakers were a good example of ‘sweated labour’ meaning hours of toil for minimum wages. The women chainmakers’ pamphlet, which gives extensive information about the dispute, quotes the following about the working conditions of chainmakers:

Author Robert Harborough Sherard visited Cradley Heath to collect evidence for one of a series of articles, later published as a book ‘The White Slaves of England’ (1898), on the sweated trades of the land. He was taken by James Smith, secretary of the Chainmakers’ Union, to a place called Anvil Yard. Sherard Wrote:

"Two of the girls working in the shed were suckling babes and could work but slowly. Those who could work at their best being unencumbered could make a hundredweight of chain in two and a half days. Their owner walked serene and grey –haired among them, checking conversation, and being, at times, abusive. She was but one of a numerous class of human leeches fast to a gangrened sore.

Of Anvil Yard, with its open sewers and filth and shame, one would rather not write, nor of the haggard tatterdermalions* who groaned and jumped. In fact I hardly saw them, the name ‘Anvil Yard’ had set me thinking of some lines of Goethe, in which he deplores the condition of the people – ‘zwischen dem Amboss und Hammer’ – between the anvil and the hammer.

And as these lines went through my head, whilst before my spiritual eyes there passed the pale procession of the White Slaves of England, I could see nothing but sorrow and hunger and grime, rags, foul food, open sores and movements incessant, instinctive yet laborious – and anvil and a hammer ever descending – all vague, and in a mist as yet untinged with red, a spectacle so hideous that I gladly shut it out, wondering for my part, what in these things is right."

*tatterdermalion – a poor and ragged person

Throughout the day re-enactments of the struggle and dispute took place in the reconstructed town at the museum. These were followed by a march through the museum streets which was accompanied by marching bands. At the end of the march there was a reading of one of Mary MacArthur’s speeches.