A little light
Can be a dangerous thing.
Not as much
As darkness, though.
The prompt for today's Sketching Every Day is matchboxes. Now, the thing is that I did once upon a time collect matchboxes, when I was a boy over 40 years ago. I've been told that the collector gene is more prevalent among males than females. I don't know about that, but I have at different times in my life collected different things. As a kid I was more serious about collecting matchboxes than I was about stamp collecting, although I tried that for a while as well.
As an adult, it's funny the things that can spark you off on collecting. A good 15 years or so ago I had a hankering for a 1960s Roberts transistor radio, and my wife bought me one. Well, this snowballed. It didn't help that I discovered eBay and car boot sales at much the same time. At one time I had well over 50 radios of the same period, but I haven't bought a new radio for years, and a few years back I did start selling the collection off. I still have a lot though.
Smaller current collections I have are memorabilia from London Bridge, and from the TV quiz show Mastermind. Actually they're both linked. You see in 2007 I appeared in the grand final of the show, taking London Bridge as my specialist subject, and I won.
Coming back to Bryant and May though, I did some reading up on them this morning. Messrs Bryant and May were a pair of Victorian quaker gentlemen who set up their business in London importing matches from Sweden and repackaging. After successfully starting this business they set up their own factory in London, employing mostly women to manufacture their matches. Many women working or them developed a horrific condition nicknamed phossy jaw, where the vapour from the white phosphorous they were working with would eat away the bones of the jaw, and in many cases cause madness as well.
Phossy jaw, and other poor working conditions in their factory in Bow, such as 14 hour days, poor pay and ridiculously harsh fines for a range of so called misdemeanours, led to the Bryant and May matchgirls strike in 1888. Basically the social reformer Annie Besant published an expose of the terrible conditions inside the factory in a newspaper she published. Bryant and May tried to force all of their employees to sign a piece of paper stating that the allegations were false. The girls refused to sign it, and when the management sacked a worker in retaliation, the girls went on strike. Eventually the management were forced to accept the girls' terms, following the bad publicity and the dent in their profits caused by the strike. However it's worth noting that the company continued to use white phosphorous until 1901.
The same Bow factory continued to produce matches until 1979, since which listed buildings which were part of the complex have been converted into luxury flats. About this time British Match, which Bryant and May had evolved into through various acquisitions and mergers, was acquired by US company Allegheny, and when they went bankrupt it was acquired by Swedish Match. The Bryant and May trademark is still used by Swedish Match in the UK.
