Fine pale powder hung in clouds above the women, drifting down slowly to cover window sills and walls with a gritty veneer. A blazing August sun glared through the high windows, striping the mote-filled air with light, turning the powder into a fine gold dust. It billowed up in vanilla-scented blooms each time a woman reached to fill a new packet at the delivery chutes, which ran in straight lines down the length of the factory floor. The women stood at a long bench, where one pulled a lever to release custard powder into an empty packet, then passed it on to her neighbour who deftly pasted it closed, while the third in the team stacked filled packets on to a trolley cart. Above the women, a cat’s cradle of steam-driven belts chugged and clattered, filling the vast hoppers that fed the delivery chutes. Unending streams of cloying powder chuted down, sending up yet more clouds of choking yellow smoke. Though the women wore rough cotton smocks, all were covered in a fine, sticky coating of custard powder.
Nellie Clark licked her lips, sweet, always sweet. Sometimes she longed for a trickle of sweat to reach her lips, just for the blessed difference of salt. On a day like today, she was likely to get her wish. It was sweltering in the factory and Nellie was suffering, in her voluminous cotton smock. The thought of putting on her best wool jacket made her feel faint. But they had decided to wear their best, and as she only had one good jacket, the woollen one it had to be. At least no one would be able to say that Bermondsey girls didn’t look smart. She looked at the clock. Not long now. She licked her lips again and tasted salt. Sweat beaded her upper lip and her face was covered with a sheen of moisture. She brushed her damp brow with the back of her hand, tucking away a strand of chestnut hair, and glanced over at Lily. Lily nodded towards the clock and mouthed, ‘Ten minutes.’
‘I’m not sure I can last ten more seconds in this oven!’ she whispered back.
And when it came to it, could she go through with it? She liked to think she was strong, but even at sixteen years old and a woman earning her own keep, it irked her that her father could still make her quail like a child. The rows over her late arrival home, on the night of the meeting, had lasted for weeks. He would surely throw her out for this.
Nellie raised her blue eyes at the thought and blew out an overheated breath, which lifted another dank lock of hair from her forehead. Her stomach was churning, though whether from fear or excitement, she couldn’t tell. Other women around her were getting fidgety. Ethel Brown, a rotund woman in her forties, was turning an ever deeper shade of lobster. Nellie had caught a glimpse of a feather boa under her bench. Maggie Tyrell was rooting around in a bag at her feet and Nellie spotted a black straw hat, with green feathers.
Suddenly she noticed a change in the sounds filtering through the high windows. Distant shouts at first, then snatches of song drifted in. Women’s voices sang out, high and excited: Are we downhearted no, no, NO! The chanting was coming closer and closer. Then the sound of feet, lots of them, hundreds of feet, boots ringing on the cobbles. The chatter of the women around her ceased, as they registered the noise of the approaching crowd. Just as the clock struck eleven, Nellie found herself standing up. Suddenly she was flooded with the knowledge that she could do it! She wasn’t on her own. But still her legs felt like jelly and a queasiness lurched in the pit of her stomach.
More than a hundred women rose, as one, from their benches and ran to the windows, craning their heads, looking down on to the street below to see the first of the women marchers. Nellie saw rows and rows of women, filling the street as far back as she could see, some linking arms and singing, others carrying banners. One read: WE’RE NOT WHITE SLAVES, WE’RE PINK’S!
The women around her called out excitedly. ‘There’s Pink’s Jam, can you see Crosse & Blackwell’s? Where’s Peek Frean’s? I can see Lipton’s. Have they all come? Have Hartley’s come?’
Albert, their astonished foreman, was running up and down behind the line of women at the windows. ‘Get back to your benches, what d’yer think yer doing!’
They pretended not to hear him and Nellie followed the others as they started to remove their smocks and caps.
‘This is it, Nell.’ Lily squeezed her hand. ‘You coming?’
Nellie paused for a heartbeat, then bent down deliberately and reached into a bag hidden behind a trolley. She pulled out her best wool jacket.
‘’Course I’m coming, I’m not missing this!’
Other women were putting on their fancy hats and feather boas, as they marched in orderly single file past the open-mouthed foreman. They joined a stream of women workers from higher floors. Jostling down the stone staircase, came the girls from baking powder and blancmange, distinguishable only by the white or pink powder coating them. When they reached the factory yard, Nellie glanced over at the jelly building. The foremen in charge of the great vats of fruit jellies had left the gelatine bubbling, coming out to stare incredulously as the jelly packers joined the other women marching out of the factory gates. They looked as if they were dressed for a day out, but they weren’t – they were on strike!
Once Nellie was down among the crowd, she grabbed Lily, feeling overwhelmed by the mass of humanity surrounding her. She had never been in such a vast crowd, not even during the new King George’s coronation celebrations, earlier that summer. There must be thousands of women there today, choking the width of Spa Road, holding up carts and trams, drawing shouts from drivers and hoots from the odd motor car desperate to get through the crush. Women poured from side streets, like the tributaries of an unstoppable river. They seemed to Nellie to move in an orchestrated way and yet no one was in charge; they were merely surging forward in a common purpose. Astonished onlookers lined the pavement, unable to negotiate their way through the throng of banner-carrying women. Many of the men and boys stopped, mid-stride, to gawp openly; others, shoving their hands into their pockets, pointedly ignored the women and attempted to barge through them. Some called out as they passed, ‘Get back ’ome, and cook yer husbands’ dinners!’ and other less decorous suggestions. But Nellie felt safe enough, amongst the group of burly dockers who had turned out to march with them. Some of these shouted back at the hecklers.
‘Don’t I know yer missus, mate? She’s here somewhere!’
Nellie pulled Lily in closer, linking arms. ‘Look, there’s Ted!’ She pointed towards the front of the crowd, where Lily’s brother and his fellow dockers marched.
Nellie thought Ted looked heroic, with his red-gold hair shining in the bright sunshine, and his strong arms holding one end of the dockers’ union banner. At the head of the march she could see the colourful banner of the National Federation of Women Workers, bravely proclaiming that they would ‘fight to struggle to right the wrong’. Nellie guided Lily nearer to the banner, which was held aloft by two athletic middle-class young women. Beneath it, marching four abreast with the other strike leaders, was Eliza James, dressed in a long, flowing grey silk coat and a broad straw hat. With her white scarf flying out behind her, she was smiling and urging the women on, calling out to the male onlookers, ‘Come and join the struggle, these are your daughters, and your wives!’
She looked magnificent, as bold and brave as Britannia on the face of a penny, and whatever misgivings she might once have had, Nellie felt she would follow Madam Mecklenburgh to the ends of the earth.
Nellie could hardly believe it had only been a few short weeks since she’d first met the woman. Then she hadn’t even heard of the NFWW, and she certainly hadn’t wanted to attend a meeting, listening to stuffy speeches. At the time, she had gone simply because Ted Bosher asked her to. Since then, she’d avoided her father as much as possible, stayed home in the evenings and attended every one of the trade union’s lunchtime meetings at the Fort Road Labour Institute. The more she’d heard the less frightened she’d become, anger and boldness replacing timidity. She and the other women were buoyed up by the dockers’ support. Even when the government caved in and gave the dockers their eightpence an hour, they’d pledged to stay out on strike until the women got their eleven shillings a week. Dockers in Hull and Liverpool were striking as well as those in London. The railwaymen had joined them, and her father was livid when even his fellow horse drivers in the carmen’s union had voted to support the strike.
‘That’s the end of it for this country!’ he railed at her one teatime. ‘Ted Bosher and his friends won’t stop till they get their revolution, and who’ll pay for it? Their wives and kiddies, that’s who!’
Nellie had cleared the tea things away and privately thought her father a blustering coward, too scared to defy his bosses. He was just frightened that his supply of beer and tobacco would dry up! But if he was too weak to make the sacrifice that could change all their lives forever, she wasn’t. And anyway, what gave him the right to sneer at Ted? At least he was doing something.
‘You think you know it all, girl,’ he’d said when she tried to disagree, ‘but you don’t know what it means. You don’t remember the dock strike in eighty-nine. Well, I do. When the strike fund ran out, it was the wives and kids that starved. It was terrible and now it’s happening all over again.’
Hard as it was, she had bitten her tongue. She didn’t want him getting too suspicious. The rows would have to wait for later, and she shuddered as she thought of what might be in store for her when he finally found out. But she did know enough to acknowledge that striking would mean hardship for her family. Even now, the evidence of the three-week shutdown at the docks was there, in the stagnant, putrid air surrounding the wharves. London’s Larder was rotting. After days of fiery ninety-degree temperatures, the scant summer breezes bore only the stink of decaying food, left rotting on the quayside or still in the holds of the warming refrigeration ships, waiting to be unloaded by absent dockers and stevadores. Worst of all, supplies of milk and bread were failing, and even in Vauban Street two children had died of dysentery, some said caused by bad food and milk.
Now, as they approached Southwark Park, the mood of the marching crowd was changing. Gaiety was giving way to anger. Their numbers had swelled to thousands, and scores of nervous policemen were lining Southwark Park Road. Eliza James and the dock union leaders were due to address the marchers in the park. Women streamed through the gates and spread like a rippling tide over the grass, which had been burned to a crisp during the long, rainless weeks of summer. The jaunty songs of the women were being drowned out now by angry shouts and jeers from the dockers, as they spotted rows and rows of khaki-clad guardsmen, with their bayonets fixed. Nellie felt her elbow being grabbed from behind. It was Ted. ‘Listen, you two, stay out of the way, there might be trouble.’
‘Oh, I wish I was taller,’ Nellie said, standing on tiptoe. ‘I can’t see sod all from here. Can’t we get up the front?’
‘No,’ Ted said sternly, ‘those soldiers ain’t here for a picnic. They’ll make trouble if they can’t find it. I’m going up to the podium, but you two stay back here!’
With that, he strode off towards the bandstand, where Nellie could make out his tall figure helping Eliza James up the steps. Once she stood on the platform, she called out, above the noise:
‘Women of Bermondsey, are you downhearted?’
The refrain went up from thousands of voices.
‘No, no, no!’
‘Some may say it’s the men that run the world, but I say, it’s only the women that can change it. Are you ready to change the world?’
And Nellie joined in as the women roared back, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ She jumped and waved her makeshift banner, which read CUSTARD TARTS DON’T COME CHEAP!
The lines of soldiers seemed to have shuffled closer, forming a ring round the great mass of people. Some union officials walked among the crowd, urging them to stay calm and orderly. The last thing they wanted was rioting; the Riot Act had already been read at rallies elsewhere in the country and the soldiers had orders to shoot, if the strikers turned nasty.
Suddenly a surge in the crowd set it into a slow spiral, and though she fought the momentum, Nellie found herself separated from Lily. The crush of bodies seemed to waltz her round the bandstand, spiralling her closer and closer to the front. She found herself pressed deep into a group of dockers who were shoving and jostling at the line of soldiers. Some of them tried to ease off the crush as her banner bashed them, knocking off someone’s cap. Then one of them started haranguing the soldiers.
‘Shame on you lot for shooting yer own kind, you’re meant to be defending us!’
His fist was curled round a rock. Suddenly he let fly at the nearest guardsman, and soon Nellie found herself tumbled about in a tangle of dockers. The rock had hit its target and now the guardsman, blood streaming from a gash in his forehead, lurched forward with his bayonet extended. She tried to worm her way out, but found she couldn’t move her arms as she was tossed between solid muscled bodies, all ducking out of the way of the advancing soldier. The only possible way for her to go seemed to be down, and finally, Nellie was knocked clean off her feet. Frantically pushing up against the crushing weight of bodies, straining on to her hands and knees, she found herself staring into the muzzle of a rifle, the sharp end of a bayonet only inches from her face. She scrabbled to crawl away as shouts and fists exploded about her, punctuated by the sickening crunch of cracking jawbones. A heavy docker thudded down on top of her, pinning her to the dusty earth.
‘Get off me, yer big lump!’ she gasped, as the air was squeezed from her lungs. Her last thought was that her best wool jacket would now certainly be ruined, ground into the dust.