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One distinct type had been the “factory girl,” whose token moment of emancipation arrived in the summer of 1888 when 1,500 “girls,” working in the Bryant amp; May match factory in Bow, walked out of their jobs in a demand for higher wages; they were to a certain extent organised by the Fabian militant, Annie Besant, and their success had significant consequences. In that year also women were allowed to vote in local London elections, and of course the movement of the suffragettes found its source and purpose in London. For the first time in the city’s history, women were able to engage its egalitarian spirit in pursuit of their own interests.
In 1913 Sylvia Pankhurst founded the East London Federation of the Women’s Social and Political Union (the WSPU itself was established by her mother ten years earlier); the federation’s birthplace was a baker’s shop along the Bow Road, not far from the Bryant amp; May factory. Sylvia wrote later that “I regarded the rousing of the East End as of utmost importance … The creation of a woman’s movement in that great abyss of poverty would be a call and a rallying cry to the rise of similar movements in all parts of the country.” So through the efforts of women London reacquired its destiny as the home of radical dissent; it was a suitable response, kindling a spirit in all those women who had been written off as “soaks” or worse.
The history of the suffragettes connected with Sylvia Pankhurst was associated very closely with that of the East End, and became a genuine expression of the area’s concerns. Meetings were held in Poplar, Bromley and Bow; processions began, or ended, in Victoria Park; the printer of suffragette literature was in premises along Roman Road, while the Women’s Hall opened on the Old Ford Road. The significance of the topography of the women’s movement has never adequately been analysed, but it has become clear that the eastern areas of London lent power and authority to it. During the First World War, a Distress Bureau was opened on the Old Ford Road for women who, with their husbands’ income gone, had been threatened with eviction. A co-operative factory, organised by Sylvia Pankhurst, was established in Norman Road with a day nursery within it. A free clinic and nursery was opened on the corner of Old Ford Road and St. Stephen’s Road; it had once been a public house, known as the Gunmaker’s Arms but was renamed the Mother’s Arms. It was this double movement, of caring feminism and the female adoption of male working roles, which steadily advanced the moral and social position of women in the city.
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There are still women wrestlers in Shoreditch; the inmates of Holloway Prison have been characteristically convicted of cruelty to children, prostitution, or drug trafficking. There are still many poor women whom the city has beaten into submission. From the latter half of the twentieth century there are records of hostels and refuges for “sick women and battered women.” There is a truth about London here; the pattern of relative misery remains recognisable and unaltered, while surging above it are broad general movements of change. So, for example, the latest statistics suggest that female labour in London has increased by over 6 per cent in the ten years from 1986, while that of men has declined. It is now estimated that 44 per cent of the women in London are in paid employment. So the city has become friendlier to women, and they permeate all of its structures and institutions; there are female taxi-drivers and female executives. Just as the early twenty-first-century city is becoming lighter and more open, so after two thousand years it is discovering its feminine principle.
CHAPTER 68. Boys and Girls Come Out to Play
The history of children in London affords much material for contemplation. Whether in their mortality, in their savagery, or in their instinct for game, the great forces of the city are revealed. The first evidences are brief and elusive: fragments of small leather shoes and slippers, as well as bronze toys and bone whistles. The delight in game, or play, is profound and eternal. The tombstones of children from the Roman era still also survive; one is inscribed to Onesimus, the “helpful” child and “well-deserving” son, and another to “good Dexius, son of Diotimus.” The death of children is a constant thread in the history of London. In more than one sense, youth is a stuff which will not endure within the confines of the city.
Deep beneath the level of Poultry has been found the golden statuette of a baby and that small image represents all those ideas of holiness or sacredness which surround the child. There are accounts of children as prophets and visionaries; one young Londoner “was imbued, to the glory of God, with a knowledge which the master had not taught him.” We read of another who “had the job, along with two boys from the cathedral school,” of guarding the abbey at Westminster. There are accounts of children carrying baskets of sand and gravel to Smithfield in the early twelfth century in order to help Rahere in the building of St. Bartholomew’s great church there.
This connection of children with the protection, and even erection, of London’s sacred sites is a highly significant one; the city is acquiring the energy and innocence of its children, in an activity not far removed from that of child-sacrifice in the foundations of temples or of bridges. Certainly children were at the centre of civic and ecclesiastical ceremonies. It has been noted that “upon St. Nicholas, St. Katherine, St. Clement and Holy Innocents Day, children were wont to be arrayed in chimers, rockets, surplices, to counterfeit bishops and priests and to be led with songs and dances from house to house, blessing the people.” As late as the sixteenth century, just before the Reformation, “a boy habbited like a bishop in pontificabilis went abroad in most parts of London, singing after the old fashion.” In the Lord Mayor’s Show of 1516 the great procession was accompanied by “16 naked boys,” and children were an integral feature of all the city and guild pageants that were carried along Cornhill and Cheapside. We may also note here the curious and yet consistent pattern of superstition which surrounded children. During the Commonwealth “the prophesies of children were listened to intently,” and astrologers employed children as “scryers” or visionaries. “When a spirit is raised,” one book of magic suggests, “none hath power to see it but children of eleven or twelve years of age or such as are true maids.” Here the idea of innocence, in a corrupt and corrupting city, is powerfully effective.
The status of the child as a legal and commercial entity was also quickly established. Of William the Conqueror’s charter to Londoners in 1066, the second of the three precepts was “I will that every child be heir after his father’s death,” thus confirming a tradition of primogeniture. A complex system of wardship was also in place, so that there was no possibility that the children of the deceased might be fraudulently deprived of their inheritance. The commercial importance of the child in London is emphasised by the words of an ancient ballad, in which a married couple send their boy “away to fair London, an Apprentice for to find,” while the first extant record of a young London apprentice can be dated to 1265. Another commercial activity undertaken by children was that of begging, while children themselves were robbed, kidnapped and murdered for profit. One Alice de Salesbury was condemned to stand in the pillory because “she had taken one Margaret daughter of John Oxwyke, Grocer … and had carried her away and stripped her of her clothes that she might not be recognised by her family, that she might go begging with the said Alice, and a gain might be made thereby.” This activity of child-stealing continued upon the streets of London well into the nineteenth century, when it was called a “kinching lay”; the children of the affluent were a particular prey since they could be decoyed, and their clothes and jewellery sold. Many of them were killed upon the spot, to prevent their crying out or afterwards identifying their assailants. London could be a perilous place for the young.