England’s disgrace3
THE picture on this week’s front page is a postcard that was printed at the time of the famous women chainmakers strike of 1910.
It shows two of the vulcanesses with their children in a squalid backyard chainshop in Waterfall Lane, Old Hill. Many women and their children were forced to endure such conditions in order to make a living – often labouring for hours, producing miles of small chain every week, for a pittance of pay.
Harassed
Journalist Robert Sherrard, in an article published in Pearson’s Magazine in 1896, wrote of the women chainmakers that they were “at each moment harassed by her sons and daughters. There is one child at the breast, who hampers the swing of the arm; there is another seated on the forge, who must be watched lest the too comfortable blaze in which it warms its little naked feet prove dangerous; whilst the swarm that cling to her tattered skirt break the instinctive movement of her weary feet.”
The young children in our front page photograph would soon be of an age to begin earning money too. From around the age of 10, they learnt the rudiments of the trade by making the iron
“bends” used to bind the bundles of iron rods that were the chainmaker’s raw material, or they worked the bellows of the furnace. Extra money could be earned by sending young children out to work for other chainmakers or in the larger chainshops, where they were paid a few pennies for blowing the fires.
The women earned a pittance. On average they would have to make up chain from 46 iron rods, each nine feet long, and all for just three shillings, out of which the cost of their fuel was subtracted.
The better paid could make four or five shillings for one hundredweight of chain. They often worked for 12 hours at a stretch and then the women had all of their domestic chores to carry out on top of their work, feeding and washing for their families.
In 1910 the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath went on strike for better pay – an extra 2½d an hour. Mary Macarthur of the Federation of Women Workers joined their cause, working tirelessly to galvanize support from across the country.
Eventually, the government intervened, allowing women chainmakers to be included in the Trades Board and setting a minimum wage at twopence-three-farthings an hour.
With the money raised for the strikers, the Workers Institute was built in Lower High Street, Cradley Heath, opened in 1912 by the Countess of Dudley and now to be found at the Black Country Living Museum.