Dr. Annie BesantDr. Annie Besant is one of those foreigners who inspired the love of the country among Indians. She declared in 1918 in her paper "New India": "I love the Indian people as I love none other, and... my heart and my mind... have long been laid on the alter of the Motherland."Annie Besant, born of Irish parents in London on October 1, 1847, made India her home from November, 1893. Dr. Besant, said Mahatma Gandhi, awakened India from her deep slumber. Before she came to India, Dr. Besant passed through several phases of life-housewife, propagator of atheism, trade unionist, feminist leader and Fabian Socialist. By 1889, "there was scarcely any modern reform (in England) for which she had not worked, written spoken and suffered."Dr. Besant started the Home Rule League in India for obtaining the freedom of the country and reviving the country's glorious cultural heritage. She started a paper called "New India." She attended the 1914 session of the Indian National Congress and presided over it in 1917. She could not see eye to eye with Gandhiji in regard to the latter's satyagraha movement.
An orator and writer with poetic temperament, Dr. Besant was a veritable tornado of power and passion. By her eloquence, firmness of convictions and utter sincerity she attracted some of the best minds of the country for the national cause. She was largely responsible for the upbringing of the world renowned philosopher K. Krishnamurti.
Dr. Besant died in 1933.
Annie Wood was born in 1847 in London into a middle-class family of Irish origin. Annie was always proud of being Irish and supported the cause of Irish self-rule throughout her adult life.
Her father died when she was young and left the family almost penniless. Annie’s mother was forced to support the family by running a boarding house for boys at Harrow. She raised the money for a private tutor for Annie in this way.
Annie was educated privately by a female tutor as an Evangelical Christian. She was given a strong sense of duty to society and an equally strong sense of what independent women could achieve.
As a young woman, Annie was also able to travel widely in Europe. There she acquired a taste for Catholic colour and ceremony that never left her.
She was married in 1867 in Hastings, Sussex, to 26-year-old clergyman Frank Besant, younger brother of Walter Besant. He was an Evangelical Anglican clergyman who seemed to share many of her concerns.
Soon Frank became vicar of Sibsey in Lincolnshire. Annie moved to Sibsey with him, and within a few years they had two children: Digby and Mabel.
The marriage was, however, a disaster. The first conflict came over money and Annie’s independence. Annie wrote short stories, books for children and articles. Frank took all the money she made: married women did not have the right to own property. Politics further divided the couple. Annie began to support farm workers who were fighting to unionise and to win better conditions. Frank was a Tory and sided with the landlords and farmers. The tension came to a head when Frank struck Annie. She left him and returned to London.
Annie began to question her own faith. She turned to leading churchmen for advice. She even went to see Dr Pusey, leader of the Catholic wing of the Church of England. He simply told her she had read too many books. Annie returned to Frank to make one last effort to repair the marriage. It proved useless. She finally left for London. Divorce was unthinkable for Frank, and was not really within the reach of even middle-class people. Annie was to remain Mrs Besant for the rest of her life. At first, she was able to keep contact with both children and to have Mabel live with her. She got a small allowance from Frank.
Her husband was given sole custody of their two children.
She fought for the causes she thought were right, starting with freedom of thought, women's rights, secularism (she was a leading member of the National Secular Society alongside Charles Bradlaugh), birth control, Fabian socialism and workers' rights.
Once free of Frank Besant and exposed to new currents of thought, Annie began to question not only her long-held religious beliefs but also the whole of conventional thinking. She began to write attacks on the Churches and the way they controlled people’s lives. In particular she attacked the status of the Church of England as a state-sponsored faith.
Soon she was earning a small weekly wage by writing a column for the National Reformer, the newspaper of the National Secular Society. The Society stood for a secular state: an end to the special status of Christianity. The Society allowed her to act as one of its public speakers. Public lectures were very popular entertainment in Victorian times. Annie was a brilliant speaker, and was soon in great demand. Using the railway, she criss-crossed the country, speaking on all of the most important issues of the day, always demanding improvement, reform and freedom.
For many years Annie was a friend of the Society’s leader, Charles Bradlaugh. It seems that they were never lovers, but their friendship was very close indeed. Bradlaugh, a former seaman, had long been separated from his wife. Annie lived with Bradlaugh and his daughters, and they worked together on many issues.
Bradlaugh was an atheist and a republican. He was working to get himself elected as MP for Northampton to gain a better platform for his ideas.
Besant and Bradlaugh became household names in 1877 when they published a book by the American birth-control campaigner Charles Knowlton. It claimed that working-class families could never be happy until they were able to decide how many children they wanted. It suggested ways to limit the size of their families. The Knowlton book caused great offence to the Churches, but Annie and Bradlaugh proclaimed in the National Reformer: "We intend to publish nothing we do not think we can morally defend. All that we publish we shall defend."
The couple were arrested and put on trial for publishing the Knowlton book. They were found guilty, but released pending appeal. As well as great opposition, Annie and Bradlaugh also received a great deal of support in the Liberal press. Arguments raged back and forth in the letters and comment columns as well as in the courtroom. For a time, it looked as though they would be sent to prison. The case was thrown out finally only on a technical point: the charges had not been properly drawn up.
The scandal lost Annie her children. Frank was able to persuade the court that she was unfit to look after them, and they were handed over to him permanently.
Bradlaugh’s political prospects were not damaged by the Knowlton scandal. He got himself into Parliament at last in 1881. Because of his atheism, he refused to swear the oath of loyalty. Although many Christians were shocked by Bradlaugh, others (like the Liberal leader Gladstone) spoke up for freedom of belief. It took more than six years before the whole issue was sorted out (in Bradlaugh’s favour) after a series of by-elections and court appearances.
Meanwhile Besant built close contacts with the Irish Home Rulers and gave them support in her newspaper columns. These were crucial years, in which the Irish nationalists were forming an alliance with Liberals and Radicals. Annie met the leaders of the movement. In particular, she got to know Michael Davitt, who wanted to mobilise the Irish peasantry through a Land War: a direct struggle against the landowners. She spoke and wrote in favour of Davitt and his Land League many times over the coming decades.
However, Bradlaugh's parliamentary work gradually alienated Annie. Women had no part in parliamentary politics. Annie was searching for a real political outlet: politics where her skills as a speaker writer and organiser could do some real good.
For Annie, politics, friendship and love were always closely intertwined. Her decision in favour of Socialism came about through a close relationship with George Bernard Shaw, a struggling young Irish author living in London, and a leading light of the Fabian Society. Annie was impressed by his work and grew very close to him too in the early 1880s. It was Annie who made the first move, by inviting Shaw to live with her. This he refused, but it was Shaw who sponsored Annie to join the Fabian Society. In its early days, the Society was a gathering of people exploring spiritual, rather than political, alternatives to the capitalist system.
Annie now began to write for the Fabians. This new commitment - and her relationship with G.B.S. - deepened the split between Annie and Bradlaugh, who was an individualist and opposed to Socialism of any sort. While he would defend free speech at any cost, he was very cautious about encouraging working-class militancy.
Unemployment was a central issue of the time, and in 1887 some of the London unemployed started to hold protests in Trafalgar Square. Annie agreed to appear as a speaker at a meeting on 13 November. The police tried to stop the assembly. Fighting broke out, and troops were called. Many were hurt, one man died, and hundreds were arrested. Annie offered herself for arrest, but the police refused to take the bait.
The events created a great sensation, and the newspapers dubbed it ‘Bloody Sunday’. Annie was widely blamed - or credited - for it. She threw herself into organising legal aid for the jailed workers and support for their families. Bradlaugh finally broke with her because he felt she should have asked his advice before going ahead with the meeting.
Socialists saw the trade unions as the first real signs of working people’s ability to organise and fight for themselves. Until now, trade unions had been for skilled workers - men with a craft that might take years to acquire and which gave them at least a little security. The Socialists wanted to bring both unskilled men and women into unions to fight for better pay and conditions.
Her most notable victory in this period was perhaps her involvement in the London matchgirls strike of 1888. Annie was drawn into this first really important battle of the ‘New Unionism’ by Herbert Burrows, a young socialist with whom she was for a time in love. He had made contact with workers at Bryant and May’s match factory in Bow, London, who were mainly young women. They were very poorly paid. They were also prey to horrendous industrial illnesses, like the bone-rotting Phossy jaw, which were caused by the chemicals used in match manufacture. Some of the match workers asked for help from Burrows and Annie in setting up a union.
Annie met the women and set up a committee, which led the women into a strike for better pay and conditions. The action won enormous public support. Annie led demonstrations by ‘match-girls’. They were cheered in the streets, and prominent churchmen wrote in their support. In just over a week they forced the firm to improve pay and conditions. Annie then helped them to set up a proper union and a social centre.
At the time, the matchstick industry was an immensely powerful lobby, since electric light was not yet widely available, and matches were essential for lighting candles, oil lamps, gas lights and so on. (Only a few years earlier in 1872, lobbyists from the match industry had persuaded the British government to change its planned tax policy.) Besant's campaign was the first time anyone had successfully challenged the match manufacturers on a major issue, and was seen as a landmark victory of the early years of British Socialism.
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Communist Party Great Britain (Marxist Leninist) June 2008
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The matchgirls' strike of 1888
Annie Besant and the landmark victory in British working-class history, with much relevance to workers today, the majority of whom are once more unorganised and unrepresented by the trade-union movement. Reproduced from communist newspaper 'Proletarian':
The matchgirls’ strike of 1888 has a significance that is difficult to put into words. In its physical scale it is unremarkable for the period, but its significance for the future of the British trade-union movement was colossal, since the strike redefined the very nature of trade unionism and gave birth to our modern-day general unions.
Background to the strike
It is timely to reflect upon the following words of Tom Mann, written two years before the strike, in which he criticised the old craft unions, with their high contributions and exclusive membership, their well-paid officials and officers.
These ‘old’ trade unionists, so similar to those we see today, had, in their quest for ‘respectability’, entered into direct collaboration with the capitalists and government, abandoning the class struggle and embarking down the path of reformism. They had no desire to abolish the wages system, merely to extract from it concessions for their respective crafts.
Outside of these unions were the vast masses of proletarians, unskilled and unrepresented, with nobody to lead their struggle, and considered by the trade unionists of the day to be ignorant and impossible to organise. Furthermore, ‘official’ unionism was so stagnant it offered nothing to the new masses of industrial workers.
Let all modern-day trade unionists reflect upon the words of Tom Mann, which read as though they were written yesterday:
“To Trade Unionists, I desire to make a special appeal. How long, how long will you be content with the present half-hearted policy of your unions? I readily grant that good work has been done in the past by the unions, but, in Heaven’s name, what good purpose are they serving now? ... The true Unionist policy of aggression seems entirely lost sight of; in fact the average unionist of today is a man with a fossilized intellect, either hopelessly apathetic, or supporting a policy that plays directly into the hands of the capitalist exploiter.”
So it was that two years later, growing out of this period of apathy and neglect, the downtrodden labouring masses of East London got up from their knees and used the only weapon the working classes have in their battle with capital – organisation.
The strike took place at a single large factory, Bryant & May, in London’s East End. Here, a few thousand girls, many mere children, toiled from 6.30am until 6.30pm. On their return home, many set to work box-making – piecework for the factory that could be done in the home until weariness or hunger made the girls fall asleep.
Conditions of work
Living or working amongst these workers were some radicals who had connections with the early socialist organisations, including the Fabian journalist Annie Besant, who popularised their plight in her newspaper, The Link. Annie Besant used her contacts in the factory to expose the appalling conditions in an article entitled ‘White slavery in London’.
The factory conditions were horrific. Poor ventilation made the phosphorus fumes lethal, and ‘phossy jaw’, a form of bone cancer, ran rife. In addition to the chemical hazards, the employers were cruel and draconian. Girls were heavily fined for talking, going to the toilet, dropping matches and being late.
Yellowing of the skin, bald patches and frequent loss of teeth were some of the common ailments the women and children endured as the result of having no separate room in which to eat their food and consequently ingesting the phosphorous along with their meals.
The social status of the matchgirls was described at the time as being rated somewhere below prostitution. (See The Great Dock Strike 1889 by the TGWU, with a foreword by Ron Todd)
In Victorian society, the matchgirls were also victims of the bourgeoisie’s own perverted sense of morality. Sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) were a criminal offence subject to imprisonment, and the Poor Law’s treatment of single mothers remained sadistically cruel and twisted; a departure from the evils described in Dickens’ Oliver Twist had still to be made.
Although the conditions were deplorable, organisation amongst this section of the working class was pretty well non-existent. With no general trade unions in existence, the voice of the unskilled workforce only gradually became heard in the preceding years during marches of the unemployed and through early socialists like Hyndman.
Three weeks on strike
In May 1888, the matchgirls took action and decided to strike after Annie Besant’s three informants were sacked.
Instead of aimless rioting, or the smashing of machinery, the Bryant & May workers understood that the most effective way to achieve their demands would be through the withdrawal of their labour. This maturity had no doubt come about after direct participation in the riots and street fighting of previous years, the events of Bloody Sunday (1887), and the demonstrations for free speech during 1887, which were brutally broken up by the police.
Some recognition must also be given to the role played by Hyndman and the early socialists, who had begun to inculcate a socialist ideology amongst the poorest sections of the working class, despite the ideological limitations that were to turn these men in the fullness of time into pawns of the bourgeoisie.
“During 1888, the years of propagandist effort on the part of Socialists, urging the people to bestir themselves and try to find a way out of the terrible poverty that existed, were beginning to show results. The first considerable movement came from the women and girls employed at Bryant & May’s match factory at Bow. Kindly-disposed persons had written about the woeful conditions under which many of the girls worked, resulting in the terrible disease known as ‘phossy jaw’, and other serious troubles, it being argued that better methods might be applied that might materially minimise these evils. In addition, the wages were shamefully low. No response to appeals from the workers was made by the firm. Lists of shareholders were published showing that a considerable percentage of these were clergymen; but nothing brought any change for the better until the women and girls went on strike. This immediately attracted public attention, and Mrs Annie Besant – at that time devoting her whole energies to the Socialist movement, and doing splendid work as a member of the now superseded London School Board – at once gave close personal attention to the girls on strike. She was ably assisted by Mr Herbert Burrows, the girls were soon organised in a trade union. Their case was conducted with great skill. A club was formed, which was used as an educational and social centre, and a spirit of hopefulness characterised the proceedings. The girls won. This had a stimulating effect upon other sections of workers, some of whom were also showing signs of intelligent dissatisfaction.” (Tom Mann, Memoirs, 1923, p58)
The strike itself lasted for a total of three weeks, during which the girls endured great hardship and suffering (they did not, after all, have access to welfare-state benefits, to savings, or, for that matter, to credit). They established a strike fund and, with the support of some trade unions and radical clubs, they managed to face down their employer.
New unionism
The strike had involved 3,000 workers in total. The victimised girls were reinstated, the workers had been victorious and a new path was blazed – an example to all the other general labourers that, if they stood united in withdrawing their labour, they too could improve their conditions and stand up to any abuse.
The girls at Bryant & May had set in motion a trend towards a ‘new’ unionism, toward the organisation of the broad masses of proletarians into trade unions of general labourers.
As these new unions sprang up in the years that followed, new leaders of the working class came to the fore; men like Tom Mann, Will Thorne, John Burns and Ben Tillett. These men were instrumental in the creation of the Gas-workers’ and General Labourers’ Union, which waged a successful struggle for an eight-hour day.
The next year, 1889, saw the great dock strike, and a new era had begun. The proletariat was once more in the ascendancy. In 1892, Engels highlighted this new mass movement as the most important sign of the times:
“That immense haunt of human misery [the East End] is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpid despair, it has returned to life, and has become the home of what is called the ‘New Unionism’, that is to say, of the organisation of the great mass of ‘unskilled’ workers. This organisation may to a great extent adopt the forms of the old Unions of ‘skilled’ workers, but it is essentially different in character. The Old Unions preserve the tradition of the times when they were founded, and look upon the wages system as a once for all established, final fact, which they can at best modify in the interests of their members. The New Unions were founded at a time when the faith of the eternity of the wages system was severely shaken; their founders and promoters were Socialists either consciously or by feeling; the masses, whose adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working class aristocracy; but they had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited ‘respectable’ bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated ‘old’ Unionists. And thus we see these new Unions taking the lead of the working class movement generally and more and more taking in tow the rich and proud ‘old’ Unions.” (F Engels, Preface to the English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1892)
In our struggle today it is vitally important that we educate the working class about the victories that British workers have scored in the past. If we fight the class-collaborationist attitude of today’s union leaders and Labour party apologists, we can again win gains for the masses of unrepresented and downtrodden workers, and, in so doing, train many more fighters for the cause of proletarian revolution.
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