FEATURE Olympics
Heart of the revolution
Poet Lemn Sissay honours the match girls’ fight with a poem etched into the walls of the Olympic stadium building, for all to see
BY NICHOLAS MURRAY
“STRIKE” This is the word that echoes through a powerful new public poem commission- ed for the Olympic site in Stratford by Lemn Sissay (pictured) about the famous match girls strike in London in 1888. Nearly 125 years on, it finally answers the call of the Victorian socialist feminist Annie Besant for a poet who could embody, “in deathless verse” for “the execration of posterity” the cruel match factory owners, Bryant and May.
The last straw was when the employers docked the girls’ wages to fund a statue of William Gladstone. So angered were the workers by this cut of their meagre wages – most could barely afford to survive on a diet of bread and tea – they protested by cutting themselves and smearing their blood on the statue. Then they went on strike, winning widespread backing for their fight. Seen as a turning point in the history of union organisation, the strike was a success and led to the founding of the new Matchmakers’ Union.
The Bryant and May Factory now stands adjacent to the new Olympic site and Lemn Sissay was the first poet to be commissioned by the Olympic Development Authority to provide a
poem. It will be etched into a wooden structure at the north end of the Olympic Park designed to house one of the main electricity transformers.
The poem, Spark Catchers, plays cleverly on the many associations of the word “strike”, linking union action to the theme of match manufacture. At its heart is an image of the workers leaping up to capture and extinguish a dangerous spark on the factory floor of this “fortress of flames”.
It’s a brilliantly vivid picture and when I met Lemn Sissay recently I asked him if this was something he had found in his researches, but the answer was no. It was a happy poetic invention, an idea that suddenly came to him as he started to compose the poem. “It was like finding a seam,” he says, “when you commission yourself to write a piece you are prospecting.”
It was an article by Annie Besant, White Slavery in London, (available on his website) that was the initial trigger. It highlighted the large profits made by the match factory owners and shareholders and the poor working conditions and low wages of the workers, all young women.
26 uniteWORKS July/August 2012
When the owners sacked three of them for speaking to Besant, the 1,500 workers came out on strike on 5 July 1888 and the world learned of their hardships at the factory – the fines and deductions, and the toxic atmosphere which gave them a cancer called ‘phossy jaw’, from the phosphorous used in match making.
“When I read the final paragraph of Besant’s article,” Lemn has written, “it seemed like a message from the past, a request from over 100 years ago, that I must write a poem about the match girls.”
Lemn told me that a poem of this kind can tell the stories, expose the “limitless narratives”, that often remain hidden from view. The working class, he believes, has “a rich seam of great stories” waiting to be told.
He’s recently been working with Unite’s education department, and has been involved in particular with the Unite migrant workers education project (UMWEP).
“Unions and poets have gone together for a long, long time,” he points out. “Poetry is at the heart of the
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