CORPORATE bosses raking in 20 per cent returns on shares while forcing down wages. A super-exploited immigrant-origin workforce. Women demonised for daring to be visible, confident and organised.

The story of the matchwomen — mainly Irish, often teenaged or even younger workers whose 1888 strike sparked by the sacking of one of their number at the huge Bryant & May match factory in Bow, east London — is not only foundational to the modern labour movement, it bears striking parallels with the struggles of oppressed workers today.

The matchwomen’s festival organised by historian Louise Raw has been a staple of the London leftie calendar for 12 years, and Saturday’s event was true to form in platforming remarkable women who have battled sexism, racism and a brutish British state.

That state’s ongoing brutality was highlighted by Jessica, a victim of the spycops, who spoke of how she was duped into a relationship with undercover officer Andy Coles (later a police and crime commissioner and Tory councillor — Jessica has testified against Coles at the Undercover Policing Inquiry, but he denies the sexual relationship). She emphasised how Police Spies Out of Lives are currently organising a petition to make it illegal for undercover officers to have sexual relationships as part of their work.

Raw stresses the distinctive culture of the matchwomen — their collectivism, demonstrated in the solidarity they showed to comrades if their pay was docked in a pitiless factory system, or, more tragically, those who became too sick to work through the disfiguring and sometimes deadly “phossy jaw,” a necrotic disease caused by exposure to white phosphorus, then used in the match-making process, that kills the bones of the face.

The collectivism applied to everything, though, including leisure. The matchwomen had “gin committees” who would sample local spirits in the then largely unregulated and often unsafe market, determining which venue’s gin was the least contaminated and might do for a night out. They had “feather clubs” where they pooled money to buy huge feathery hats, which would be shared between them so whoever was on the town could look their finest. The long hatpins also served as weapons when warding off predatory men.

The determination of an oppressed and culturally foreign community to express and enjoy itself, and the opprobrium that brought down from the authorities, was echoed in contributions throughout the day.

Jamila Bolton-Gordon, a community activist from Ladbroke Grove, spoke of growing up in west London’s Afro-Caribbean community and the landmark case in which her father, Rhodan Gordon, became the third defendant to represent himself in court against bogus police charges of riot — the 1971 trial of the Mangrove Nine, the first to secure a judge’s admission that police had been motivated by racial hatred.

The repeated police raids on the Mangrove restaurant and others on its street were a hate-driven response to a black community hub that attracted writers, artists and not a few of the rich and famous, from Jimi Hendrix to Diana Ross. Undercover cops infiltrated the protest march the goaded community arranged against police harassment, and ensured it turned violent, charging organisers initially with affray and other offences before returning with riot charges intended to see them jailed.

Not only was the trial groundbreaking — the defendants effectively putting state racism on trial, and opting for innovative tactics including demanding trial by a black jury based on the Magna Carta’s insistence on a “jury of [one’s] peers” (they secured, in the end, two black jurors) — but Bolton-Gordon stresses the role her father and others went on to play in training new generations of anti-racist leaders, from lawyer Michael Mansfield (whose famous cases include that of Stephen Lawrence) to leading black politicians including Diane Abbott and Paul Boateng. The transfer of experience in how to resist oppression was one detailed too in her recollections of the unique relationship between west London’s Irish and Caribbean communities.

Now, she is focused on other ways communities are oppressed, in particular through the environment, with poor and black people’s neighbourhoods the ones suffering from toxic air pollution by being built alongside arterial roads or waste disposal plants. Wealthier communities have more say on council planning committees, generally ensuring unsightly, smelly and polluting developments are steered elsewhere.

The significance of a voice on planning committees, and organised engagement with local government, was a key theme of Solma Ahmed, a pioneer from the Bangladeshi community who set up women’s refuges and counselling services for women fleeing domestic violence in Hackney and Tower Hamlets in the 1990s. Even where a community apparently had council representation, as the Bangladeshis did, this did not automatically empower its women, often the victims of male violence from within their own community.

Ahmed later worked in housing policy too, looking at how this affects black and ethnic minority communities in particular (overcrowded housing was cited in reports as one factor, alongside their disproportionate representation in manual jobs that could not be done remotely, in the higher incidence of deaths from Covid-19 among black people in Britain).

Now she’s retired, but she hasn’t stopped fighting — chairing Colchester Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and having organised vigils for Palestine every Sunday since October 2023. The group has also arranged film screenings and marches, and is helping organise a cultural event bringing communities together for July 12 — “we’re involved in anti-racism work too. After all [Nigel] Farage is our next-door neighbour in Clacton! There will be workshops, music and so on.”

Palestine solidarity was a theme of the day, inevitably given the horror unfolding daily in Gaza which — as the same day’s scenes from Glastonbury and the state reaction to them showed — has now become the most prominent issue in British politics.

Teacher and former National Education Union president Louise Regan called for unity in the face of state attempts to ban Palestine Action and smear the giant Palestine solidarity demonstrations as hate marches.

She spoke of sitting incensed at a memorial for the victims of the Srebrenica genocide at St Paul’s Cathedral as Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said the world had done nothing to stop those killings and vowed never again — while the Labour government is complicit in a current genocide on an even greater scale.

“I will never forgive the people in leadership in this country. I will never forgive them for what they have done. They have allowed tens of thousands of Palestinians to be brutally murdered when they could have stopped it,” she said.

The links between wars and genocides and the global arms trade was the theme of the final session, in which Raw interviewed Laura Alvarez on the Peace & Justice Project’s role in bringing together The Monstrous Anger of the Guns, detailing the shocking political influence of a bloated, corrupt and dangerously powerful armaments industry.

Crooked capitalism weeping, as Marx once put it, from every pore with blood and dirt, facilitated by venal politicians: a story that takes us back to the matchwomen themselves, whose employer Theodore Bryant paid for the statue of Liberal prime minister William Gladstone that still stands on the Bow Road with enforced contributions from his impoverished workforce.

Strolling back to Bow Road station after a fascinating day of talks interspersed with live music from Emma Flowers and Maddy Carty, enjoyed to the accompaniment of a few gin-and-elderflower Matchwomen’s Spritzers, my colleague Ros Sitwell pointed out that Gladstone’s hands had again been painted red.

They always are, however often they are cleaned, a tradition the grandchildren of matchwomen have told Raw began soon after the statue was erected. One story says the furious workers smeared the new monument with their own blood, saying it had been built with it.

Living history, and stories of injustice and resistance passed down through the generations to inspire us to resist again. As Raw adapts the old proverb, “it’s better to strike a match than to curse the darkness.”

Louise Raw’s book Strike a Light: the Bryant & May Matchwomen and Their Place in History is published by Bloomsbury.