Eleven Shillings

Chain was made in the Black Country by hand, in small forges in the back yards of terraced houses, by women.

The heavy chain — anchor cable, colliery chain — was men’s work in factories. The small stuff, the light chain sold by the hundredweight, was made at home. A woman had a hearth, an anvil and a hammer in a brick shed a few feet from her back door, and she worked at it between and during everything else, with children in the yard.

Mary Macarthur, seeing it for the first time, described the red of the forge fires and the shapes moving in front of them, and said it made her think of a medieval torture chamber.

What they were paid

Piecework, and the rate was set by the middlemen — the foggers — who supplied the iron and bought the finished chain.

A woman working a fifty-five hour week could earn as little as five shillings. That was not a low wage; it was below subsistence, and the trade was one of the standing examples in the Edwardian campaign against sweated labour.

The reason it stayed that low is structural. Three and a half thousand people, working alone, in separate sheds, behind separate houses, scattered across a district, competing against each other for work from the same handful of buyers.

There is no shop floor. There is nowhere to meet. Nobody knows what anybody else is being paid. It is a difficult situation to organise, and the employers knew it.

The Act, and the trick

Mary Macarthur had founded the National Federation of Women Workers in 1906 specifically to organise the trades everybody else considered unorganisable. Her evidence to a parliamentary select committee fed directly into the Trade Boards Act of 1909, which set up boards empowered to fix minimum rates in the worst-paid trades.

In March 1910, the Chain Trade Board set a rate for the women chainmakers: twopence-halfpenny an hour, replacing piecework.

It was still a very low figure. It was also roughly double what most of them were getting — around ten or eleven shillings for the week instead of five.

Then the employers found the gap. The rate did not become compulsory immediately; there was a period before it bit. So they went round the sheds with forms, and asked the women to sign a paper contracting themselves out of the new minimum for that period.

Many of the women could not read. Those who refused were simply not given iron.

The strike

In August 1910, the women came out. About four hundred at first, rising to something like eight hundred.

Macarthur’s strategy was not industrial, because there was no industrial leverage available. It was publicity.

She got the women photographed and filmed — this is one of the earliest British labour disputes to be captured on newsreel — and she took the pictures round the country. Well-dressed audiences in London and elsewhere were shown what a woman making chain in a shed in Staffordshire actually looked like, and were told what she was paid, and were asked for money.

The fund raised around four thousand pounds, which was an enormous sum and which meant the strikers could hold out.

The government helped, in the most effective way available: it refused to place contracts with firms that would not pay the Board rate.

The employers came in gradually and the last of them conceded on 22 October 1910. Ten weeks.

What it changed

The Cradley Heath women were the first workers in Britain to win the enforcement of a legally set minimum wage.

Not the first to be promised one — the Act had done that — but the first to make it real, by refusing to work until it was paid.

The NFWW’s membership went from about two thousand to twenty thousand. Trade boards were extended to other sweated industries. The principle that the state could set a floor under wages was available thereafter to everyone.

There was money left in the fund. Macarthur proposed spending it on a building, and the Cradley Heath Workers’ Institute opened in June 1912 — a union headquarters, a library and a social centre for the district.

It was later dismantled and re-erected at the Black Country Living Museum, where it stands now, a few hundred yards from a reconstructed chainmaker’s shed.

Macarthur died in 1921 at forty, of cancer, having also lost her husband to the influenza epidemic two years earlier. She had stood for Parliament and lost.

Her most-quoted line was about the circularity the chainmakers were caught in: that women were badly paid because they were unorganised, and unorganised because they were badly paid.