Bermondsey Uprising
In 1911, thousands of women put down their tools and walked out of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe’s factories in protest against “appalling” working conditions and pay. Many women were injured in the factories because of a lack of health and safety, and they worked long hours for little pay.
14,000 women marched to a demonstration at Southwark Park, where famous faces such as suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst spoke.
This was to become known as the Bermondsey Uprising.
Image via Southwark News
The strike could not have happened without Ada Salter – Bermondsey’s first female councillor elected in 1909 – and her friends Mary Macarthur, who set up the National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW), and Eveline Lowe, who was the first woman elected chair of London County Council.
Historian and author of Ada Salter: Pioneer of Ethical Socialism, Graham Taylor explained to Southwark News, “In the can factories where they made the tins or metal boxes they had these presses and there were no guards on them so women lost their fingers and their thumbs and sometimes an arm.”
Taylor stated “Round here there were jam factories and the jars into which the jam was forced was a very poor quality glass and it would explode so lots of women were blinded by flying glass or had their faces shredded by it and even bulbs in lights would explode,”
Read more about the Bermondsey Uprising via Southwark News here
