Lottie Walker is the founder of Out of the Fire, the newly formed sister company to Blue Fire Theatre Co. It aims to bring to life the stories of people forgotten by history – and where possible, to bring them to life in their own communities. The company believes that education and entertainment are not mutually exclusive.
I’ve always had role models who are achievers
Her Edinburgh Fringe play Chopped Liver and Unions celebrates one of the early pioneers of women union leaders, the Ukranian Jewish refugee Sara Wesker; Arnold Wesker’s aunt. I spoke to Lottie about Sara, the play and the ongoing struggle for equality.
One of the points of the play is to raise the profile of a largely unknown woman, so who was she and how did you encounter her?
Sara Wesker came to the UK, aged five as a refugee from Ukraine in the early 20th century. As most immigrants did, she ended up in one of the large port cities of the country. In Sara’s case, the East End of London. She worked in the garment trade and took it upon herself to fight to improve the terrible working conditions.
A chance meeting introduced me to her. I was the ’entertainment’ at the unveiling of an English Heritage blue plaque for the Matchgirls (they get a mention in the play). There I met Dr Louise Raw, who wrote the definitive book on the Matchgirls and is a historian with a particular interest in working class and women’s history. Louise told me that the playwright Arnold Wesker’s aunty was a strike leader with a formidable reputation as an orator in East London, using her Yiddish language skills to galvanise women workers to protest their working conditions.
Whilst researching the play, our author, J.J. Leppink and I discovered so much more – not least that she fought at the Battle of Cable Street, was romantically involved with prominent trade unionist Mick Mindel (eight years her junior – imagine the scandal!) and was the inspiration behind the character Sarah Kahn in Wesker’s play Chicken Soup With Barley. This was a woman we really wanted to know better.
Why did the women she led form their own union rather than join existing ones?
Sexism in the early 20th century was far more overt than it is now. As Sara says, “They want the women strong enough to work long hours but not strong enough to fight back”. And the fact is that women were not welcomed into existing unions. Credit to the Communist Party of Great Britain who are not shy of admitting on their website how women were not exactly welcomed into the party with open arms in the 1920s.
The irony is that although they were marginalised and under-represented in the unions, the entire trade union movement as we know it today is thanks to women: the Dockers’ strike of 1889 was the turning point for organised trade unionism in the UK. And that model was taken directly from the high level of organisation of the Matchgirls’ strike a year before. Sara would have been aware of this and would not have taken being sidelined well, hence her formation of the United Clothing Workers’ Union. She was also pragmatic and when the opportunity arose to amalgamate with the NUTGW she grabbed it - strength in numbers and all that. The NUTGW itself is now part of the GMB.
The play includes songs by the Singing Strikers – are there any titles we would recognise today?
Such a good question! The short answer is “no”. But…. what the strikers did was to write their own words to well-known tunes. They are sort of ‘urban folk songs’. There is a strong tradition of protest songs going back centuries and it felt like we looked at them all whilst working on this show, from Cutty Wren, dating from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, to the songs of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger in the 1960s.
Music plays a big part in the show and one particular tune recurs several times – John Brown’s Body was used by the Bryant & May Matchgirls, Sara’s Goodman’s fellow workers and still survives as a protest song in its Solidarity Forever entity as recorded by so many different people. The lyrics attached to it at each point in the show, make it sound different each time, though – we hope! All the music in the show (there is a lot of underscore and incidental music as well as the songs) is either a protest or a suffragette song or a popular song of Sara’s time that is evocative of a particular mood or event. I’m in the middle of making a playlist to share that includes all of it and have surprised myself with how varied it is.
Are there things in your own background that attracted you to the subjects covered by the play?
Absolutely. I’m an Eastender. I grew up in what was then the poorest borough in London when it was quite acceptable for girls to say they had no intention of going to work as they would be married at 16 and be happy housewives! There was no culture of aspiration for women at all. My father was a manual worker. He was a docker in the Royal Docks in London and he was a committed trade unionist. I have vivid memories of enjoying time with him when he was on strike. I thought it was a treat to have daddy home to take me fishing and play shops for weeks at a time, when the poor man was worrying about how he’d pay the rent and feed us with no wages coming in.
Employment conditions were terrible for the dockworkers at that time – no contracts, regular hours or even guarantee of work unless one’s face fitted and you were chosen by that day’s foreman. It was brutal. My dear old dad was a single parent who had the foresight (I think – it might have been an accident!) to introduce many strong women into my life from an early age.
I’ve always had role models who are achievers and who often achieved against the odds and demonstrated amazing resilience. My parents’ generation lived through the Second World War; my grandparents’ generation lived through the First. The anecdotal social history learned from family stories, has definitely informed sections of this play.
Looking at the country today, do you think unions should still have a specific focus on the pay and conditions of women?
Definitely. We’ve come a long way over the last 130-odd years but we’re still a long way from true equality in the workplace. I love the coincidence that Sara’s first strike was in 1928, exactly 40 years after the Matchgirls Strike and 40 years before the Ford’s Dagenham strike that led to the introduction of the 1970 Equal Pay Act.
And I sincerely hope that 40 years on from that – in 2028 (just five years away - the clock’s ticking) – someone will actually smash the glass ceiling once and for all. In the current economic and political climate there is so much for the unions to deal with that something already enshrined in law may not be seen as a priority but we must never give up the fight for true equality in the workplace.
