Early years
Early years
Collection: British Women Trade Unionists on Strike at Bryant & May, 1888 Volumes Early years
Bryant & May grew from modest roots. The founders, William Bryant and Francis May, worked variously as soap and tea manufacturers and grocers to eventually become the largest British match manufacturers and an important player in both home and export markets, trading in many countries. The documents in this section reflect the progress of their early years, from lone operators to partners in an increasingly important and profitable business.The existence of Charles Dickens' article in the journal Household Words (1852) among these papers proves the firm had an awareness of phosphorous necrosis, the grisly industrial disease linked to matches and white phosphorous. This would come back to haunt the firm in later years. There are very early match receipts which specifically propose using alternatives to white phosphorous. Dangers of death by fire are also referenced in the advertising material as white phosphorous was known to spontaneously burst into flames. Bryant & May used this as a selling point for their non-white phosphorous matches, whilst at the same time selling the white phosphorous 'Lucifer' matches alongside their 'safety' versions.
View Volume Metdata
Filter Documents
We were unable to find any results for your requested terms. Whilst we try our best to extract as much usable and searchable as possible, our primary resource collections have varying levels of available metadata and searchable OCR'd text depending on the nature of the document; please bear this in mind when searching, especially when looking for older resources. We recommend trying the following:
- Try a different combination of terms and queries to try and match your result.
- Use 'themes' or 'subjects' directly in your search query, e.g. "19th century colonial administration Africa" - 'Africa' being the broad subject.
- Try using the advanced search facility.
- Use a broader search and use the filters on the left-hand side to refine your results.
