Bow Match Women’s Strike

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin, and to welcome the colleagues who are here to support the debate. I am delighted at the opportunity to talk about and commemorate the strike and consequent achievements of the match women of the Bow Bryant & May factory in July 1888, 125 years ago. I grew up with their story, living, as I did, in a working-class home within walking distance of the factory in east London.

In my research in preparation for the debate, and in thinking about why we should mark that defining event in the history of the women’s and trade union movements, I was interested to note a recent publication by Kate Adie, the former BBC chief news correspondent, “Fighting on the Home Front”. It is a challenge to what has been conventional and acceptable in the recording of women’s roles in wartime, and it represents Ms Adie’s determination that women should not be written out of the history of the first world war. She records that the munitions industry depended on nearly 1 million women workers, and that others toiled as welders, locomotive engine cleaners, policewomen and taxi drivers, and in many other roles traditionally reserved for men. Those women and the jobs they did were visible then, but they are invisible now. Their stories have faded from the chronicles and histories of that most terrible of wars, the centenary of the start of which will be marked next year. My purpose in seeking today’s debate is to help to ensure that the role of the match women will not be similarly overlooked when we recount the history of the fight for women’s rights, the struggle to establish trade unions, and the story of the communities in east London.

I want first to deal with a matter of language. Much of the telling of events at Bryant & May’s factory has referred to match “girls” and has presented a sentimentalised vision of young, helpless souls, dependent on the protection of others—who are, of course, older, wiser and “better” men, as, in the main, are the historians who tell their stories. So today let us tell it as it was. Those workers were women with a fight on their hands to determine their own fate. Yes, some were young; all were working-class; many were, like my family, of Irish extraction; but they were women, not girls, and that is how we should see them and talk about them.

Secondly, I want to talk about leadership. Many versions of the match women’s story attribute leadership of the strike to Annie Besant, whose name is inextricably linked to it. Indeed, the memorial plaque on the former Bryant & May factory—now converted to housing known as the Bow quarter—confidently

“commemorates the role of social pioneer and feminist Annie Besant in leading the demands for better pay and conditions”.

Annie Besant was a controversial character and a writer, journalist and social activist in a variety of causes including women’s rights and secularism. It is true that her journalism and political activity played a pivotal role in the tale of the match women and the events that they precipitated. However, to present her role as one of leadership of the strike is to fall into the trap of seeing history solely from the perspective of the middle-class storyteller, and it frankly does not reflect the reality of the events as they unfolded. The women went against the advice of Annie Besant, who felt that they should not strike.

I am most grateful to Louise Raw, whose outstanding work first published in 2009 documents in fine detail the strike and the events leading up to it. In “Striking a Light: the Bryant & May Matchwomen and their Place in History”, she meticulously describes the life and times of the women who worked at the match factory, and the events that led 1,400 women to walk out on strike in July 1888 and stay on strike for more than two weeks, until their demands were met. Ms Raw shows not only that Annie Besant was not the strike leader, but that she favoured a boycott by match purchasers rather than direct action. It was the women themselves who were in charge and who determined that a strike was necessary. Ms Raw’s work demonstrates clearly that the women were the leaders of the strike, and her research in the Bryant & May archive suggests that the names of the strike leaders were Alice Francis, Kate Slater, Mary Driscoll, Jane Wakeling and Eliza Martin.

At the time of the strike, Bryant & May was a household name. It had become the largest British employer of match workers. The factory was the largest employer of female casual labour in the east end. Bryant & May had established a powerful monopoly, taking over rival factories, so that by 1888 it could pay its workers less than it had 12 years earlier. It claimed to be paying 10 to 12 shillings a week to “steady” workers in 1876, but in 1888 the strike register showed women earning just 2 shillings a week, or about £12 in today’s money.

Before considering the strike itself I will remind the House of the inhumane and dangerous working conditions prevalent at the time, which were experienced in extreme form by the women working for Bryant & May. The women worked with white phosphorus, which was known to be extremely toxic and the cause of phosphorus necrosis or “phossy jaw”. It caused the development of abscesses filled with stinking pus in the lower jaw, gums and cheeks with affected tissue fluorescing with a whitish-green glow. White phosphorus was banned in Finland in 1872 and in Denmark in 1874. It was still in use in Britain until it was banned following the Berne convention of 1906, despite the existence of a safer alternative—red phosphorus.

One of the key but relatively small demands of the match women, which the management would not sanction, was that they should not be required to eat their food in the factory, in rooms made toxic by the white phosphorus fumes. However, the injury caused to health through the dangerous conditions of the factory was compounded by the insult of the management’s behaviour towards the workers. Low pay, very long hours, dangerous machinery, arbitrary fines and even physical abuse were commonplace. Hearing the grim news of the conditions, Annie Besant investigated and published a story about them in her weekly newspaper The Link, headlined “White Slavery in London”, prompting Bryant & May to threaten her with libel. The company instigated a witch hunt among the work force and tried to pressure workers to reveal who had spoken to Besant. It bullied them, depriving them of work and wages. It was the sacking of one of the workers who the company believed had spoken to Annie Besant that provoked the women and led to a mass walkout, with 1,400 women on strike.

Bryant & May had not expected that. It immediately offered to reinstate the women it had fired, but it was too late. By the morning of 3 July, the workers had formed a picket line, which continued for two weeks, along with mass meetings, marches in the east end, a lobby of Parliament, pressure from shareholders and much coverage in the local and national press. Bryant & May was finally under pressure.

Let us remember that the decision to strike would not have been taken lightly, as a strike must have been extraordinarily difficult to sustain. The women and their families would have experienced considerable hardship. Without their pittance wages or any savings on which to fall back for rent and food, they would have been destitute. Contemporary observers record that exceptionally high levels of mutual support among the women kept the strike going.

The company was forced to settle the dispute. Arbitrary fines were abolished, a grievance process was established for working disputes and a separate room was made available where the women could eat their meals away from phosphorus fumes. The Star newspaper reported:

“The victory of the girls…is complete. It was won without preparation—without organisation—without funds. It is a turning point in the history of our industrial development”,

and truly it was. Crucially, the women were allowed to form a trade union so that future disputes, if any, might be laid officially in front of the firm: the Union of Women Match Workers, the largest union of women and girls in the country, with Annie Besant as secretary.

Unarguably, those match women did something amazing: they brought to account a great power of industry, established greater control over their working lives and made a huge contribution to the development of the organised labour movement and the Labour party. Yet their proper place in the beginning of the labour movement seems to have been ceded to the great dock strike of 1889, which took place just down the road. Why is that? Is it because they were girls, women, majority Irish, unskilled or working class?

It was not always thus. At the time of the great dock strike, its leader, John Burns, urged a mass meeting of tens of thousands of strikers to

“stand shoulder to shoulder. Remember the match women who won their fight and formed a union”.

The women’s victory was a touchstone—a landmark in the history of the labour movement—and it should be recognised as such in our conversations, our considerations and our curriculum. We should give thought to the relevance of the match women’s achievements to industrial relations and community organisation today.

Let us take a little time to reflect on the role of women in the modern trade union movement in this country. The Government’s labour force survey tells us that in 2012, 6.5 million workers were trade union members, up by 59,000 from 2011, and that 55% of trade union members are women, forming a clear majority of the country’s trade union membership. Women employees are more likely to be in a union—29% of women, compared with 23% of men, a trend seen in each of the last 11 years of the survey.

Women are as pivotal to the modern trade union movement as they were in the fight for rights in the 1880s. The year 2013 marks the first time that two women have led the TUC at the same time: Frances O’Grady as general secretary and Lesley Mercer as president. I commend them, as I commend the TUC for its role in co-ordinating the trade unions and promoting the work that they do collectively to protect the interests of workers and the communities in which they live.

There are modern parallels to the match women’s organisation and mutual support against oppressive behaviour by employers. In the contract cleaning sector, porters, cleaners and domestic staff went on strike in 2012 at Swindon’s Great Western hospital over allegations of bullying and harassment by their employer, Carillion, followed by allegations that non-white employees had been asked by their white managers to hand over gifts, including jewellery, in order to get time off work. Strike action, supported by the GMB, was successful in exposing such practices and ensuring that Carillion, a massive outsourcing company, took its workers’ concerns seriously. The spirit of the match women was alive and well on the Swindon picket lines as the workers cooked and brought food for each other, showing mutual support and solidarity in the face of alleged dubious employment practices.

For me, the story involves deep personal memories. My late mother was a working-class woman from a very poor family in east London, within walking distance of the Bryant & May factory in Bow. Her education was disrupted by the second world war, and she left school at 14. When I was seven, she went to work stacking sugar at the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery at Silvertown. She joined the union in her first days there as a matter of course; it was what workers did to protect themselves and each other. There was never any doubt about it. She was the daughter of a man who had had to stand on cobblestones begging for work day after day, week after week and month after month. She understood what trade unions did to protect workers.

Later in her working life, my mother became a shop steward and fought hard for the rights of her sisters and fellow workers. I am told that she is remembered by Tate’s management for her audacity and strength of purpose. It was she who told me of the inspiration of the Bow match women. She used their story in her own way to make the point that leadership in working communities comes from within, which is as true now as it was then.

I hope that I have helped in some small way to preserve the place that those women’s story should have in our collective history. I pay tribute to the bravery of the women who fought so bravely and so well 125 years ago. We owe them so much.

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[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I begin with a personal reflection, which I find quite difficult? In 2007, my late daughter played the character Louie in “The Matchgirls” play that was put on by a community association. She had to have stitched to her head a piece of cloth to give the impression of an 11-year-old girl whose hair had fallen out because of the work that she was doing in the Bryant & May factory. I have always been struck by that image and the passion in the performance that was put on by those young people. That image has come back to me during this debate. I did not want to refer to it, but I feel I have to.

[Lyn Brown]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mike Gapes]

No, I want to carry on. Anyone who has an image of what that factory was like, whether from photographs or from their imagination from reading the stories, will know about the working conditions of women not just in the Bryant & May factories, but throughout the Victorian era during the industrial revolution. Anyone who reads Friedrich Engels’s work about the conditions of workers in Manchester—it was published not when it was written in 1844, but about 40 years later—will know about the conditions of millions of people in this country who built our great cities and our industrial revolution, which made us the workshop of the world, as was demonstrated in the great exhibition of 1851. Britain grew economically and prospered on the backs of those giants—the men and women who built the industrial revolution—but they did not benefit from it. Their work was casual, erratic and not permanent. They did not have pensions or benefit from health and safety legislation and there was no sick pay. They were on what are now called zero-hours contracts, but in most cases they had no contracts. They were dismissed at will, abused, exploited, sexually harassed and treated appallingly by some more senior workers and their employers.

If we are honest—this is topical—we face today a race to the bottom. The ideology of the Government, including the Liberal Democrats who are in up to their necks, is based on a view that we must compete globally by reducing working conditions in this country so that we can be more competitive with our European neighbours, and that Europe must reduce working and living standards to be competitive with the Asian economies that are rapidly industrialising and taking on manufacturing for the world.

Yesterday, I watched an interesting programme on television about the largest container vessel ever built. It is so large that things must be removed so that it is not too high in the water and can go under bridges. It cannot dock in many places. It comes from China fully laden and goes back three quarters empty because we are exporting only our waste products and some specialised equipment, and I am talking not just about Britain. The programme highlighted our massive trade deficit of billions of pounds every month. We import from countries where men, women and children are exploited. In China today and many of its cities the treatment of workers is comparable with the treatment that men and women in this country experienced in the 19th century.

When we talk about health and safety, and the protection of workers, it is important to take a global perspective. I am an internationalist and a socialist, and I believe in internationalist and universalist values. It is time that we left the parochial debate about the situation in this country and raised issues relating to the rights and duties of global companies that do not pay tax in this country and manufacture goods in other countries. They work cleverly so that certain large global corporations have far more power and influence than individual states, even the most powerful states.

I will not digress, but that is why we need international co-operation and a strong European Union that can defend the European social model, stand up against the global multinationals, and work within the International Labour Organisation, the World Trade Organisation and the treaties that we signed with Korea, the United States and other parts of the world for trade and international co-operation. That should be not a race to the bottom, which is the agenda of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, but a race to protect and raise the living standards of people in the countries that we trade with around the world. That is an argument not for protectionism, but for modern, effective regulation and globalisation. In this century, we cannot live on the basis of total deregulation and a race to the bottom. The values of the women in Bryant & May’s factory 125 years ago are exactly the same that we should argue for today to protect the women in factories in China and elsewhere who are working in conditions that are comparable with what those women were working in.

We have talked about trade unionism in Britain. Trade Unions do not organise enough people in this country. Millions of women work as cleaners and carers in low-paid, casual jobs. On the radio this morning, a lady said that if there is a traffic jam she cannot do her job when she visits the elderly people she cares for because she runs late with resulting pressure. That applies particularly in the care industry. We can do something about that in this country because contractualisation, privatisation, deregulation and zero-hours contracts are a race to the bottom. We must do better, and we must all recognise that that will involve a change in our attitude to the lowest paid people in our country.

We have a national minimum wage. It was a great achievement of the last Labour Government, but it is not high enough. It is impossible to live on the minimum wage in London. We need a London living wage and we need it to be enforced. Let people be prosecuted for failing to pay the minimum wage. Let the Daily Mail and the Daily Express show pictures of those who are guilty of not standing up for British values of fairness, justice and fair pay for men and women. That is what we need in this country today, not the poison that comes from our tabloid press.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I was preparing to stand up and thank Mr Dobbin for chairing the debate excellently, but I noticed that a change had taken place while I was in thrall to the speech by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman). It was a seamless transfer, but I thank you and Mr Dobbin for your excellent co-chairmanship of this passionate and important debate.

I thank the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) for securing the debate and for expounding on the match girls’ strike in such detail. I also pay tribute to the excellent speeches that we heard from the hon. Members for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), for Ilford South (Mike Gapes)—I noted the mention of his late daughter, Rebecca, and I found his speech to be particularly moving in that regard—and, of course, from the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland, who expounded in her usual, passionate fashion.

It is also important to note, Mrs Main—I am not sure whether you were in the room—the brief presence of the new shadow Education Secretary, who entered the Chamber, stood, and gazed around him—it seemed to be a laying-on of hands on this debate by him. I would like to take this moment to congratulate him on his appointment and to note the perspicacious tweet that was put out yesterday, saying that when the Labour party

“is ready to be led by a man called Tristram”,

it is ready for government.

[Lyn Brown]

I thank the Minister, certainly for the beginning of his speech, which, as always, is entertaining. No one was more delighted than I was when I saw that the new shadow Secretary of State for Education had been elevated to such a position, but then I realised that he would no longer be able to speak in this morning’s debate, in which he had promised me a good 20 minutes. It was for that reason, I believe, that he popped in—to ensure that I was not without friends.

[Mr Vaizey]

I very much hope that the shadow Education Secretary will publish the speech that he was due to make. There is no reason, in my view, why he could not have spoken in the debate, but that would be a matter for the parliamentary authorities. I remember speaking with my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister when he was Leader of the Opposition and chose to lead a Westminster Hall debate. I hope, therefore, that we will have an opportunity to read the hon. Gentleman’s words of wisdom, because he is a most excellent historian, as of course is Louise Raw, who I think may be in the Chamber watching this debate and to whose excellent book there has been much reference.

Of course, the match girls’ strike was a seminal moment in trade union history and the history of industrial disputes. It was a cause célèbre at the time. It was supported by celebrities on the left. The strike fund was donated to by the Fabian Society and by luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb and Graham Wallas. It was also supported by the Richard Dawkins of his day, Charles Bradlaugh, the overtly atheist Member of Parliament, who fought so hard for his atheist beliefs—if I can put it that way—that he was imprisoned in the cell in the Houses of Parliament when he tried, time and again, to affirm rather than to take the oath. Of course, he was an avowed trade unionist and an avowed anti-socialist, but I do not think that those two beliefs are necessarily connected. It is interesting that in the same year in which he supported the match girls’ strike, he achieved his own victory by securing the passing of the Oaths Act 1888, which allows some Members of Parliament to affirm the oath if they so choose.

The hon. Member for Ilford South referred to the performance of “The Match Girls”. Of course, the match girls’ strike was commemorated in a musical produced by Bill Owen and Tony Russell in 1966. I am sad to hear that it has not been put on since. I hope that all hon. Members will unite in sending a message to the musical theatre community that “The Match Girls” perhaps could be performed again. Perhaps there could be one gala performance to raise money for our hard-pressed trade unions, which we have heard about, this year to coincide with the 125th anniversary.

A number of points were raised about what I should do as a Minister. I have really come to this debate wearing my heritage hat rather than my health and safety hat, my equal pay hat or any of the many other hats that I might wear at a particular moment, so let me just deal with the heritage aspect. Certainly if there is the problem of an inaccurate blue plaque commemorating the match girls’ strike, that should be remedied as swiftly as possible. I am very happy to contact English Heritage if indeed it is one of its plaques. I am not sure that it is, but I am certainly happy to discuss with English Heritage in what ways the strike could be commemorated. Of course, English Heritage runs the blue plaque scheme independently of Government—it would be wrong of politicians to dictate which of their particular heroes should be commemorated in a blue plaque—but certainly this is a matter that I could bring to its attention.

The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland talked about ensuring that the match girls’ strike is properly portrayed in the school curriculum. As she knows, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education is trying to simplify the curriculum, but he is trying to do so to give teachers more freedom to teach in the ways they see fit. Certainly, teaching about the match girls’ strike in schools is not banned. Any school and, in particular, local schools—schools in the area in which the strike took place—should feel free to educate their pupils on this important event.

[Lyn Brown]

I am grateful to the Minister for being so generous with his time. I am not one to malign the Secretary of State for Education, but during one discourse he was holding forth about the nature of history and I believe that he may have inadvertently got a reference to the match women’s strike wrong himself by mentioning Annie Besant as the leader of the strike. The Minister, when he is having lunch with the right hon. Gentleman at some point, might want to point that out to him to rectify any future possible transgressions.

[Mr Vaizey]

I hope that the hon. Lady will supply me with the appropriate quote so that I can make that point to my right hon. Friend. He is obviously extremely busy, because he is trying to put forward very important reforms to our education system to help, funnily enough, the very poorest in our society, which is his passion. The fact that too many children are written off at a very young age and told that they cannot achieve is what he wants to change. It may not be possible for me to have a meeting with him, but certainly I might write to him and perhaps the official history of the match girls’ strike, written by Louise Raw, could be made available to him. He is an assiduous reader. Even in a digital age, if someone stops my right hon. Friend in the street—as I am sure you know, Mrs Main—they will find at least 10 and possibly 20 books in his satchel. He is also a keen historian, although perhaps not in the same league as his new shadow.

Let me talk more generally about some of the issues to do with heritage, because this is a timely debate in terms of what the Government want to do to recognise heritage. I have been given a list of some of the small grants that have been made to relevant projects by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Interestingly, we increased the share of the national lottery money going to the Heritage Lottery Fund from 16% to 20%, so there is now substantially more funding available for these schemes. Last year, almost £10,000 was given to Maximal Learning for a seven-month project to explore the history of the Bryant & May building in Bow, east London. We have also got a huge sum—up to £28 million—for projects to commemorate the first world war. We have recently given some money to the Charles Dickens museum, the author’s former Bloomsbury home, as well.

Most importantly of all, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport announced earlier this month the creation of an anniversaries fund. That is a fund of £10 million, to which people who wish to commemorate a significant anniversary can apply. That is something that is very close to my heart and that I have long wanted to see come about. Obviously, I was thinking about some of the big anniversaries that are coming up, such as the celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, but there is a general point that is relevant to this commemoration in Parliament of the match girls’ strike, which is that, as part of our society and as part of community cohesion, it is important that as many people as possible know our history and know the significance of great events. That includes Magna Carta. It includes the match girls’ strike. These are events that have shaped our history and continue to have a resonance.

Perhaps it is too late for a group to apply to the Heritage Lottery Fund for funding to commemorate the match girls’ strike, but it may be possible to find a suitable anniversary further down the line to which that would apply. Obviously, the anniversaries fund should certainly not exclude anything that commemorates the important industrial and labour history of our nation.

Let me move on to the subject of health and safety. There were impassioned speeches from Opposition Members about the importance of maintaining heath and safety legislation. Again, this subject is close to my heart. I was struck when I went round the Olympic village before the opening of the Olympics and was told that it was the first such stadium to be built without a single fatality. I certainly do not and nor, I hasten to add, do any of my fellow Ministers come from the school that sees health and safety as a burden and that does not understand the importance of health and safety in keeping people safe. However, it is important that we review regulations and that we strike a balance between the need to protect people at work and the need not to burden business unduly.

We have conducted some key reviews. Professor Löfstedt carried out an independent review, and of course Lord Young of Graffham carried out his own review. They found that there was an over-implementation of health and safety regulation, driven by a fear of the civil law—a fear of lawyers, who can see an opportunity presenting itself. There was an opportunity to simplify health and safety legislation, and by doing so we can improve health and safety. We are, for example, introducing a register of occupational safety and health specialists, which will mean that small employers no longer have to waste time searching for the right person; they will be able to consult the register to find a specialist. A teacher now has to fill out only one form when they organise a school trip, so the process is much easier. We hope that that will encourage more schools to take school trips. We have also made it easier to make a personal injury claim through a simplified three-stage process.

Although it sounds contradictory, the simplification of health and safety legislation can improve health and safety by encouraging small businesses to apply health and safety law. We have also made it absolutely clear that we will not stint on health and safety inspections of dangerous occupations or workplaces. We will name and shame those who breach health and safety law, and we will make them pay for follow-up inspections if they are found to be in breach of the law.

The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport is also the Minister for Women and Equalities, and equality in the workplace was mentioned with some vigour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Vaizey]

I have not read those statements in detail; I have only read about them in the newspapers, and I hesitate to stray on to another Department’s policy area by expressing an opinion about whether new regulations should be introduced concerning transparency and mandatory reporting. As the hon. Lady knows, the Consumer Affairs Minister, the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), is passionately committed to tackling the problem, which is why she spoke so vociferously about it. That goes to the heart of the point that I was making. The Government are committed to making Britain fairer and tackling the barriers to equal opportunities that hold so many people back.

We have launched a voluntary initiative on gender equality transparency called “Think, Act, Report”, which asks private sector and voluntary sector employers to make workplaces fairer for women through greater transparency on pay and other workplace issues. More than 120 leading businesses have signed up, and the initiative covers nearly 2 million employees, which is 16% of the targeted work force. We are also using a voluntary approach to increase the number of women on boards. Women now account for almost one in five of FTSE 100 board directorships, which is a significant increase from 12.5% in February 2011. Only six FTSE 100 companies still have all-male boards.

We want to strengthen the economy, so we are supporting more businesses to start up and employ more people. That is why we have set up the Work programme, announced 24 new enterprise zones and introduced the regional growth fund. The Government have created 1.4 million jobs in the private sector during the past three years. We have established the Women’s Business Council, which published its recommendations in June. We responded to the recommendations by welcoming them and announcing a series of actions. We have announced funding of £1.6 million over the next three years to support rural women’s enterprise, the introduction of 15,000 new mentors to support those setting up and growing their businesses—including 5,000 specifically targeted to women—and a new scheme that will make £2 million available in small grants of up to £500 to those who wish to set up new child care businesses.

The debate has been important and memorable, and it has commemorated an important event in our history. The quality of the speeches from Opposition Members demonstrates that that event raises many important issues on which people feel passionately—equal pay, employment rights and health and safety—and teaches us that events in our history still resonate today.

[Lyn Brown]

Before the Minister sits down, will he undertake to ensure that in the first world war commemorations that begin next year, women will not be hidden from that history and that herstory will be told as well?

[Mr Vaizey]

I was about to say that I hesitated to give any undertaking, but the hon. Lady has raised an important point. I am not responsible for running the first world war celebrations—the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport takes the lead on that, along with the new Minister for Sport—but I feel strongly that we must ensure that the role of women in the first world war is suitably recognised throughout the four years of our first world war commemorations. I conclude on a positive note by agreeing with the hon. Lady and thanking her for calling this important debate.