But first, using hitherto neglected contemporary sources, she demolishes the great myth of Mrs Annie Besant leading the strike. In short, the idea that a fabian Lady Bountiful in the shape of Mrs Annie Besant (during her brief five-year period as a ‘socialist’) descended on the politically ignorant matchgirls to lead them to an isolated victory against their particular Bryant and May employers is a nonsense.

It may be worth making plain that denying Mrs Annie Besant the deciding role conventional history has given her does not make the Bryant and May strike ‘spontaneous’. However, while Louise Raw identifies the strike leaders, she has not traced (perhaps she could not) the full internal details of the strike.Photograph of two Maori people making fire with a fire-plough, the woman holding the hearth, the man using the plough, Aotearoa (New Zealand) One of the oldest and most widespread methods of fire-making is by using tinder, flint, and steel. Even ‘Ötzi’, the natural mummy of a man who lived 5300 years ago in the Ötztal Alps in Austria, was found with flint, iron pyrites, and a collection of different plants for tinder. corrections and revisions to definitions, pronunciation, etymology, headwords, variant spellings, quotations, and dates; The Bryant and May strike has remained ghettoised within labour history and, in particular, denied connection to new unionism. Even feminist historians failed the match women; they were reluctant, according to Raw, to compromise their own credibility as serious scholars working on muscular subjects, albeit with a gendered perspective, by association with such a tired old saw as the Bryant and May strike. The match women have not been hidden from history but hidden by history. Rather than Mrs Annie Besant leading the matchgirls’ strike, she tried to quash it with a consumers’ boycott, but once it took place and proved successful, she was happy to represent the matchgirls at the 1889 TUC conference.

That is not to say it is perfect, but its defects are peripheral, while its core analysis of the 1888 Bryant and May’s matchgirls’ strike demolishes the standard myths of the strike with a precision that a US drone can only dream of. [ 1] Old Norse has a term for striking-stones used in fire-making. Such a stone was called eld-tinna, "fire-flint, flint with which to strike fire." Quite the contrary. From her first appearance on the public stage as a militant atheist, and all through her ‘socialist’ phase, Mrs Annie Besant was always fiercely opposed to strike action. In her Link article she called for a consumer boycott against Bryant and May. In another article, she even derided the very idea of a strike: Both these groups were active in the East End, holding meetings, selling papers and agitating, along with the anti-Irish coercion movement, which had come to a head in a march to Trafalgar Square that became known as Bloody Sunday (13 November 1887).

True flint and steel fire starting is a low temperature method of spark-based fire starting. This means that the orange-colored sparks generated by steel on stone are cooler than the white hot sparks generated by modern, ferrocerium-based sparking tools often sold in sporting goods stores or by the Boy Scouts. To start a fire using the Viking Age flint and steel method, you need flint or a hard stone, steel and tinder. Louise Raw must be congratulated for her persistence over many years to try and discover what really happened at Bryant and May in 1888 as she has produced a book of vital importance.

Percussion fire-starting is the method that seems most commonly to have been in use in the Viking Age: it certainly is the only one that leaves good traces in the archaeological record. This method utilizes a piece of high-carbon steel and flint (or other hard stone that experiences conchoidal fracturing to produce sharp edges, including quartz, quartzite, chert) plus a flammable substance that will ignite with a low-temperature spark and hold the ember well. Other substances may also be charred and used as the spark-catching platform, including small pieces of "punky" or slightly rotten wood. In the Viking Age, apparently the preferred substance was called hnjóskr or fnjóskr, which is usually translated as "touchwood". Touchwood has a wide variety of names, but is technically a fungus of the Polyporus or Boletus family, especially Fomes fomentarius, Polyporus fomentarius or Boletus chirurgorum. Other terms used for this substance are amadou, punk, surgeon's agaric or oak agaric.Touchwood was collected in Europe in August and September, chiefly from oak and beech, the best being from oak. The substance was then prepared for use by removing the exterior rind and cutting the inner part into thin slices, which were washed first in weak alkali, then in water and then beaten with a hammer and worked until they become a soft, pliable felt-like material that could be easily torn by the fingers. For making tinder, the felt-like material was charred in exactly the same way that charcloth is made, and then soaked in "strong urine" where it was boiled for several days. Urine contains sodium nitrate, which is very similar to the potassium nitrate ("saltpeter") found in gunpowder. The difference is that sodium nitrate tends to be more hygroscopic (absorbs moisture more readily) than saltpeter. Books are generally reviewed when they first come out, but Proletarian has no need to follow such a bourgeois convention, not when it comes across a very useful historical study, which Louise Raw’s Striking a Light most certainly is.