Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

 'THE MATCH-MAKING INDUSTRY IN GREAT BRITAIN. matches, and the little tab by which the box is pulled open. To make such boxes by hand from start to finish requires nine handlings. The comparative payment of the two methods is—boxes, insides only (for wax matches), made by machine, eleven gross, 2j^d. ; by hand, one gross, 2j^cl., and this quantity is attained by good workers per hour. A similar speed and scale of payment applies to the outsides, though not exactly identical, since there is so much more work entailed. In every department, whether managed by machine or hand, the work is achieved with almost incredible speed, and the quantity produced by each employee looks to the in- experienced eye impossible of comprehension. As an instance, the women who stand at tables piled high with cardboard box-outsides, paste, stick on and drop into large baskets beside them, sixty gross of sandpaper strips every day! Their hands do verily seem to move at lightning speed; applying paste to a smooth board on the table edge, picking up neatly heaped dozens of paper strips, dabbing them clown in rows in the spread paste, and then catching them up again one Photo: Cas seit & Co., Ltd, SIFTING- WOODEN MATCHES. by one with the right hand, whilst the left takes up box after box from the mountain before them. A flashing movement of the deft hands and the paper is in place, the box dropped, and another in course of operation. There are, in the case of almost every factory, some scores of people employed outside the establishment, women who from one cause or another find it impossible to go out to earn their wages, and are, therefore, glad to be enrolled as home-workers. They do boxes only, the match-making not being practicable in little dwelling-houses. These home workers are supplied by the factories with the various parts—strips of wood, card- board, paper, etc.—and they are at liberty to bring back the made boxes at a given hour daily. It is very usual for whole families— with the exception of the strong male members — to work at the boxes, mother, several children, and sometimes grand-parents, all contributing various divisions of the required labour — one will bend the wood strips, another will paste the paper wrappers, another will stick those round, a fourth will set the finished boxes aside to dry, and so on. The home workers are paid at the same rate as those who spend their time within the factory walls, and, unless they make special arrangements, they are not compelled to finish their work by any stipu- lated day. The necessity to make tin boxes leads most match factory owners to enlarge this division of the undertaking by turning out many varieties of tin receptacles, such as ornamental tea caddies, little round boxes for blacking, and numerous smaller editions of the sort that chemists fill with ointment, etc. The machine has the entire monopoly in the making of tin boxes, and a very lightly constituted manual machine it is, one turn of a half-circle, there and back again, sufficing to cut the sections of any shaped box out of the inserted sheet of tin. The mottled effect sometimes seen on variously coloured tin goods which in the trade is known as “crystallising,” is produced by a most ingenious pro- cess. Each sheet of tin is heated over gas jets, and when very hot is laid iß