Was Enola Holmes 2 historically accurate?

SPOILER ALERT: This article features film spoilers

Set in London’s East End in the late Victorian era, the new Enola Holmes movie on Netflix takes some brave steps with working class history. But it gets some important facts wrong.

I watched the first Enola Holmes movie when it came out, mainly because it featured the brilliant Millie Bobby Brown. It clearly didn’t make much of an impression, as sitting down to watch the sequel I couldn’t remember anything about the first.

I persevered as I had heard it was set in London’s East End, and featured the historic 1888 match women’s strike. Although it’s more common to see women’s history in movies, working class history remains rare.

The problem with watching a movie set in a period you know so much about is that the historical inaccuracies jump out. For example, Enola states that Queen Victoria is on the throne, yet her mother is a militant suffragette and shown bombing letter boxes. The militant wing of the suffragettes did not form until 1903, and the bombing campaign began in 1912, by which time Queen Victoria was long in her grave.

I suppose these details don’t really matter — I can see why a film director could not resist a woman in a corset doing jujitsu (factually accurate, if the wrong timeline). They also got some things very right. There was a large match factory that employed hundreds of women in the East End. The women who worked there were mostly poor, and some were very young. There was one called Sarah Chapman, who was a key organiser in the famous strike. You can read her real story in our research report.

It was wonderful to see Sarah come to life, even if her story was largely fictional. However there were details that were not accurate, and “it’s just a story” is not a good excuse.

Sarah’s on-screen sister takes Enola to their home, and smirks about the overcrowded conditions and rats. I’m not sure anyone living in the East End during this period took it so lightly, especially as the terrible housing claimed the lives of one in three children under the age of five. It rather perpetuates the myth of the jolly poor.

It also states at the end of the film that Sarah led the strike. She was certainly a key member of the strike committee, and she may have been one of the delegates who went to Westminister, but she was one of many women organisers. While I want to celebrate Sarah’s achievements, it should not be at the expense of women like Mary Driscoll, Alice Francis, Kate Slater, Jane Wakeling, Eliza Martin and many more in the heart of the action. It moves the strike away from being a solidarity action, to a protest with individual heroes. That was the complete opposite of what the labour movement was about.

The film does accurately portray the devastating effects of working with white phosphorous in match factories. It revolves around the idea that this is not publicly known. Sarah has discovered the truth, and stolen documents that prove it. There are baddies trying to reclaim the documents, but Sarah is determined to expose the factory owners for “killing hundreds of us girls.”

The sad truth is that the lethal effects of working with white phosphorous were known since 1852, when Charles Dickens wrote about it. When Bryant and May opened their factory in Bow in 1861 they continued using it, despite one in ten match workers falling ill with its effects. It would take until 1895 before any action was taken. Even then they were only asked to notify the authorities of cases that occurred in their factories. It was not banned until 1901.

Of course it is a drama, and so complete accuracy can not be expected. According to the Match Girls Memorial campaign, it created a surge in visitors to their website, which means more people learning about these amazing women. Yet the idea that Britain’s leaders would have acted if only they’d known, let’s them off the hook. They knew and did nothing.

These women made the matches that kept the fires of the British Empire burning, yet got to share in little of its wealth or security. Union leaders knew this, and that’s why they organised with the most powerful thing they had — their labour.