In some accounts, the "Ken" Strike began with a synchronised dropping of silver tea trays. Given that the Cabin Restaurant employed about 40 waitresses, that would have been quite an impressive clatter.
The Cabin, in Piccadilly Circus, London, was one of the biggest and busiest eateries in the West End, especially popular with the pre-theatre crowd who would assemble there, dressed in their glad rags, for a spot of something before the curtain rose.
It sounds like a jolly old place, provided you didn't have to work there: waitresses did 12-hour shifts, six days a week, for 6 shillings and ninepence plus tips.
(The question of the tips became a particular controversy later on, when the management, defending the low basic pay, pointed out that as a matter of policy they only employed pretty girls, and pretty girls naturally received generous tips.)
The first strike at the Cabin didn't last long - it didn't need to. At lunchtime on the 4th April 1908 the restaurant was packed full of matinee fans. It was at about 1.30pm that the dropping of the tea trays took place (or didn't; several entirely impressive sources give greatly differing versions of this whole story, so in the circumstances I've done the historiographically correct thing and picked out the bits I like the best.)
The staff's immediate grievance was an unfair dismissal. With the business at a standstill, the employees gathered outside the office of the manager, and insisted on the reinstatement of their victimised colleague. The manager surrendered immediately, apparently confirming this in writing on the back of a paper bag. The victorious workers went back to feeding their customers who were now cheering and applauding them - whether out of solidarity or just for love of a free show.
There are two reports of what happened next, but they both end in another strike. Either the manager tried to go back on his agreement, or the waitresses refused to work under him as he was a martinet, and demanded a new supervisor. When this was refused, they walked out (along with the bar staff, the musicians, the washers-up and all) on 8th April. Either the first or second strike - again, depending on which source you consult - seems to have started on the dot of 5pm, with everyone stopping whatever they were doing: taps that were running were left on, while servers halfway through dishing up a supper simply put their their spoons down and walked off.
The spokesperson and informal shop steward at the Cabin was a senior waitress in her mid-twenties known, for reasons which are now forgotten, as Ken. The strike made news abroad as well as at home, with the strikers invariably winning all the sympathy. A fascinating colour lithograph appeared in a French magazine, showing Ken standing on a restaurant table, dressed in her smart Cabin uniform, giving a boss a good old verbal going-over, while rebellious staff and astonished customers gather around. The caption referred to the affair as a "pittoresque" strike in London.
Support for the strikers - who held well-attended rallies in Trafalgar Square - came from all sorts of quarters, not only from trades unionists and feminists. Businessmen and theatre owners and well-off members of the public made generous donations to the strike fund, which grew heavy.
A wealthy property owner, Mrs (or Lady) Holland, offered the strikers rent-free occupancy of a place just across the road from Harrods, and so on 13th April a tea-room run as a co-operative called Ken's Kabin opened its doors. There were a thousand customers, a special edition of a strike newspaper named The Tea Shop Girls, a top perfume company giving out free samples, souvenir postcards and sandwich-board men carrying the slogan "Help the Cabin girls support themselves."
It was such a success, in fact, that Lady (or Mrs) Holland decided it would be much better if she owned the business instead of the workers. This dispute was settled in court, and the strikers were able to start a new co-op restaurant, Ken's Cabin (aka the Cooperative Kabin and Ken's Kafe), in Leicester Square. It ran on an 8-hour working day, and it prospered.
The Ken Strikers, the Cabin Girls, the Cabinettes, didn't win the strike in the sense of getting their old jobs back - they did much better than that, collectively creating a far improved working life for all of them. A newspaper at the time described it as "one of the shortest, pluckiest and most successful strikes on record."
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Sources:
Miss Muriel Matters by Robert Wainwright (Allen & Unwin, 2018)
www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/M527198/A-picturesque-strike-in-London
https://speakernet.co.uk/talk/505/a-storm-in-a-teashop-the-waitresses-strike-of-1908
www.pressreader.com/uk/ashbourne-news-telegraph/20201021/281874415892600
www.life-publications.com/retford/retford-ladies-probus-club-29/