Virtual Museum

Ada Nield Chew

28 January 1870 - 27 December 1945

Ada Nield was born into a large family in 1870 in Talke, Staffordshire. Her father eventually moved the family to Crewe, where he worked in a brickworks. 

In the early 1890’s, Ada began work as a tailor in a Crewe factory where uniforms were made on contract. 

On 5th May 1894, a letter signed ‘Crewe Factory Girl’ appeared in the Crewe Chronicle, describing the conditions under which the girls worked. On 19th May, a second letter appeared, headed ‘A living Wage for Factory Girls at Crewe’. Detailed account were given of the finishing department, where the writer worked doing ‘piecework’. With a normal working day of nine to ten hours, they earned only 8 shillings a week.

Then four articles appeared, all under the heading of ‘Life in a Crewe factory’, describing in detail the life there, and listing the grievances, stating that the root cause was the failure to pay a living wage, and proposing that the factory girls, and other women workers, should organise themselves and join a union. They also described how the writer had been attacked by the factory management, and on 25th August she reported the sacking of a friendly tailor and twelve girls who had been sympathetic, and her own resignation, signing herself ‘(an ex) Crewe Factory Girl.’

The same issue of the Chronicle reports a labour meeting in Crewe addressed not only by Eleanor Marx (Mrs Aveling) but also by Miss Ada Nield, the Crewe Factory Girl. Her prominence led to her election to the Nantwich Board of Guardians as the Trade Council representative, and to her links with the ILP where she met her husband, George Chew, and became one of their travelling speakers, then a Woman’s Trade Union Organiser and then as a Woman’s Suffrage speaker, writer and organiser.  

From about 1913 she settled in Rochdale with her husband and died in 1945.