Several eminent Conservatives, including Winston Churchill, believed that wartime schemes of education in the Armed Forces caused servicemen to vote Labour at the Election of 1945. For instance, R. A. Butler wrote: “The Forces' vote in particular had been virtually won over by the left-wing influence of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs.” So frequently was this view stated that ABCA became a scapegoat for Tory defeat.

As would be expected, the emphasis in existing accounts of the debate over the appropriate school-leaving age in inter-war Britain has been predominantly educational. The important discussions relate to the parliamentary and administrative struggles over the relationship between elementary and secondary schooling, with all its implications for central-and local-government finance, to the conflicts over the nature of any extended educational provision in different types of school, and to the potential effects of such developments on class division within society.

The grass-roots activities of the Independent Labour Party have been the subject of increased scrutiny from historians over the past few years, especially in the pages of this journal. Consequently we can now be a little surer about the contribution of the party to the development of an independent labour movement in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, though with every fresh case-study a different local strategy seems to come to light. The one outstanding profile in this field is the closely observed account of the ILP in Bradford by J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, who identify several key features in the party's growth in that city, notably the reformist nature of ILP socialism and the close associations with local trade unionism. “From the outset”, they tell us, “Bradford trade unionism and the Bradford ILP were seen as two aspects of a single homogeneous labour movement aimed at the emancipation of the working class from poverty and exploitation.”

The following article attempts to trace the course of working-class living standards in Britain in the comparatively neglected period between 1870 and the First World War. A considerable body of historical opinion sees this period as a time of marked improvement in standards of life, an improvement based essentially on rising real wages. Studies of this period have owed a considerable debt to the pioneering work of A. L. Bowley and G. H. Wood, which produced an invaluable collection of indices for wages and real wages, upon which most general accounts of living standards in the later nineteenth century have drawn. Wood's contention that real wages, in the years roughly between 1874 and 1900, rose by 36 per cent lies at the heart of an interpretation which sees the late-Victorian period as a time of crucial economic and social amelioration. The data are sufficiently comprehensive to show these improvements to be common to all occupations and to lead to the inescapable conclusion that “industrialization paid off generally in higher real wages for all groups in society in the second half of the nineteenth century”.