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This article examines the criminal records of 427 convicts present in Dartmoor Prison during a large-scale riot on 24 January 1932. The structure of this notorious convict population is outlined and the significant proportion of relatively minor crimes on their records is highlighted. The geographical mobility of these offenders is considered along with the diverse reasons why these men, and others like them, travelled. The idea of mobility, the excitement of crime, the motor car and dangerous offenders were all important factors in the way in which a small minority of offenders achieved a high level of public attention and became part of inter-war culture. Heightened fears about crime focused in particular on the motor bandit, who was perceived as a new kind of criminal at war with society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1972 a British commission arrived in Rhodesia to test how acceptable the latest and most comprehensive proposals to end Rhodesia's rebellion were to its entire people. Africans rejected the proposals in overwhelming numbers. Such powerful opposition was attributed to the African National Council, said to be a new and spontaneous organization, but in fact the creation of the banned political parties. This article examines the political agitation during the Pearce Commission's visit to show how commonplace the layers of political affiliation, substitution, and deception were in the groups that both supported and opposed the proposals in 1970s Rhodesia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses efforts by the British Cabinet to conduct a confidential re-assessment of plans presented in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 regarding the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. According to the author, the Cabinet persisted in its promotion of the plans despite concluding that it could not adequately protect the region's Arab population nor help them move towards independence. It is suggested that had the British Cabinet made the League of Nations aware of its findings, the international organization may have been able to prevent the Arab-Israeli conflict. Details related to British governance in Palestine are presented. Other topics include Zionism, the Suez Canal, and the so-called McMahon pledges concerning Arab independence.

Using the private papers of Lord Killearn in conjunction with official government documents from the British national archives and the French colonial archives, this article builds upon previous historical scholarship to highlight the importance of Killearn's South-East Asian diplomacy to the resolution of the international food crisis following the Second World War. As Britain's senior diplomat in South-East Asia Killearn had little choice but to become entangled in various international disputes often centred upon French Indo-China - Killearn's failure to do otherwise would not have preserved adequate international rice supplies. Therefore this article not only demonstrates the magnitude of Killearn's concern for South-East Asian rice production during the immediate post-war food crisis but it also reveals the depth of Killearn's frustration towards the chaotic priorities emanating from French Indo-China, and thus it substantiates a more significant and complex understanding of Killearn's diplomatic mission to South-East Asia than has been formerly stated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harnessing international support for the struggle against apartheid was a major aspect of international solidarity work, and publicising the atrocities of apartheid and the role of the liberation movements in combating apartheid was therefore a campaign priority. The British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) emphasised informing the British public about developments in South Africa as one of its core functions. In this article one aspect of this activity - namely the AAM's own publication, The Anti-Apartheid News - is analysed. A survey of the paper illustrates how the AAM used it to inform the British public about both apartheid and the African National Congress's (ANC) history and ideology. Through the newspaper the AAM was able to increase international solidarity with and support for the ANC. The article argues that the AAM therefore played a pivotal role in popularising the ANC and helping to establish its reputation internationally as the authentic representative of the people of South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical discussion of recent work on local government health care and health services in interwar England. A literature review examines case study approaches and comparative quantitative surveys, highlighting conventional and revisionist interpretations. Noting the differing selection criteria evident in some works, it argues that studies based upon a limited number of personal health services provide an insufficient basis for assessing local health activity and policy. There follows a regional study demonstrating various discrepancies between health financing data in local sources and those in nationally collated returns. These in turn give rise to various problems of assessment and interpretation in works relying on the latter, particularly with respect to services for schoolchildren and long-stay patients. The case study points to the importance of integrating poor law medical services in evaluations, and of learning more about the role of government subsidy in supporting expanding services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the production and reception of the television series The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-1960). It places the series in the contexts of telefilm production in Britain and the United States in the 1950s and examines the agency of key personnel including producer Hannah Weinstein, associate producer Sidney Cole and the involvement of numerous blacklisted American writers working under pseudonyms. The article argues that the politics of the series were influenced by these inputs, and examines selected episodes to show how the Robin Hood story was interpreted in the light of Cold War politics. It also shows how The Adventures of Robin Hood responded to the needs of audiences both in Britain and in America, where it was a significant popular success. It concludes with an assessment of the series' place in television history, marking the origin of the costume adventure series, or swashbuckler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the history of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Great Britain since 1945. It examines the relationship between NGOs and political activism and engagement. The author particularly explores environmental NGOs and NGOs committed to international development and aid. He links support for NGOs to declining public trust in elected officials and political institutions. The role of professional and technocratic expertise in NGOs is also considered.

The decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War saw Great Britain engaged in a naval arms race of unprecedented expense against the German empire. The spiralling cost of armaments proved politically problematic for a Liberal ministry ostensibly committed to ‘Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform’. Outside the government, however, an organized navalist lobby agitated enthusiastically for ever greater levels of defence preparedness. Groups such as the Navy League have typically been regarded as bastions of the radical right. In fact, as this article demonstrates, Liberal engagement with and participation in the navalist lobby was far greater than historians have realized. Liberal MPs accounted for a significant portion of the Navy League’s support within Parliament, and Liberals held many leadership positions in the organization. These men were motivated by considerations of national defence, but they also identified their navalism as belonging to a coherent Liberal political tradition. The navy had long been associated with progressive political causes, above all with the maintenance of free trade, and was regarded as being free from the more regressive forms of militarism associated with standing armies. In this sense, navalism was not simply a phenomenon of the radical right; it also represented a distinctly Liberal form of militarism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses moral and sexual changes in Great Britain in the post-World War II era, examining the notion of a permissive society. It explores the influence of the state and the press and comments on the role of London, England in these transformations. The author also reflects on sexual scandals, particularly noting an affair between British war minister John Profumo and Christine Keeler, the supposed mistress of a Russian spy. An inquiry into sexual reform led by John Frederick Wolfenden, Baron Wolfenden, also known as Lord Wolfenden, is also considered.

The English ‘sexual revolution’ has recently become increasingly conceived as ‘long’, lasting many decades, and by some historians as a gradual phenomenon, but reaching a peak with the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill in the 1960s. At the same time, the ‘religious crisis’ of the same decade has been attributed by some recent scholarship to liberal Christian revolt within the churches, and largely unconnected with sex. This article offers different views. First, based on the illegitimacy rate, it argues that, after a period of decline, restraint, and only minor change in the period 1946–59, the 1960s witnessed a sudden growth in pre-marital heterosexual intercourse before the pill’s availability to single women, implying a cultural rather than a technological cause. Second, based on contemporary social surveys, it argues that there is clear evidence of a strong inverse correlation between levels of religious activity and levels of pre-marital sexual intercourse. Third, it argues that in the 1950s the dominant conservative Christian culture restrained single women from pre-marital sexual intercourse, but that from the early 1960s changing attitudes led to rising levels of sexual activity, led by single women, which reduced religious attitudes and Christian churchgoing, thus constituting a significant instigator of the religious crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the role of voluntary organizations in British political and civic life in the early- and mid-twentieth century. It examines various types of organizations, including voluntary agencies and women's groups, particularly those campaigning for women's suffrage. The author comments on the book "Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System Since 1911," by Keith Middlemas, particularly considering Middlemas' writings about trade unions and employers’ associations.

The British fear of bombing in the early twentieth century has aptly been termed ‘the shadow of the bomber’. But the processes by which the public learned about the danger of bombing are poorly understood. This paper proposes that the press was the primary source of information about the threat, and examines a formative period in the evolution of public concern about airpower — the so-called air panic of 1935 — during which German rearmament was revealed and large-scale RAF expansion undertaken in response. A proposed air pact between the Locarno powers enabled a shift from support of disarmament to rearmament by newspapers on the right, while simultaneously supporting collective security. Paradoxically, after initially supporting the air pact, the left-wing press and its readers began to have doubts, for the same reason: the need to support collective security. This episode sheds new light on Britain’s early rearmament, and how the government was able to undertake it, despite the widespread feelings in the electorate in favour of disarmament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unlike recent contributions in the field, which discuss the geography of British overseas investments, this article focuses on the growth of capital exports from Great Britain during the period 1870–1913. Using a broader concept of foreign investments, which includes foreign direct investments (FDIs), and refocusing on the push and pull factors emphasised in earlier literature, we propose a framework able to capture the long-run determinants of British capital exports. Moreover, the framework includes elements suggested by early and recent works such as the institutional setup of the international economy and the evolution of world trade. The most relevant result, in an error correction model environment, is that the timing of British overseas investments in the long run seems to be related to the evolution of world trade, domestic growth and to the role of India as a colony. On the other hand, the attraction elements of the borrowing countries, captured by the risk-adjusted realised rates of return abroad, have been proven to matter in the short run. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the final decades of the twentieth century, history in British higher education experienced major challenges that highlighted fundamental issues of educational purpose and value. As the hitherto private world of university history teaching and learning began to open up to public scrutiny, what emerged was a statement of what one subject representative body called 'the traditional standpoint of historians' on undergraduate history education. Drawing particularly upon evidence from national discipline consultations and recent rethinking of the representation and uses of tradition, this article argues that the appeal to the educational past was more complex than public statements suggested and that more critical scrutiny of history's educational traditions might play an important role in imagining pedagogic and professional futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the task of 20th century local history approach and the significance of history in Great Britain. The use and abuse of the past through commercialisation, commemoration, consumerisation and personalisation is noted. The agenda for local history with thematic approach to 20th century study referencing to local studies conducted in Great Britain is outlined.

In this paper we argue that the fertility decline that began around 1880 had substantial positive effects on the health of children, as the quality-quantity trade-off would suggest. We use microdata from a unique survey from 1930s Britain to analyse the relationship at the household level between the standardised heights of children and the number of children in the family. Our results suggest that heights are influenced positively by family income per capita and negatively by the number of children or the degree of crowding in the household. The evidence suggests that family size affected the health of children through its influence on both nutrition and disease. Applying our results to long-term trends, we find that rising household income and falling family size contributed significantly to improving child health between 1886 and 1938. Between 1906 and 1938 these variables account for 40% of the increase in heights, and much of this effect is due to falling family size. We conclude that the fertility decline is a neglected source of the rapid improvement in health in the first half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, the concept of strategic culture has (re-)gained scholarly attention in International Relations theory, offering a supplementary or alternative explanation for state behaviour. Using this concept as an analytical tool and drawing on International Relations theory, military history and organisational theory literature, this article examines the organisation of High Command in Britain and Germany between 1850 and 1945 from a comparative perspective. It demonstrates the explanatory power of strategic culture by identifying the enduring character of key attributes in the way both nations organised their strategic decision-making bodies and processes. With the next theatre of war unclear, Britain as an island nation preferred flexible and adoptable High Command structures in which the incontestable primacy of political control was key. On the contrary, the organisational choice of Germany was driven by its precarious geographical setting in the centre of the European continent and the idealisation of a personalised unification of political leadership and military command which contributed to the narrowed a-politicised, technical and operational focus of the German High Command. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text presents a paradigmatic case in the history of espionage linked to his ideological configurations, political and psychological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary culture, soldiers held as prisoners-of-war (POWs) or as hostages are considered at significant risk of mental illness, in particular post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This assumption contrasts with the psychiatric orthodoxy of the First World War when it was concluded in both Britain and Germany that POWs were protected against ‘war neurosis’. Although ‘barbed wire disease’ was identified during time of captivity, post-release effects were not recognized. The repatriation of ‘protected’ POWs in 1943 prompted a reassessment of the psychological impact of imprisonment when servicemen of previous good character began to behave aberrantly. Rehabilitation programmes were designed to enable soldiers to re-adapt to service or civilian roles. Difficulties of adjustment were cast in social and cognitive terms, and corrective measures were occupational and educational. Psychiatric disorders found in POWs were explained in terms of a pre-conflict predisposition to, or a history of, mental illness. However, retrospective studies of veteran POWs have found a high prevalence of PTSD. A change in attitudes is explored in relation to the advance of medical terminology into the territory of emotions and the attribution of pathological processes to self-recovering mental states. The reclassification of the effects of imprisonment implies that diagnoses in military psychiatry are culturally determined and can be understood only if they are placed in a context that includes changing beliefs about mental illness, the formal development of the psychiatric profession and the immediate needs of the armed forces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The influential policy work in education of the intellectual grouping formed by J.H. Oldham during the Second World War known as 'Oldham's Moot' (1938-1947) has been discussed in recent publications. These have noted its general educational and university policy, its intellectual strengths, and the role of Sir Walter Moberly in relation to his chairmanship of the UGC and his The Crisis in the University (1949). Others have placed its thinking in a tradition of Christian medievalism and British intellectual movements. This article focuses on the social theories debated in the group, especially their European roots, their contribution to their discussions on the university and especially the role of adult citizenship in the era of 'Planning of Freedom'. In particular the authors follow the arguments concerning the integration of adult education in the university reform they envisage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the structural development of institution-based interest in genetics in Anglo-North American medicine after 1930 concomitantly with an analysis of the changes through which ideas about heredity and the hereditary transmission of diseases in families have passed. It maintains that the unfolding relationship between medicine and genetics can best be understood against the background of the shift in emphasis in conceptualisations of recurring patterns of disease in families from ‘biological relatedness’ to ‘related to chromosomes and genes’. The paper begins with brief considerations of the historical confluences of, first, heredity and medicine and, second, genetics and medicine which, in a third section, leads to a discussion about a uniquely ‘genetics-based approach’ to medicine in the second half of the twentieth century. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The author explores the complex relationship between Cornishness and Englishness in the early 21st century in Great Britain. In this paper, the author focuses entirely on the role of historical narrative and usable pasts in the mobilisation and articulation of particular versions of Cornishness. He provides particular details on the recent works of Cornish nationalist John Angarrack that link a history of Cornish oppression with contemporary social and economic ills. The author likewise stresses his fruitful awareness of the value of drawing on theoretical work on regional identity from within a range of subject disciplines beyond history.

The article discusses the televising of cricket in Great Britain from 1938 to 1956. The author explains that the televising of cricket began in the early days of broadcasting during the inter-war period. The article focuses on the early coverage of Test and County cricket levels in England. The author outlines how the union of television and cricket as a spectator sport began in 1938 and 1939 and later developed more formally after World War 2. The article also explores the relationship between the Marylebone Cricket Club and the County cricket clubs.

The article discusses Anglo-Jewish reactions to fascism and antisemitism in Great Britain in the 1930s. It focuses on the responses of Jewish elites and the organization the Board of Deputies of British Jews, examining its publication the "Jewish Chronicle" (JC). Topics include the British Union of Fascists (BUF), founder Sir Oswold Mosley, and BUF's work in East London, England. The author also explores the organization the Jewish People's Council against Fascism and Anti-Semitism (JPC).

Purpose - This paper seeks to examine the social construction of the racialised, colonial subaltern accountant in the British imperial centre in the early twentieth century.. Design/methodology/approach - Primary sources are used to provide an historical analysis of the British accountancy arena in the 1920s, this being the period when "race thinking" first became explicit. Secondary histories of race and empire are used to contextualise this analysis by highlighting: the growth of "race thinking" in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries; and the American challenge to British imperial hegemony after the First World War. Findings - This paper tracks the struggles of British accountants in the imperial centre in the 1920s to find a path between racialist attitudes in the imperial centre, their own included and countervailing discourses of non-discrimination. For the Scottish chartered bodies, this involved the development of a de facto barrier to entry when a proposed de jure one aroused, surprisingly enough, the prospect of retaliation from American accountants. Research limitations/implications- Limitations in the primary sources preclude detailed examination of the attitudes of individuals or for all variations in the positions adopted by particular bodies. Practical implications - The troubling thing about the demise of explicit race talk by the end of the 1920s is that de facto barriers to the entry of the racialised, subordinated Other remained in place. Originality/value - This paper shows that the rise of race thinking in Britain did not leave British accountancy untouched; largely through the pressure it placed upon the identity of British accountants qua Britons and the consequential issue of inclusion/exclusion of non-Britons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in this article traces the origins of a process of competitive change in British retail financial markets by looking at the emergence of cash dispensers technology, how it transformed into automated teller machines (ATMs) and how proprietary ATM networks gave way to total interoperability of cash withdrawals through a single common switch. Cash dispensers were an industry-specific innovation developed by British manufacturers (e.g. Chubb and De La Rue) which were, in turn, overtaken by US (e.g. NCR) and German (e.g. Siemens-Wincor) manufacturers. However, as the ATM became a global technology some of the leading providers (i.e. Burroughs, IBM and NCR) kept manufacturing and even their main design facilities in Scotland. The evolution of this technology illustrates changing boundaries of the banking organisation, the challenges faced by financial intermediaries to adopt on-line, real-time computing and highlights the role of network externalities in financial markets. From a business history perspective, the ATM, electronic funds transfer and other retail payment media have largely been neglected by British historians and management scholars. Yet the success of automated cash dispensers as a distribution channel in retail banking epitomises a shift in bank strategy, namely how applications of computer technology moved from being potential sources of competitive advantage to being a minimum requirement for effective competition in retail finance. This article thus promotes the idea that the history of technology must consider its users, their strategies and business models inasmuch as business histories of the late twentieth century will be incomplete without attention to developments in information and communications technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to show how, during the interwar period, Labour's ambivalent attitude to the retailing industry was born. This meant that, on the one hand, the party favoured big, consolidated businesses, but, on the other, it saw the advantages of small, local shops. Given that the Cooperative, perhaps surprisingly, was marginal to most Labour thinking on retailing, this ambivalence produced two broad policy vectors within the party. The first of these argued for the rationalization of retailing, while the second maintained that efficiency within retailing could be promoted without totally restructuring the industry. These issues were debated most strongly during the period of the postwar Attlee Governments. This article will examine how and why the rationalist argument was defeated, and will consider the policies regarding retailing pursued by these governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how the concern with the apparent 'Americanization' of British commerce and culture played out within the world of London advertising in the post-war period. In doing so, it engages with, and partly challenges, a pervasive line of argument within economic and cultural history that has emphasized the influence of American commercial power over Europe's economies in the immediate post-war decades. Historians of this period, like contemporary commentators before them, have tended to privilege the dominance of what Victoria de Grazia has recently termed America's irresistible 'Market Empire' in their exploration of trans-Atlantic relations. In this paper, I take the case of JWT London, a US-owned multinational advertising agency, and its relationship with its parent company in order to revise claims about US commercial domination. JWT is an instructive case because it was a classic example of an international advertising agency in the era of high American commercial expansion. Yet the organization of its London office and the relations between London and New York reveal a picture of business practices that complicates assumptions about American commercial domination. JWT London was not the bold apostle of the American vision of its parent company, but rather it sought to soften and not aggressively assert the corporate identity and commercial ethos of its American parent. In this regard, JWT London, like other US companies before it and since, worked to shed its Americanness and go native. To insist on this process of indigenization is not to deny the authority of US models of commercial life in this period. Rather it is to suggest that even within a US-owned company like J. Walter Thompson, American commercial influences took particular forms in Britain and that the American domination over Europe was neither monolithic nor homogeneous nor irresistible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Harold Macmillan's role as Chancellor of the Exchequer during the Suez crisis in light of information now available. It argues that, contrary to present historiography, the Treasury was consistent in warning Macmillan of the dangers of the use of force, but that this advice was not accepted by Macmillan. He did not adequately pass on these warnings to his Cabinet and Egypt Committee colleagues. Though he did not lie to his colleagues about the state of the reserves when the decision to call a ceasefire was taken, the reasons that he gave for his abrupt change of mind were specious. The article concludes that American hostility was primarily responsible for the failure of the operation and that Macmillan showed a lack of judgement in not recognizing this until it was too late. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous attempts to understand press coverage of protests against the Vietnam War have either emphasized the struggle for self-definition that protesters were confronted with as a result of a dominant press presentation or have noted the press reversion to long-established models to explain this new phenomenon. In turn protesters were usually hostile to the press both because they felt they were misrepresented and because the press appeared to be yet another representative aspect of capitalist hegemony. Yet the relationship between the press and protesters was in many ways a symbiotic one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the strategies and tactics of surveillance that were used by Manchester City Police in relation to anxieties about gender, sexuality, juvenile delinquency and drugs misuse in post-war England. In the early 1960s the members-only 'coffee beat club' became a target of police activity, resulting in a series of raids, minor prosecutions and the intensification of the licensing laws. Commenting on the relationship between police culture and youth culture, including the leisure practices of adolescent girls, this article argues that the targeting of the 'coffee beat club' became a motif for the defence of an older imagined social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Gathering Storm, Winston S. Churchill claimed that during the 1930s British leaders were willfully blind to the German threat and failed to meet it by rearming. Accepting the Churchillian narrative, leading IR scholars regard British grand strategy during the 1930s as glaring example of strategic adjustment failure. This article reappraises British grand strategy during the 1930s and rejects both the Churchillian narrative, and the scholarly claims that Britain did not adjust its strategy to the German threat. In the 1930s, Britain did balance against Germany and focused on countering what policy makers perceived as the key threat facing Britain: its vulnerability to German air attack. Britain's grand strategic options were limited by external conditions and by domestic economic constraints. Neville Chamberlain, therefore, was playing a weak hand, and did the best that he could with the cards he was dealt. Britain's 1930s grand strategy is one of the historical cases most frequently used by IR scholars for theory testing. For that reason alone, it is important to get the history right. This is not the only reason, however. The 1930s have provided many of the concepts, images, and metaphors that have dominated the discourse about American foreign policy since World War II. Because scholarship about the events of the 1930s shapes the discourse about real-world policy, getting the history right matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the propaganda ideas and plans that the British government put together in an attempt to coax neutral Eire into the Second World War, or at least to make Eire's neutrality as benevolent as possible. Britain's reputation in Eire, stemming particularly from the Irish Civil War, meant that conducting British propaganda in the country was a delicate task and had to be well judged. The article focuses on the work of John Betjeman, the British press attache in Dublin 1941-43, in trying to influence Irish thought. The article concludes that Betjeman was most successful in propaganda by word-of-mouth, personality and Anglo-Irish cultural links. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the diplomatic mission of United States Colonel Bonner Fellers to Cairo, Egypt in 1942 during World War II and the security breach that occurred with Fellers's communications back to the U.S. government in Washington, D.C. The author highlights the relationship between the British and American governments in the security issues that involved massive amounts of intelligence concerning British troops in Africa being leaked to the Axis countries, particularly Germany. The author also draws attention to the special nature of the relationship between the U.S. and British governments.

This analysis reviews the discussion behind Britain's recognition of Bangladesh as an independent state in February 1972. It concentrates on correspondence in the preceding six weeks between Whitehall and its diplomatic postings, particularly in the Commonwealth, and considers in detail the role of the Commonwealth Secretariat. Perceptions of recognition are first briefly discussed, followed by Bangladesh's historical background and the international security issues surrounding it. Government and Commonwealth Secretariat files are studied in detail. They show above all the influence on Government decision-making of diplomatic intelligence, in particular the importance of economic and political factors. Also revealed are London's concern for Pakistan's president, Zulfiquar Bhutto, its desire not to recognize alone and the attitude of the Commonwealth's Secretary General. The study suggests that recognition is a far more complex matter than the legal definition would imply and presents a compelling case for its further analysis in an historical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the debate surrounding the role played by private doctors in the treatment of heroin addiction in Britain during the 1980s. Whilst there were a number of problems connected with the treatment of addiction in private practice, this debate was something of a surface issue masking a deeper professional dispute. The involvement of general practitioners, whether in private or National Health Service practice, posed a threat to the recently established specialist status of psychiatrists working in the field. This came at a time when the specialist psychiatric approach to drug addition was increasingly being challenged by other non-medical agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mutual Aid, the practice by which Conservative constituency associations in safe seats regularly sent groups of party workers to nearby marginals, was widely presumed at the time to have been a contributory factor to consecutive Conservative General Election victories in the 1950s. Indeed, Mutual Aid is still a part of party electoral organisation today. However the practice has been subject to little detailed analysis, its effectiveness and contribution to Conservative electoral recovery simply taken for granted. It is the purpose of this article to examine the origin, operation and effectiveness of Mutual Aid in the marginal constituencies. Although the direct impact of Mutual Aid may always be impossible to prove beyond doubt in terms of victories won, it can be shown that the perception of its wider benefits guaranteed it a place in the party hierarchy's campaigning strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with Britain's political and territorial interests in the Antarctic in the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the signing of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Using in part the diaries of a Foreign Office advisor, Dr Brian Roberts, attention is given as to how successive British governments and their officials sustained a presence in the remote polar continent. Rival claimants in the form of Argentina and Chile made the task all the more difficult. Mapping and surveying were essential in maintaining British sovereignty even if the end results were at times disappointing. The article concludes by suggesting that the Antarctic Treaty, while important in promoting international scientific collaboration, did not manage to resolve the political and territorial disputes surrounding the Antarctic. Arguably, the 1982 Falklands War and its aftermath provided a vivid reminder that Britain's most southerly possessions still remain deeply contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European volunteer workers have received comparatively little attention in the history of British post-war immigration, with greater coverage given to, for example, demobilised members of the Polish Resettlement Corps. This paper is based upon oral history interviews with a group of European immigrants, predominantly European volunteer workers, and local Lancastrians who started work in the Lancashire cotton industry between 1946 and 1951, and examines perceptions of how they integrated into British life in a variety of domains. The paper emphasises that 'blending-in' was context-dependent, with a sense of being welcomed and fitting-in applying to certain domains and in certain situations but not necessarily in others. It argues that migration fosters particular cultural attitudes and practices amongst both migrants and hosts as social identities are produced and reproduced, changed and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the attempts of British central government to react to the perceived inadequacy of official economic statistics. A huge amount of work went into this project, the main aim of which was to speed up the production of statistics so that the economy could be analysed in more detail, and thus better managed. If this was to work, more data was required on the labour market, on productivity, on production, and on the interlinkages between those indicators. British official statistics clearly were more comprehensive and more detailed at the end of this period than they had been at the start. Even so, the effort was usually thought to have been a failure by the early 1970s. More detail took time to produce; it was difficult to recruit the necessary staff; successive administrative reorganizations also absorbed energies. The devolved informality of British government hampered the emergence of an overall picture. Businesses and trade unions resisted attempts to collect more data, especially when it showed them in an unflattering light. Above all, the elite, specialist, and technical nature of the reform process meant that very little political and popular pressure built up to force through further changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the establishment of a number of Anglo-American working groups at the Washington Conference of October 1957. Attitudes of U.S. and British officials toward the groups; Practical problems associated with the functioning of the groups; Implications of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for Anglo-American relations.

Considers interwar preparations to control prices and profits in Great Britain. Shift from a market economy to a planned wartime economy; Achievement of the cooperation of business and labor by maintaining the status quo; Nature of interwar government in Great Britain; Attitude towards intervention.