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This thesis seeks to explain how the Teach for America [TFA] organisation has precipitated consequential changes in American K-12 education. A large literature on education politics describes an inflexible system, riven with vested interests and therefore resistant to reform. Yet despite this oft-cited rigidity, consequential change has occurred in the last few decades and several recent studies have highlighted TFA's critical role in disrupting the traditional structures of the American public education system. In particular, TFA has fuelled the dramatic growth of alternative pathways into teaching as well as high-profile and rapidly expanding models of charter schooling. As elected and appointed officials and as leaders of prominent advocacy groups, TFA alumni have also been instrumental in the passage of choice and accountability reforms at the local, state, and federal level. To explain how TFA has acquired and exerted significant influence, I synthesise recent insights from the rational public administration and historical institutionalist literatures to develop and test, through process tracing, a model of 'institutional subversion'. 'Institutional subversion' describes a process whereby a group of programmatically-motivated agents progressively infiltrate a system and reform it from within. I argue that subversion enables concrete changes in policy systems that are resistant to top-down reform, owing to the dominance of vested interests and high degrees of agent discretion. Subversion exploits the fact that no matter how dominant they may be, system incumbents have limited information about other agents' capacities and preferences. Imperfect information means incumbent groups can be slow to recognise and mobilise against threats to the status quo posed by subversive action. In the meantime, subversive agents advance change by introducing innovations in structures and practices and capturing key decision-making posts within the system. If subversive challengers can amass sufficient power resources to resist incumbent reprisals, their legacy of change can endure. By conceiving of TFA as an agent of institutional subversion, we enhance our understanding of how recent changes in American education have come about. Extant explanations grounded in new forms of philanthropic intervention, neoliberal ideas, and variations in interest group power are essential pieces of the puzzle. But these explanations do not in themselves offer a complete account of why we have seen significant shifts in a sector traditionally characterised as highly intransigent. By placing agents sympathetic to reform at the heart of the education system, TFA provided a partial answer to the principal-agent problem that has plagued past attempts at top-down reform by philanthropists and policymakers alike. In accounting for one of the more spectacular instances of policy entrepreneurship in recent times, this thesis makes a novel contribution to the politics of education literature. Moreover, by paying careful attention to the interplay between structure and agency in new institutionalist theory, this thesis identifies and expounds a mode of institutional change that is generalisable to contexts well beyond American public education.

The aim of this research was to investigate the calibration of Sound Source Localisation (SSL) for robots using the adaptive filter model of the cerebellum and how this could be automatically adapted for multiple acoustic environments. The role of the cerebellum has mainly been identified in the context of motor control, and only in recent years has it been recognised that it has a wider role to play in the senses and cognition. The adaptive filter model of the cerebellum has been successfully applied to a number of robotics applications but so far none involving auditory sense. Multiple models frameworks such as MOdular Selection And Identification for Control (MOSAIC) have also been developed in the context of motor control, and this has been the inspiration for adaptation of audio calibration in multiple acoustic environments; again, application of this approach in the area of auditory sense is completely new. The thesis showed that it was possible to calibrate the output of an SSL algorithm using the adaptive filter model of the cerebellum, improving the performance compared to the uncalibrated SSL. Using an adaptation of the MOSAIC framework, and specifically using responsibility estimation, a system was developed that was able to select an appropriate set of cerebellar calibration models and to combine their outputs in proportion to how well each was able to calibrate, to improve the SSL estimate in multiple acoustic contexts, including novel contexts. The thesis also developed a responsibility predictor, also part of the MOSAIC framework, and this improved the robustness of the system to abrupt changes in context which could otherwise have resulted in a large performance error. Responsibility prediction also improved robustness to missing ground truth, which could occur in challenging environments where sensory feedback of ground truth may become impaired, which has not been addressed in the MOSAIC literature, adding to the novelty of the thesis. The utility of the so-called cerebellar chip has been further demonstrated through the development of a responsibility predictor that is based on the adaptive filter model of the cerebellum, rather than the more conventional function fitting neural network used in the literature. Lastly, it was demonstrated that the multiple cerebellar calibration architecture is capable of limited self-organising from a de-novo state, with a predetermined number of models. It was also demonstrated that the responsibility predictor could learn against its model after self-organisation, and to a limited extent, during self-organisation. The thesis addresses an important question of how a robot could improve its ability to listen in multiple, challenging acoustic environments, and recommends future work to develop this ability.

CONCLUSIONS: A central finding of the thesis is the need for a more nuanced approach to the generation and use of evidence. This is in contrast to imposing a quality criteria specific to one type of study design (e.g. experimental methods) or allowing for cherry-picked and unsystematic evidence use within policy making processes. It is also argued that the development of a knowledge translation tool, operationalised through an evaluation and monitoring framework from the start of an organisation's existence, may facilitate the collection of more appropriate, decision-relevant data linked to an underlying programme theory. This would enable a tangible understanding of how data is to be aggregated, highlight any knowledge gaps and facilitate data-linking to other intelligence sources. The inclusion of policy makers early in the research process may also enable the generation of problem-driven evidence and shape an understanding of how such evidence supports decision making.

This thesis explores the pivotal place of the 1885 Labouchère Amendment and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act in the discourse of homosexual regulation presented by 20th century homophile histories. These twin events of ‘criminalisation’ and ‘decriminalisation’ are revisited to explore how and why they occurred and how they came to assume such a central position in both academic and popular understanding. The thesis draws on two streams of evidence. The literature on homosexual regulation is examined to establish the claims that are made about Labouchère Amendment and the Sexual Offences Act and the place that they are accorded, and the relationship that is established between them, within widely accepted homophile histories of the UK. Alongside this, primary sources – in the form of parliamentary debates, government papers, newspaper archives, and biographies – are interrogated to unpick the motivations and intentions of those involved in these pieces of legislation and to position them within a wider historical context. The thesis argues that this literature on homosexual regulation contributed to and institutionalised a homophile discourse geared especially towards establishing a history of what specific events might mean for political imperatives of the time and future prospects of homosexual communities. I will suggest that this led to uncritical acceptance of particular interpretations of the Labouchère Amendment and the Sexual Offences Act, which were reproduced over time and thus established as ‘truths’ within academia, the gay community and the wider public. Whilst some authors have recently subsequently questioned the importance of the Labouchère Amendment in the process of criminalisation (e.g. Cocks, 2003:17) these accounts have by-passed this event altogether, rather than offering an alternative account for its passage. Consequently, they have not supplanted earlier public, academic and political understandings of Labouchère. Specifically they have not explored how earlier understandings informed the debate about decriminalisation which, as this thesis will show, was premised on these historical interpretations. More broadly, the thesis argues that the over-concentration and mistaken interpretation of the Labouchère Amendment, which has misinformed understandings of the SOA (1967), has prevented the development of a more thorough, genealogical analysis of simultaneous sexual regulation more generally. In turn, developing a combined analysis of heterosexual as well as homosexual regulation contributes to the critique of existing interpretations which uncritically present certain events as homophobic rather than part of a more encompassing punitive heteronormativity. Part One critiques homosexual regulation’s historiography, before exploring theoretical and methodological issues raised in my thesis. Part Two then questions the Labouchère Amendment’s status as a fundamental adjustment in homosexual regulation making private homosexual acts short of sodomy illegal for the first time (Weeks, 1977). I provide an alternative history showing all homosexual acts were previously punishable and show that Labouchère’s Amendment was not homophobic but a measure for the protection of male youths from sexual exploitation and as such part in keeping with the wider punitive heteronormativity. I achieve this through analysing the primary sources on Labouchère’s Amendment from that period alongside the genealogical contextualization provided by contemporaneous heterosexual regulation. This establishes the foundations for Part 3 to repeat this methodology in analysing the decriminalisation process, this questions the centrality ascribed to the 1957 Wolfenden Report. I establish that this concentration ignores that decriminalisation was a highly politicised and negotiated process reliant upon the same social and political transformations that also re-ordered heterosexual regulation. This radically changes the interpretation of the how and why decriminalisation occurred and what had been possible.

Streptococcus pneumoniae is a major cause of infection world wide, particularly in the very young and the elderly. Serotype specific anti-capsular antibodies are known to protect against infection. Studies of human antibodies specific for bacterial derived capsular polysaccharide antigens reveal these antibodies to be oligoclonal and of limited diversity. Relatively little is known of the molecular basis of the human immune response to pneumococcal polysaccharide. With new generation pneumococcal conjugate vaccines now becoming available a better understanding of the human immune response to Streptococcus pneumoniae is of increasing importance. This thesis describes an analysis of the immune response to two types of pneumococcal vaccine (plain polysaccharide and conjugate) in healthy adult volunteers. Using heterohybridoma technology to produce antigen specific monoclonal antibodies, the diversity of the immune response to pneumococcal polysaccharides was analysed and the molecular characteristics of the antibodies were correlated with in vitro functional activity. A high proportion of the hybridomas produced were isotype switched and highly mutated, inconsistent with their being derived from a primary immune response. Identical genes were used by a number of individuals to generate antibodies to a variety of serotypes and a common replacement mutation was identified in the CDR2 of two clones derived from different individuals and of different sero-specificity. Both ranked highly in the functional assays. Two of the hybridomas generated were isotype switch variants of the same clone and demonstrated marked differences in antibody avidity and opsonophagocytic activity. These data suggest that the antibody repertoire induced by pneumococcal vaccination in adults may be restricted in V gene use with common V genes and somatic mutations demonstrated to a variety of serotypes and shared between individuals. Mutation analysis demonstrates that the antibody repertoire of adult vaccinees may be dictated not by vaccine formulation but by immune history of each individual in whom priming for memory has already occurred.

We have shown that a number of molybdenum(II) and tungsten(II) complexes are capable of catalysing the C-C bond forming allylic substitution reaction with silyl enol ethers derived from dicarbonyls or simple ketones, aldehydes, and esters as nucleophiles under mild conditions (rt, 1-2 h). Mechanistic and stereochemical experiments are indicative of a Lewis-acid catalysed process. The research was successful in identifying an number of key catalyst structures and properties for our continued investigation into M(II) catalysts. We have subsequently developed a catalytic system based on the chemistry of 2,2'-bipyridine and 1,10-phenanthroline substituted molybdenum(II) complexes {M(CO3 NN(SnCl3) Cl}. These complexes have promoted allylic substitution reactions with cinammyl derived allylic substrates with high levels of regioselectivity, the effect of the ligand, choice of solvent and steric congestion of the nucleophile have been investigated. The above investigation has lead to the development of chiral catalysts for the asymmetric allylic substitution reaction with modest enantioselectivity. Finally, we have prepared and characterised (including X-ray crystal structures) a pair of chiral 2,2'-bipyridyl ligands of C2-symmetry with the aim of introducing complementary chiral environments around a bound metal. These chiral ligands are currently being screened in our laboratory for asymmetric molybdenum catalysed allylic substitution reactions.

Neuropsychological assessment has long been associated with epilepsy surgery and continues to play an important role in the presurgical evaluation of candidates for temporal lobectomy. However, material specific memory deficits are not invariably found in pre- or postoperative surgical candidates. The literature suggests that a number of factors may interact with the side of seizure focus and/or surgery in shaping the nature of the associated neuropsychological deficit. The heterogeneity in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) cases is clearly demonstrated by the findings from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) studies that enable the in vivo identification and quantification of a number of pathologies associated with TLE. The aim of the research presented in this thesis was to explore the factors associated with variable memory test performance in pre- and postoperative TLE patients with the ultimate aim of improving clinical neuropsychological practise both in terms of presurgical localisation and the prediction of postoperative memory decline. Five studies form the main body of the thesis. In the first the development of a new test of non verbal memory is described. The findings suggest that the test may be a useful clinical tool in the presurgical assessment of TLE patients. The second study employed a multivariate approach to examine the relationship between the extent and laterality of hippocampal pathology and memory dysfunction. The results suggest that chronological age and age of onset of habitual epilepsy interact with the laterality and extent of pathology in patients with hippocampal sclerosis in determining the nature and the extent of the associated memory deficits. The third study explored these relationships further by examining the correlations between quantitative MRI measures of hippocampal pathology and functional measures from the intracarotid amobarbital procedure (IAP). MRI measures of structural asymmetry were significantly correlated with the IAP measure of functional asymmetry supporting the role of the IAP in lateralising temporal lobe dysfunction. The fourth study examined the relationship between quantitative histology and pre- and postoperative memory function. Postoperative decline in verbal recall was associated with the excision of a relatively intact left hippocampus. The excision of a relatively intact right hippocampus was associated with a postoperative decline in non verbal recall. The final study examined the power of preoperative MRI measures, neuropsychological test profiles and demographic and epilepsy related variables in predicting postoperative memory decline. Approximately one third of the patients demonstrated a significant postoperative decline on each memory task. Different patients deteriorated on each task and the decline was task specific for many of them. A high level of preoperative function was a significant risk factor for every task. The underlying pathology, side of surgery and epilepsy and demographic factors were also associated with decline on many of the indices. The clinical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Existing information systems used by contractors and subcontractors are found in surveys to be flawed in modelling the requirements for control of production time and cost. Structured systems development is carried out to devise models based on data flow diagrams that represent the practice of project planning, monitoring and control. A case study on information systems used by a design and build organisation is included. Prototyping is recommended to further the development of information systems. Criteria are developed for concept models of building project information. Design and build procurement methods that allow the contractor to prepare data are considered, where information can be coordinated. Data coding and phraseology are developed in relation to activity-based schedules and a work breakdown structure. The use of a coding system is illustrated by a case study and criteria for coding system and work breakdown requirements given. Master Lists for activity coding are tested on site managers. The monitoring and integration of both planning and job cost accounting is shown in a case study and criteria given for control in relation to integration. Main contractor requirements are considered, in relation to accounting, valuation and cost value reconciliation. A project case study compares valuations based on programme progress with those of the surveyor. The use of computer systems is reviewed for project and production control. Directly employed resource and subcontract requirements for integration are analysed and a case study develops site based weekly time and cost control. Proposed systems are designed for main and subcontractor control and illustrated by data flow diagrams. The contributions made to the knowledge of the subject are: (i) An activity coding system that combines and rationalises existing systems. (ii) A set of criteria for the analysis of coding systems and for project control models that are unique. (iii) Models developed for main contractor control and for subcontracted or directly employed resource control, based on activity descriptions which are in advance of existing systems.

Sensitive radioimmunoassays have been developed to enable the measurement of testosterone, androstenedione, dihydrotestosterone and Cortisol in human saliva. The relatienships between the concentration of salivary steroid and the unbound and total plasma concentrations in normal subjects and patients with endocrine disorders have been examined, and the factors affecting androgen concentrations in saliva have been investigated. The applications of salivary androgen measurements to physiological and pathological studies have been evaluated. There were highly significant correlations between the concentration of steroid in saliva and the concentration of unbound hormone in matched samples collected from normal women, women with clinical signs of hyperandrogenism and antiandrogen treated women. A good correlation was observed between the concentration of testosterone in saliva and the concentration not bound to sex hormone binding globulin in plasma.

Schwann cells are the principal myelinating glial cells of the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS) that insulate neuronal axons with a lipid-rich myelin sheath. Defects of the myelin sheath can impair nerve conduction and are associated with various developmental and demyelinating diseases, including those involving Schwann cell pathobiology that lead to weakness, paralysis and death in severe cases. Lethal Congenital Contracture Syndrome 9 (LCCS9) is an example in which myelination of the PNS is defective as a result of a missense mutation in ADGRG6, which encodes the adhesion G protein-coupled receptor G6 (ADGRG6, formerly GPR126) with conserved roles in Schwann cell maturation. adgrg6 is expressed in zebrafish and has conserved regulatory roles in myelination of the PNS and additional roles in semicircular canal formation in the inner ear. As part of an ongoing drug-screening project, I set out to identify small molecules that are potent and specific modulators of the Adgrg6 signalling pathway, using zebrafish larvae as a whole-animal screening platform due to their amenability for high-throughput drug screening and gene expression analysis by whole-mount in situ hybridisation. In the current work, I first characterised the peripheral myelination phenotype in hypomorphic adgrg6tb233c mutant larvae, before optimising pharmacological conditions for a screening assay using myelin basic protein (mbp) mRNA expression in the PNS as a transcriptional readout of Adgrg6 pathway activity. We previously identified candidate pathway modulators from the Spectrum and Tocris compound libraries, using otic versican b (vcanb) mRNA expression in a primary screen for phenotypic rescue of adgrg6 hypomorphic mutants, before testing hits on a counter-screening mbp assay. I have similarly screened the Sigma LOPAC library of 1280 pharmacologically active compounds. This collection contains 685 compounds not represented in our previous screens, of which 275 are structurally diverse from any compounds we have previously tested. The LOPAC screen has identified 42 hit compounds that can downregulate vcanb in otic tissue, 17 of which also restore mbp expression around the posterior lateral line ganglion of adgrg6 hypomorphic mutant larvae. Hit compounds include classes of molecules identified previously, including dihydropyridines, together with some new candidate modulators of the Adgrg6 signalling pathway; those that are ineffective at rescuing the otic phenotype in a truncating mutant allele are likely to interact directly with the Adgrg6 receptor. Preliminary cAMP assays in HEK293 cells failed to illustrate potential agonistic effects of candidate compounds including, ivermectin and ebastine from the LOPAC library. However, testing ADGRG1 antagonists, including dihydromunduletone (DHM), revealed potential antagonism towards the zebrafish Adgrg6 receptor. Moreover, preliminary work in zebrafish revealed that wild-type larvae could somewhat phenocopy adgrg6 hypomorphic mutants following DHM injection into the larval ear. Further work is necessary to confirm observations in this study; however, the discovery of Adgrg6 compound modulators will provide useful tools to modulate the receptor's pathway activity, with the potential to give additional insights into its underlying mechanism of action. Compounds could also hold potential for therapeutic use against demyelinating or ADGRG6-linked human diseases.

Many patients undergoing high-risk major surgery suffer complications. Previous studies have shown that patients with low IgM Endotoxin Core Antibodies (EndoCAb) are more likely to have a complication, for relatively unknown reasons. Studying EndoCAb directly is difficult as it is a polyclonal group of antibodies. This thesis explored the relationship between EndoCAb and different measures of outcome using samples from previously conducted clinical trials and a series of basic laboratory studies. A pilot human volunteer study was conducted to try to improve ways of assessing the response to an endotoxin challenge. An observational study on adults undergoing 1st time Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting was conducted using samples from a previous trial to see if the association between outcome and low EndoCAb IgM extended to this comparatively low-risk group and to examine whether this was clearly mediated by an exaggerated inflammatory response. Patients with low EndoCAb IgM had more complications, but had less interleukin-6 at 6 hours. To assess the relationship between low EndoCAb IgM and other antibodies a series of studies was conducted to examine the hypothesis that EndoCAb IgM is part of a wider ‘natural IgM antibody group’. Blood donors with low EndoCAb IgM had lower concentrations of the ‘natural IgM antibodies’. Furthermore, EndoCAb IgM and the ‘natural IgM antibody group’ had similar temporal patterns and were present at low concentrations in some umbilical cord blood. To further understand the clinical relevance of EndoCAb, the association between EndoCAb and the systemic inflammatory response syndrome was retrospectively measured in critically ill children undergoing another clinical trial. Low EndoCAb IgG was associated with early development of the systemic inflammatory response syndrome. The difficulty in determining which factors affect the response to an inflammatory challenge led me to develop a new low-dose endotoxin human volunteer model: one in which there is the largest range of change, variability or dispersion in inflammatory markers.

This thesis examines the critical reception of the novels of Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941) and Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) as part of a 'feminine middlebrow'. They are frequently read as offering merely light entertainment and an implicit endorsement of a conservative status quo, and I argue that this is because their depiction of the pain of life and their challenges to the status quo are concealed by their use of comedy and irony. My analysis of the use of comedy offers a new understanding of these novels. Utilising Freud's theory of 'joke-work' I demonstrate that the sharing of jokes requires shared attitudes and repressions as well as shared knowledge; what Freud terms 'psychical accord'. These comedic texts, therefore, speak to a very specific community of readers, in ways that appear to elude those critics who would dismiss the novels as limited or trivial. The imagined reader of these novels is an educated, middle-class woman, and through my close reading of selected novels by von Arnim and Taylor I detail the layers of intertextuality, comedy and irony that she is expected to be able to understand and reconstruct. These novels are innovative in form. They self-consciously play with the romance and romantic comedy genres, and with specific 19th century narratives, especially those of Jane Austen and the Brontes. They utilise comedy to address profoundly serious subjects, and in the case of von Arnim's Vera (1921), innovatively synthesize comedy and horror. They build complex webs of irony that can be resistant to interpretation, particularly in Taylor's Palladian (1946), which meditates on the meaning and value of fiction. My analysis of this innovation challenges the perception of these middlebrow novels as straightforwardly realist, and shows them to be not merely light entertainment, but painfully acute commentaries on the cruel realities of domestic life, especially for women.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between the New Left and modernisation, and to suggest that modernisation provides a powerful means of understanding the underlying dynamics of Britain's history in the 1960s. This relationship is understood in terms of a politics of space. The New Left is defined broadly for this purpose as a movement emerging from the dislocating experiences of social, cultural and physical mobility in the postwar period. What is termed the 'modernisation project' is more expansive than the technological and scientific modernisation espoused by Harold Wilson in the early 1960s and is understood to address these new, politicized forms of mobility. Whilst one element of this Politics of dislocation and mobility was a concern about affluence and new forms of cultural consumption, another was concerned with the cultural and geographical dislocation of the upwardly-mobile (sometimes thought of in the language of the 'scholarship boy, ' but with the growth of the student population also associated with the notion of a counterculture). The significance of an enlarged and dislocated intelligentsia is explored through the example of British Pop theory, the approach of which was to engage positively with popular culture, emphasising the value of mass-produced cultural forms which had the qualities of rawness and vitality on the one hand, and expendability on the other. British Pop theory employed pop to explore an alternative historical approach to working class culture but also suggested a different approach to upward-mobility. Contested geographies are explored through the example of New Left attitudes towards suburbia, megalopolis and the cultural geography of the North- South divide. 1968 is explored as the moment when the New Left engaged in a particular form of spatial politics: certain types of space were valued for their psychological characteristics, their sociological inaccessibility to the manipulative power of capitalism, and their capacity to liberate the subject from new forms of alienation. The spaces of New Left protest in 1968 are then compared to other examples of radical space based on radical architecture theory. The politics of the barricade are compared to the politics of indeterminacy.

This doctoral thesis looks at Labour politics and society in South Yorkshire between the start of the Second World War in September 1939 and the fall from office of the Attlee Labour Government in October 1951. While it accepts the predominating effects of national and international factors in providing challenges which Labour councils and local Labour Parties had to find solutions to - such as the effects of the Sheffield Blitz in 1940 and the need to re-plan Sheffield and the maintaining of the organisational existence of Labour Parties during the Second World War - it nevertheless examines those 'micro-historical' factors which made for the local diversity of the party in South Yorkshire. It tries to create a holistic and rounded portrait of the local Labour movement based mainly on fragmentary archival and newspaper evidence and examines current historical debates for local relevance such as whether a post-war consensus actually existed, whether popular political attitudes were radical or conservative and, whether such popular attitudes favoured or disfavoured Labour. It also looks at Marxist debates over the concept of 'Labourism' and whether Labour was narrowly culturally determined or whether other factors were equally important. Chapter One introduces the thesis. Chapter Two examines the fears over the post-war industrial future of Sheffield which took place during the Second World War within the City Council and between it and organisations like the trade unions and the Chamber of Commerce. It also looks at City Council debates over the proposed post-war regionalisation of local government and how that was prevented by a united council. This shows that the centralising tendencies of the London government could be resisted by the peripheries and that such tendencies were not inevitable. Chapter Three examines town planning in Sheffield during the Second World War after the Blitz in December 1940 provided an opportunity to create a more modem, better planned and less ugly city. The planning process is examined and the secrecy of the City Council noted at a time when the country was fighting to defend an open and democratic society from the Nazis. Chapter Three also looks at the wartime context of the acute post-war housing crisis. Chapter Four looks at the wartime Labour Party in South Yorkshire, its ebb in membership prior to 1942 and its resurgence after that date ending with an examination of the 1945 General Election in Sheffield. Chapter Five looks at local government between 1945 and 1951, examining the factors which prevented the reform of the local structure of local government, the effect on Sheffield and Rotherham Councils of the nationalisation of electricity, gas and local authority hospitals, and the attempts to implement the Butler Education Act of 1944 in South Yorkshire. Chapter Six looks at the attempts to implement the 1945 Collie town plan for Sheffield and the reasons for the lack of progress as well as at the contrasting housing records of Sheffield and Rotherham Councils. It attempts to account for the latter's better record when compared with the former. Chapter Seven looks the ideology and cultural determinants of the Labour Party in South Yorkshire between 1945 and 1951. It also examines Labour organisation noting the essential role of women as unpaid voluntary labour and contrasting it with their limited entry to local political office. Finally it looks at and comments on the municipal and general election results in Sheffield of the Labour Party between 1945 and 1951. Chapter Eight provides a conclusion.

The object of the thesis was to build a portrait of a local peace movement in order to contrast and compare it with existing descriptions of the peace movement written from a national perspective. The Sheffield Peace Movement is examined from the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War to the disestablishment and reformation of the Sheffield Trades and Labour Council in 1940 as a result of its support for the anti-war line taken by the Communist Party of Great Britain. The peace movement is treated holistically. Political, religious and other organisations associated with it are discussed alongside groups specifically devoted to the issues of peace. These various strands are followed through from the impulse to unity which existed after the successful operation of the Peace Ballot, through the fundamental division between pacifist and pacificist outlooks which began with the War in Abyssinia, to the final split of the movement when its large pacificist majority accepted the necessity for war with Germany. The character of local peace movements, it is suggested, depended very much on the political, social and economic context in which they flourished. The history of the Sheffield movement is characterised by competition between three groups for its leadership. The Labour Party dominated its political relationships but is scarcely to be understood without reference to Communistinspired efforts to form a Popular Front of socialist and liberal groups. The Anglican Church leadership provided a strand of pacificism difficult to distinguish from defencism but nevertheless crucial to the position of the majority of the movement at the outbreak of war, while Nonconformism dominated the city's pacifism. Despite the strength of both these party political and religious influences, however, the League of Nations Union led the Sheffield movement during two key periods. The growth of the pacificist consensus, which at a national level saw the formation of a coalition spanning both right and left of British politics, is a stronger theme in Sheffield than the move of the minority pacifist wing into absolutism. The impact of a new "realism" on the "utopian" theories of the first decade and a half after the Great War is generally to be found in the move from the quasi-pacifism of the early thirties, which found expression on the Left in Sheffield in the policy of working-class war-resistance, to the rather crude version of League of Nations inspired Collective Security embodied in the mutual defence pacts and guarantees sought by Britain after March 1939. The ideological complexion of Sheffield's Left-wing and its importance in the deliberations of the Sheffield Trades and Labour Council ensured that, overlaying the general move towards pacificism, were a number of specific objections to aspects of the "realist" policies espoused by the national Labour leadership rooted in Communist Party policy and opposition to Chamberlain's National Government. The superficial similarities between communist objections to specific aspects of war preparations and the policies of the pacifist rump of the peace movement gave the impression that Sheffield was a centre of opposition to the war. The fundamental division between the pacificist and pacifist approaches ensured. however, that these two groups, the only remaining anti-war elements of the Sheffield movement after October 1939, never entered a formal alliance. The Communist Left remained wedded to interaction with working class groups while the remaining pacifists became isolated and increasingly quietist under the relentless pressure of the pro-war majority including their former pacificist colleagues in the peace movement.