The booklet shown here was published by the Independent Labour Party in 1943 to mark its fiftieth anniversary. Appearing in wartime, it was necessarily restricted in scale, but still managed to pack a great deal, including nearly fifty illustrations, into its 60 A5 pages.

The membership of the ILP had been in decline since its decision to disaffiliate from the Labour Party in 1932, and overtures to return seven years later had been rebuffed. But the ILP’s broad opposition to the second world war had at least provided it with a constituency of support and point of differentiation with both the Labour and Communist parties, especially after 1941 when the CPGB reversed its own previous opposition to the war. So by the time of its jubilee, the party was enjoying a temporary reprieve from its downward path. Certainly, there was nothing in the booklet to suggest that the party was likely to become an ever-more marginal presence in British politics when the war came to an end.

An extract from the booklet reproduced in PDF format here looks back fifty years from 1943 to the ILP’s founding conference at the Labour Institute, Bradford on 13 and 14 January 1893. Click the front cover image to download it. Further images from the booklet are shown below.