Professor John Samuel Shepherd has been one of the leading historians of British Labour history and of the British Labour Party for more than thirty years. He was something of a late developer who felt that he had had to overcome the constraints of his working-class background to pursue his life-long involvement and interest in the labour movement and the Labour Party. It led him to produce, from his early sixties onwards, the major biography of George Lansbury (in 2004), a study of the first British Labour government (in 2006), and a definitive study of the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978/9 (in 2013), which preceded the fall of the James Callaghan Labour government and the enthronement of Margaret Thatcher’s destructive governments which attacked trade union and working-class representation.