ABSTRACT
The study of industrial supervision does not form an important chapter in the existing accounts of British economic development or the growth of industrial relations since the nineteenth century. Even if sociologists have emphasised the supervisor's role in contemporary production, the foreman remains a dark figure in the standard portraits of industrialisation. This is at least partly due to the fragmentary records left by both foremen and their employers, of lives ‘as full of incident, and even of romantic interest, as those of any class in the whole community’. (1) The failure of writers and novelists to share this enthusiasm for the workplace, or the fascination for the supervisor's social ascent, was criticised by one popular commentator in the interwar years as the unjust neglect of industry's key employees. (2)
