ABSTRACT
On November 11, 1918, the city of Manchester celebrated the end of more than four years of bitter and brutal conflict. A day in which hundreds of thousands of Mancunians cheered, reflected, and grieved alone or in small groups merged into a night of joyous and raucous festivities across the city, the country, and swaths of exhausted Europe. With the guns on the Western Front barely silent, the wartime government called a general election for December. The presence of so many soldiers in uniform led some to call this a "Khaki Election", while others termed it the "Coupon Election" after the slips of paper given to candidates supported by the Coalition. Labour's message of social equality found literally tens of thousands of listeners as troops began to make their way back to Manchester in the months after the election. In Manchester, the election mirrored some of the broader trends in postwar British politics.
