ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the three great partnerships which did so much from the 1890s onwards for the study of economic and social history – Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, J. L. le Breton Hammond and Barbara Hammond and G. D. H. Cole and Margaret I. Cole. The members of these partnerships all wrote extensively, persuasively and influentially on various topics of working-class history, but they were all from the middle classes, and, indeed, all but one from the upper strata of the middle class. 'Monotonous' and 'execrable', as well as 'plain' and 'wholesome', were the adjectives used by visitors to describe the food served at the Webbs' table, and their cold mutton became a by-word. Historians were therefore recruited almost entirely from the upper strata of the middle classes, because no one in the working classes possessed the necessary technical skills for pursuing historical research and writing history in the academic sense.
