In 1923, an Act of Parliament gave all British men the vote, and opened the door for a radically different sort of government: men from working-class backgrounds who had never before occupied the corridors of power at Westminster. Who were these ‘wild men’? Ramsay MacDonald, their leader and Labour’s first Prime Minster, was the illegitimate son of a Scottish farm labourer; Arthur Henderson was a Scottish iron moulder; J. H.Thomas, a Welsh railwayman; John Wheatley, an Irish-born miner and publican; and William Adamson, a Fife coal miner.