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THE 1980'S SAW THE RISE OF ENGLISH LOCAL GOVERNMENTS WHERE HIGHLY POLITICIZED PARTY GROUPS WERE FORCED TO COMPROMISE THEIR POLITICAL PROGRAMS IN ORDER TO ATTAIN A SHARE OF POWER. BETWEEN 1985 AND 1989, HALF OF THE ENGLISH COUNTY COUNCILS WERE "HUNG." IN DEVON, FOUR DISTINCT POLITICAL GROUPS VIED FOR CONTROL. THIS STUDY ANALYZES THE PROCESS OF ADMINISTRATIVE FORMATION, MAINTENANCE, AND BREAKDOWN IN DEVON. WHILE POLICY AFFINITY WAS A CRUCIAL FACTOR IN THE FORMATION OF ADMINISTRATIONS IN DEVON, THE INITIAL DISTRIBUTION OF OFFICE PORTFOLIOS PLAYED A CRITICAL ROLE IN THE LATER DEMISE OF THE COOPERATION BETWEEN THE ALLIANCE AND THE LABOR PARTY. THIS STUDY HIGHLIGHTS THE IMPORTANCE OF SUCH FACTORS AS HISTORY, PERSONAL RELATIONS, INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURES, AND GEOGRAPHY TO THE FORMATION AND MAINTENANCE OF POLITICAL AGREEMENTS.

Rural areas have generally been ignored in recent studies of the General Strike of 3–12 May 1926 on the implicit assumption that its impact in such areas would be negligible. To see if this assumption is correct this article examines the course of the strike in Devon and reaction to it. The likelihood of militant action in Devon in part depended upon the structure of the occupied population. In 1921 16 per cent of the occupied population of Devon County and the County Boroughs was in agriculture, and this rises to 25 per cent if we take the administrative county alone. In Exeter 49 per cent of the occupied population was in commerce, the professions, public administration, defence and personal service; in Plymouth the percentage for this group was 52 per cent. Consequently even the industrial areas were likely to be relatively weakly organised. Once out of the County Boroughs the industrial population, apart from a concentration of railwaymen at Newton Abbot, was so scattered as to make organisation and co-ordination difficult. There was no tradition of militancy in the county.

The lunatic asylum remains one of the most remarkable institutional

monuments of the modern world, dominating the social landscape of
Victorian Britain and exercising a powerful attraction for social historians

of medicine, an attraction almost as great as the spectre of the madhouse

for contemporary novelists. Our image of the Victorian asylum is still

pervaded to a surprising degree by the gloomy spectacle of the total
institution presented by Michel Foucault, though it has been modified by

a whole range of institutional and philosophical accounts undertaken in

the past three decades. Pioneering studies by researchers such as Andrew

Scull have illuminated not only the power exercised by the new asylum
superintendents, armed with medical discourses of moral treatment and
the early promise of curability, but also the continuing dominance of the

'mad doctors' in the sombre years of neo-Darwinian pessimism
and
eugenics doctrines. More recent contributions to the now enormous
literature on the social history of insanity have shifted the focus of

attention from earlier concerns with charting the rise of the asylum and

the elaboration of medical discourses under the psychiatric gaze of
physicians to a detailed reconstruction of the social environment of the

asylum and especially to the interplay between familial circumstances and

the way institutions responded to the insane. Such concerns were also
clearly evident in important earlier studies by Walton, Scull, Digby and

others, which drew on fundamental work by Anderson on the changing
role of the family during industrialization. These scholars drew attention

to the importance of family and kinship relations in the negotiation of
a
lunatic's passage to the Victorian asylum, as well as the role of
wider
forces of economic change, population growth and migration in shaping
the environment in which decisions about the care of the mad were made.