This is not so much a conclusion as a ‘cherry picking’ from the preceding chapters. My main purpose is to suggest ways of exploiting this exposition on the emblems. The wealth of material presented here has many ramifications for research across disciplines and subject specialisms. In the introduction I gave a skeletal outline of the implications of this study for labour historians, art historians, classicists, Marxists and political activists on the Left (recognizing that our readership may have multiple identities as academics and practitioners).

Annie Ravenhill-Johnson's insights challenge some long-held assumptions about the artistic provenance of labour movement imagery, its meaning and significance. Her findings compel us to ask pertinent questions about a working class with a consciousness coloured by imperialist ideology, a class rightly claiming entitlement to an ‘elite’ culture but also corrupted by it, and to address the tensions between revolutionary and revisionist trends that continue to play out in the trade union movement today.

Waudby's carpenters with their bowler hats and Sharples's respectable and peaceable blacksmith espousing middle-class values were never going to change the world, but at least in the earlier emblems the worker was shown with educational aspirations and they displayed their pride in mastering the skills needed for a new industrial and technological age.