Preston's unusualness was apparent before 1914. After this date it seems to conform much more to national trends, as Appendix C shows. Even so, electoral support for Labour in Preston went through distinct phases which were somewhat out of step with the rest of the country. Firstly, Labour did extremely well in the immediate post-war period. Elsewhere it was disorganised and did badly in the 1918 general election, but in Preston Tom Shaw headed the poll and the Conservatives performed worse than at any general election (apart from 1906) for over thirty years, while at the 1919 municipal elections Labour, almost without effort, became the leading force in municipal politics. Whereas before 1914 Labour had never won more than two seats on the Council at any one time, in 1919 it won six of the nine seats it contested, winning 52% of the vote in these wards. This so intimidated Labour's opponents that in the following year they did not put up candidates against Labour in seven seats.

Support for Labour in Preston fell back in the early 1920s, and in 1924 Labour won only one Council seat (see Appendix D). While Labour's loss of popularity was common throughout the country, in Preston it does seem to have had distinctive local causes. As we shall see this period coincided with the culmination of Labour's advocacy of patriarchal economistic politics, which was popular with many (especially men) in the post-war drive to remove women from their wartime employment.