The papers contained in MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/46-49 of the Fabian Colonial Bureau collection show the way in which the Bureau's organisation was used, first to assist the Labour Party during the war years in formulating its colonial policy for implementation after the war, later to attempt to preserve the original intention of that policy when the Party was in power, and lastly to provide a consistent and well-informed attack on the policy of the Conservative Party when in office, wherever it differed from that advocated by the Socialists. With the aid of the material it collected, the Bureau produced memoranda and background papers for the consideration of the National Executive Council and the Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions, and also supplied information and guidance on policy to Members acting as a pressure group in the House.

Some of the memoranda on policy filed in MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/46 were drawn up before the Bureau was formed, both by members of the Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions, among whom were founding members of the Bureau, and by various experts at its request. The majority of these papers were probably donated by the Chairman, Arthur Creech Jones, as a basis on which the work of the Bureau could be planned at the start. Some of the early memoranda analyse questions that were frequently raised in the House of Commons by Labour Members before the war, such as the administration of the sedition laws or the costs of appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Later memoranda show the way in which the thought of the Bureau was developing in the subjects it was examining: wartime colonial economic policy; the part played by the colonies during the war and their possible contribution to a peace settlement; post-war economic planning for the colonies; migration of populations; and mass education. Much of the thought in the general policy statements and investigations of specific problems was influenced by Britain's recognition, in passing the Development and Welfare Act of 1940, of her economic responsibility for development in the colonies. This tendency was also reinforced by the publication of the United States President's Fourth Point. The conclusion was that after the war it would be Britain's duty to invest heavily in colonial development projects to compensate for what the Socialists regarded as the government's former neglect. Little was written by the Bureau at this time about political development and constitutional change; memoranda on such subjects became more frequent in the late 1940s and early 1950s when, as the papers in MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/49 show, both Rita Hinden and Marjorie Nicholson were preparing pamphlets for the Bureau on constitutional advance and the communal problem. Some of the memoranda were intended to instruct, while others were intended to outline programmes for future activities.

The minutes in MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/46 record meetings of the Bureau specially devoted to policy formation; the reports are of those conferences, not all organised by the Fabians, which examined Britain's relations with the colonies and her place in international politics, especially after the publication of the Atlantic Charter.

As the Bureau developed and organisation became easier, it employed other techniques, such as study groups and the circulation of questionnaires both in this country and in the colonies, to assist policy formation. MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/47 holds two files containing copies of questionnaires circulated in 1954 and 1955, answers to them, and allied correspondence. MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/48 contains a number of official statements on policy that were examined and criticised by the Bureau. Often, criticism by a particular member of the Bureau was presented in typescript for consideration by the committee, and later published as an article in Venture or in extended form as a pamphlet.

Papers in MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/50-68 cover many aspects of development in the colonies and demonstrate the Bureau's concern with colonial economic affairs. The importance of some of the problems investigated was already recognised before 1939, and consequently some of the papers collected here date from before the formation of the Bureau. Other problems only became apparent subsequently, and in such instances the Bureau's papers provide a review of the subject from the beginning.

The Colonial Labour Advisory Committee, which had long been advocated by Labour Members in Supply Debates, was set up by the Colonial Office in 1942. In 1946, Rita Hinden was invited to serve on it, and MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/50 contains many of its memoranda issued between 1947 and 1950 on such familiar subjects as workmen's compensation legislation, statutory minimum wage regulations, migration, cost of living indices, housing, and labour conditions in the colonies. Earlier papers on many of the same subjects are filed in MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/62. The interest of the Bureau had been quickened by the publication in 1941 of a Colonial Office paper, 'Supervision of conditions under which labour is employed in the Colonial Empire'. Members of the Bureau produced a number of typed notes on points they considered should be investigated by the Colonial Labour Advisory Committee; they collected additional information on labour conditions in the colonies and eventually set up a labour sub-committee to keep the subject under review. Most of the papers filed in MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/50 resulted from this action.

The papers in MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/51-54 appear to have been gathered during the preparation of two pamphlets on the Colonial Development Corporation and the Overseas Food Corporation and a memorandum on Bulk-Purchasing and Long-Term Agreement. MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/55 contains papers that cover about fifty different subjects, ranging from general policy formation to problems of colonial visitors to the Festival of Britain; it provides an excellent example of the multifarious questions considered by the Bureau.

MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/56 holds papers concerned solely with mining. The Labour Party had always urged that exploitation of mineral resources should be for the benefit of that country's indigenous inhabitants and not for foreign investors. A few MPs, supported by the views of a number of Fabians who were not in the House and by the principles of the International Labour Conventions, had for many years kept an eye on all questions concerning mining rights, the recruitment of indigenous people for employment in the mines, migration, royalties, taxation, and dividends. When, in the immediate post-war years, the subject of nationalising the mineral resources of the whole Empire was considered, mining in the colonies attracted the interest of a wider section of people than those interested primarily in colonial affairs. The Bureau maintained a survey of all these subjects, and more than once approached the Colonial Office with suggestions and criticisms.

MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/61 contains a file of correspondence between the Bureau and political and industrial organisations in the United Kingdom – the Labour Party, Trades Union Congress (TUC), London Labour Party – as well as with John Hatch, Commonwealth Secretary to the Labour Party. A second file holds correspondence between the Bureau and international labour organisations. At the end of 1937, the TUC had established a Colonial Affairs Committee, and the correspondence is concerned with the organisation of labour in various countries, trade union enquiries sent to either body, publications, and meetings; some of the letters were addressed to the Bureau by Marjorie Nicholson after she had resigned as Secretary and joined the International Department of the TUC.

Papers concerned with the United Nations Organization, in MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/64, give a particularly clear picture of the relations between the officers of the Bureau and certain officials in New York; further correspondence between the same people appears in other sections of the collection, filed according to subject matter. The chief correspondent is Wilfrid Benson, Director of the Division of Non-Self-Governing Territories and thus a very important source of information to the committee. He had been well known to many of the leading Fabians before the war, when he worked for the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, and was one of the six who were present at the Bureau's first committee meeting in Oct 1940.

One of the problems that has been of increasing concern to the United Nations Organisation is that of production and equitable distribution of world food supplies. In 1939, a report was made to the Colonial Office by a committee appointed to investigate nutrition in the colonies. Between 1941 and 1945, the Fabian Colonial Bureau was active in investigating this matter (MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/65), although it was an extremely difficult period in which to obtain reliable information. Except for some copies of comments on the World Investment Commission Report, the contents of MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/66 deal with the political and social aspects of development; the former include the new legislature, the Labour Party's Charter of Freedom for Colonial Peoples, and developments in Malaya (Malaysia) and Singapore, East Africa, and the West Indies; questions of primarily social significance were the Kenya Students' Scholarship Fund, organisations for technical training, and the recruitment of officers for the Overseas Service.

Two of the files in MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/67 may well have been compiled by Rita Hinden in connection with her work as a member of the Colonial Economic and Development Council, for not only do they contain a number of the Council's memoranda written in 1948, some of its minutes, and notes on the Council by the Bureau and the Central Office of Information, but the rest of the papers deal with development schemes of many kinds and the allocation of money from the Colonial Development Fund.

The final box, MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 365/68, holds a collection of papers on education divided between two folders. The first contains minutes of the Colonial Office Advisory Committee on Education in the colonies, for the period from 1936 to 1939, when Creech Jones served on it; they were presumably donated by him. The other file is primarily devoted to the question of mass education which had been of vital interest to the Colonial Office towards the end the war when the difficulty was realised of reintegrating colonial forces into the life of their different regions. During the whole demobilisation period, this was a live issue, and in 1948 a Colonial Office Summer Conference was held in Cambridge to consider what had been discovered and achieved. The papers in folder 2 cover the period from 1944 to the end of the conference in 1948. Early in that year, Creech Jones sent his famous despatch on local government to the Officer Administering the Government of Nigeria, and the text of this, together with the conclusions of the 1947 summer school on the subject, which was appended, are also in the folder.