The bulk of the material herein dates from the era of Federation, but the first section contains the files of the Northern Rhodesia Labour Party founded by Welensky in 1941. Various other files deal with Commonwealth-wide organisations and political parties in other Commonwealth countries. The arrangement of these papers is entirely artificial. Most were formerly contained in two bulging and disordered files described as 'NRLP 1943-46' and 'NRLP 1944-45', although the earliest papers date from 1941 and some from 1946 were filed in the '1944-45' file. Occasional items had found their way into the Federal-era filing system.