The year is 1900, and on a chilly February morning, a group of men in heavy woollen suits are deep in conversation in the Congregational Memorial Hall on Farringdon Street in London. Exasperated by the existing political parties, these grizzled trade unionists have come together to form a group of their own, the Labour Representation Committee. In the future, it will be better known by the name it adopts six years later — the Labour Party. Labour's rise was extraordinarily swift. In less than 25 years, it had overtaken the Liberals to become one of the two great forces in British politics. In 1924, Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a farm labourer and a housemaid, became its first prime minister.