The information which has been obtained on the education of steel and hosiery manufacturers is far from complete. In the case of the steel industry it has been culled from obituaries and biographical dictionaries. For this reason it may, at least in part, reflect the prestige which families in the industry attached to particular schools. Some of the men whose obituaries tell us nothing about their education may have gone to state schools.

Details on education have been obtained for little more than half the men in the steel samples. It is impossible therefore to give reliable figures for the proportion in each group who had, say, a secondary school education, or who went only to primary schools. The figures should be regarded as saying something about the relative importance of various types of schools in the education of future steel manufacturers, not as an approximation of the level of education achieved by the men in each sample. The percentages given in chapter II, section 3, are stated as proportions of the total number of men in each period, not of the smaller sample about whom educational details are known, and may therefore be regarded as the minimum proportion of manufacturers in each period who attended the type of school described.