The majority of AFB's pre-war papers were lost when the Independent Labour Party headquarters were bombed during the Second World War, but a small number of early files, mainly dating from before 1950 (when AFB was elected as a Labour MP, following his break with the ILP some years before) were found when the archive was initially catalogued in 1995. These files were put into a separate series at that point, as the majority of AFB's papers dated from much later in his career. This arrangement was retained when the archive was recatalogued in 2023, with the exception of several files on the publication of AFB's correspondence with George Bernard Shaw, which have been placed in FEBR 7.