Recently James Belich has argued that most of this is not evidence of an absence of class but rather of the relatively high status and standard of living of the working-class in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike in Britain at this time, working-class New Zealanders could regularly eat meat, own their own homes, and own horses (and later cars), while still being categorised as working-class. Until the advent of compulsory secondary education in the 1930s, class mobility was limited, although much less so than in Britain.