Peter Saunders meets his family. Agricultural labourers from Essex, Lincolnshire and the Scottish borders; hat-makers, pin-headers, shoemakers and coal miners from Gloucestershire; cotton spinners, weavers and piecers from the slums of industrial Lancashire; illiterate Irish peasants from County Cork; rag-pickers, charwomen, abandoned wives and prostitutes; soldiers who died in the Flanders mud and were never found; soldiers who made it home broken men; children sent to convalescent homes and old people dying in the workhouse. Reading their stories is like reading a potted history of the common people of these islands over the last three hundred years. These are the shadowy people who dug the coal that fuelled the industrial revolution; the people who wove and spun the yarn that clothed the world; the people who planted and harvested the crops that fed the cities; the people who fashioned our modern world. They were the unnamed, unrecorded heroes on whose shoulders we now perch.