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.