This book traces the Craddock family of eighteenth century agricultural labourers in the Northamptonshire village of Cranford to the market town of Kettering. There Sabina Craddock’s illegitimate children and her father’s infirmity condemned the family to the workhouse until lace and stay making enabled an escape to a poor area of the town. Employment on the railway took Sabina’s son, Joseph, to Sheffield where he married into a family with an even darker past. After rising through the ranks to express engine driver, Joseph was eventually able to purchase two properties in Sheffield. Following active service in the Great War Joseph’s son, Ernest, took over his father-in-law’s coal merchant business which he ran through the dark days of the Second World War. In the post war years, Ernest’s sons, Stanley and Peter, pursued careers in school teaching and in industry respectively.