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This is a fictionalised social history starting in Victorian dockland London. A lighterman, Frederick Horsfall, who worked the docks from his barge, unloading ships of every sort of cargo coming into London for the great exhibition of 1851. A tough trade, living in tough conditions in one of the most poverty-stricken parts of East London.
It follows his children and grandchildren, who became Royal Marines, sailors and soldiers in the great war. It tells of their lives, loves and deaths through some of the most dramatic times in history.
The story then follows a ratcatcher, William Jennings from Great Bentley in Essex, his trade, his life and marriage and his son Ernest. Ernest who became a Metropolitan policeman, working his beat around the East London docks, supplementing his living by bullying and extorting from the opium dens, brothels and illegal drinking dens of Chinatown in Limehouse.
The third family, the Spiers family, started life in the village of Earl Shilton in Leicestershire, where they were forced to leave their home village to find work. They moved to Birmingham where life did not pan out as they hoped, so they continued their journey to London. Crossing paths while there with the Jennings and the Horsfall families.
Two of these families emigrated to the far-flung parts of the world. One family to Brisbane in Queensland Australia, the other to St. Louis in America.
The original letters and documents their descendants kept form the basis for the facts of this book, the dialogue and characteristics of the participants are purely fictional. The family dramas are interwoven with the historic global events occurring at the time.
