Set in the South Wales village of Skewen and its surrounds in the turbulent third and fourth decades of the 19th century, this novel provides a fascinating glimpse of the social upheaval of those times.
Fighting against odds Iestyn Bowen, a miner’s son, fulfils his ambition of becoming a marine engineer through employment from the age of eleven in a small shipbuilding yard on the River Neath. The owner, Thomas Price, comes to see him as a future son-in-law and welcomes Iestyn’s courtship of his daughter Megan.
His career and real affection for Megan, however, conflicts with his love of Mary Osborne, a girl from a Roman Catholic family, whose brother Robert is, like Mr Price’s clerk Gareth Williams (Iestyn’s friend and suitor to Iestyn’s sister Bronwen), an active leader of an embryo Worker’s Association. They are both also supporters of the Chartist movement and the ‘Rebeccas’ who are campaigning militantly against the tollgate charges.
More a victim of circumstance and the self-interest of others than his own failings, Iestyn becomes involved in a tollgate riot in which the tollkeeper is murdered. Eluding arrest he escapes aboard an outward steamship, originally built in Mr Price’s yard.
His hurried escape is aided by both Megan and Mary coming together to help. But who is the girl beside him on the ship as it leaves?
