When Thomas Barnardo arrived in East London in 1866, his plan was to train at the London Hospital before sailing to China to work as a missionary. The conditions he found in the East End stopped him in his tracks. The unemployment, poverty, overcrowding, drinking and disease were bad enough, but seeing thousands of half-starved children living on the street broke his heart. Inside a year Dr Barnardo had oppened the ragged-school Hope Place and by 1870 the first of his homes was in operation.

Alec is a Jewish tailor working in the sweatshops of 1930s Whitechapel. He is weary of the stifling poverty and his Jewish bosses exploiting his labour. Rejecting the pull of Zionism, Alec instead chooses a unity that crosses racial and religious boundaries, finding his salvation in socialist politics and the arms of a gentile.