Augustus Harper had been right and Edward’s arm had never fully recovered from Daniel Bell’s knife wound, but twelve months into their marriage he had been elected onto the local council and had become involved in various community projects, and was currently in the process of running for government on behalf of the Labour Party. He supported Ruby in the continuing fight for women’s rights in every walk of life, and the two of them ran a soup kitchen in the heart of Newcastle, which had become a lifesaver to some folk as the depression had worsened. Along with her two shops, Ruby had opened a clothing factory, employing local women who badly needed work due to family situations. They made good but cheap clothes for the less well off in the community, which were sold direct from the factory shop at the front of the premises.

When Ruby had moved a manageress into the flat above her original shop a few months after she and Edward had tied the knot, they’d purchased a small three-bedroomed house with a family-sized garden on one of the new housing estates that were springing up in Arthur’s Hill and Fenham, one of Newcastle’s fastest-growing suburbs. It was a modest dwelling compared to what they could have afforded, but they had decided that to be part of the local community they had to live among them and not in some grand ivory tower.

Times were still desperately hard for huge numbers of the north’s working class, and although the abolition of the dreaded workhouses in 1930 meant that a significant break with the odium of pauperism had begun, Ruby and Edward knew from their welfare work that some folk would prefer to slowly starve than ask for help. Through their contacts with the soup kitchen, they’d established a link with some of these families, and had set about quietly distributing food parcels, medical supplies and clothes and shoes for the bairns on a weekly basis.