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Some of the conditions which prompted the development of the United Kingdom's Socialist party (and some radical political movements) are explored in this quasi-biographical historical drama, which goes into the harsh life experienced by one woman who lived and worked in a Welsh coal mining town at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In the story, Gwen (Sue Roderick) marries a miner, who is killed in the mines. Death in the mines is common, and the mining companies were not in the habit of paying any kind of compensation to the dead miners' survivors. Desperate for money to survive with, she takes the gruesome job of preparing miner's corpses for burial. Despite a seemingly endless succession of difficulties, Gwen somehow survives to become (as seen at the beginning of the film) "the oldest woman in Great Britain," greeted by the Queen and celebrated in the press.