Millworker Chris Hawthorn and his wife are shocked to discover that their daughter Fanny did not, after all, spend her holiday weekend in Blackpool with her friend Mary. Instead, she spent it in Wales with Alan Jeffcote, son of the owner of the mill where she and her father are both employed. And in 1912, when the play is set, there was only one solution for young men and women who spent weekends together without troubling to get married first. But the conventional morals and manners of a North of England mill town are rudely upset by the behaviour of a single young lady with ideas about women and about life far ahead of their time.