When John Murphy is sentenced to six months hard labour in Perth Prison for fighting, his wife Annie is left to raise his children in poverty in the tenements of the crescent. She relies on a pittance from her jute mill wages and handouts from the Parish until her husband is released and tries to break the poverty trap by bare-knuckle fighting in the boxing booths and beer tents.

His hard drinking, hard-man, bare knuckle fighting style is reduced to that of 'kettle-biler' at home, like thousands of other men in Dundee who are out of work. Meanwhile, Westminster and the Whitehall war-rooms are booming, thanks to the growth of the British Empire and the realisation that gold and diamonds in South Africa are ready for the taking.

The 'Kettle-Bilers' are perfect fodder for the Black Watch recruiting sergeants in Dundee who are swamped with men eager to escape the grimy oppression of the jute mills or the dole. The Boer War takes them to the brink of life and death in a faraway land that the real people of Dundee had never heard of before the call to arms. Winston Churchill begins to write the history of the boer war and the British Empire or does he actually create it.

But what happens to the women left at home? Will the Dundonians ever return from the Boer War? Can the poverty-stricken, alcohol-fuelled, neglectful generation cycle ever be stopped? Find out all this and more in this heart-wrenching, gritty story of hardship, tragedy, hurt and violence, based on the author's true story of his Dundee family's origins.