all accounts she was beautiful and good, and loved her husband with a passion. By Victorian standards the family was small: after seven years of marriage Eliza gave birth to a daughter who died four hours later, of ‘imperfect respiration’ according to the death certificate. And they never had another child between them, but they adopted a great niece, Nellie, and having only the one child to look after gave Eliza the time to be a support to her husband and the campaign, a fact that Plimsoll acknowledged in his speeches, and which was also recognised by working men and by sailors in Sheffield and also, on the 16th August 1876, at the North Western Hotel in Liverpool where a special presentation was made to Eliza after whichher, the press never asked her any questions herself, such was the climate of the time, so her voice and thoughts are known only as reported by others which was sad.

So how did Samuel and Eliza come to befriend the sailors? Plimsoll was a landlubber, and there were those who made fun of his lack of nautical experience: a spoof of his writing in Punch magazine in later life had him refer to the Cinque Port of Newport Pagnell, with its gay harbours thronged with sailors, and put into his mouth fake nautical expressions like ‘avast heaving’. He was in fact a coal merchant, and eventually an MP with a landlocked constituency, Derby.

He was born in Bristol, one of 12 children of an excise man, born into a