London, 1912. A man who runs a small shop may get drunk too much. And he may not have been the best father in the world. In fact, his 35-year-old son has proved to be worthless. Can't keep a job. Always borrowing money from his father and not paying it back. But Joe Saunders is going to do right by his son just this once: he's not going to lend him any more money. The boy will have to get it on his own. The trouble is, Sam Saunders needs the money to persuade a cheap showgirl to run off with him. And he'll do anything to get it. Meanwhile, an old friend pays Joe a late-night visit.

In the early 1900s, a bull terrier living on the streets of the Bowery rises from a street-tough engaging in dogfights to pedigreed show dog among the upper crust. All the while, he has two ambitions--to be reunited with his mother and to get even with his father who deserted her.

he wealthiest man in the world, John P. Merrick, is a private person who likes to stay anonymous. One of his many assets, and a minor one at that, is Neeley's Department Store. There is labor unrest at the store, most of the employees' anger directed at Merrick, who they hang in effigy outside the store despite not knowing what he looks like. Merrick, not happy at what he sees going on, decides to go undercover working at the store to mete out the rabble-rousers. Undercover as Thomas Higgins, Merrick gets assigned as a sales clerk in the shoe department, where he is taken under the caring wing of his colleague Mary Jones, who sees in Higgins a poor man needing the guidance of friends. One of those other friends is Elizabeth Ellis, who Mary sees as a possible "Mrs. Higgins". Mary's boyfriend is Joe O'Brien, the chief organizer of the employees, four hundred of whom are following Joe in the charge against the store and Merrick. At the store, Merrick not only wants the list of the four hundred, but also wants to change those things he doesn't like at the store, chief amongst those being his shoe department section manager, Mr. Hooper. But as Higgins, Merrick also begins to see things a little differently, specifically from an employee's point of view.

It is pouring with rain at one minute to midnight on Friday the thirteenth, and the driver of a London bus is peering through his blurred windscreen as his vehicle sails down an empty road. Suddenly, lightning strikes, and a vast crane above topples into the path of the oncoming bus... Then Big Ben begins to wind backwards. Time recedes. And we discover the lives of all the passengers and the events that brought them to that late-night bus journey, from the con-man with a hundred-pound cheque to the businessman's distraught and elderly wife. Time flows on, inevitably, to the crash -- and past it, as some live and some die.