[citation needed] In the times of austerity after the Second World War, Dickinson works hard to try to keep his failing agricultural implements factory going.

That night, Dickinson's solicitor and doctor advise him to use the situation as an opportunity to take a holiday and recommend to Miss Cooper that she return to work.

Finally, Stevens and Morris put up the deeds to their own homes, Palmer raises money on his insurance policy, and, after some grumbling, some of the other workers make up the required sum.

The Ministry of Labour and the British Employers Confederation argued that the film would damage management-employee relations, particularly in the light of renewed industrial unrest in early 1950.

[3][4] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "This salutory moral (though it will displease the more extremely left) is pleasantly conveyed, if without any great force.

The grubby little engineering works, with its dirt, untidiness and out-of-date planning, is staffed with solidly common-sensible, realistically humorous workers, whose reactions to each turn of the story ring amusingly and sometimes rather movingly true.

The actors (all excellent) play with a joyous lack of staginess; and if the direction is not entirely firm in its grasp of the whole, individual sequences are well and sensitively presented.

The photography combines most expertly the everyday tones called for by the subject, and the clarity and contrast necessary for full dramatic expression.

[6] A Mass-Observation survey at the time found that only 1/3 of the people who watched the film had intended to do so, with the majority of attendees doing so either out of habit [in attending the cinema] or because they had nothing better to do.