He becomes romantically involved with a girl on his street, Helen, whom he gets pregnant; this forces them to marry, despite the fact that Harry now not only is unemployed but also has been taken off the dole by the means test.

Sally Hardcastle, his older sister, falls in love with a doomed socialist agitator, Larry Meath, and suffers the unwelcome attention of the local illicit bookmaker, Sam Grundy.

The march itself was met with violent police resistance; in the book, Larry Meath dies as a result of blows to the head from a policeman's truncheon.

Greenwood said he had "tried to show what life means to a young man living under the shadow of the dole, the tragedy of a lost generation who are denied consummation, in decency, of the natural hopes and desires of youth."

"[3] Love on the Dole drew the British public's attention to a social problem in the United Kingdom in a similar way that Look Back in Anger (1956), Cathy Come Home (1966) or Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) would do for future generations (although its style is closer to 1915's Hobson's Choice).

The historian Stephen Constantine attributed the impact of Love on the Dole to the way it moved the mostly middle-class audiences without blaming them[4] – Gow said he "aimed to touch the heart".

[5] In 1967 the play was adapted for Granada Television by John Finch, with a cast including George A. Cooper, Martin Shaw, Malcolm Tierney, and Anne Stallybrass as Sally Hardcastle.