I don't remember now if I got the sixpence - probably not, because sixpence was as hard to come by in the depression years of the thirties as it had been in 1889.

Three doors down from our house lived my other Granddad, Ted Johns, who, with Tom Murphy and thousands of other east Londoners, had stood and fought the Great Dock Strike - and had won the now famous "Dockers Tanner" - throughout the summer of 1889.

I was brought up on stories of the strike. It was woven into the fabric of my family's history. Ted Johns, a staunch socialist in the Socialist Federation (he was still a member of the ILP when he died in 1948) and Tom Murphy, who was very heavily involved in the formation of the Dock Labourers Union, would tell me and my brothers tales about the meetings, the lobbying of other workers to join the strike, and the satisfaction they clearly still felt forty odd years after the event when the workers came out: Pickfords carmen, Singer Sewing Machine works, Fry's Chocolate, Gaslight and Coke Company, London and South-Western Railways and many others (how quickly the more organised labour unions - indeed the Labour Party itself! - chose to ignore the lessons of these events a hundred years later, during the miners' strike).

So it was with some scepticism and a conscious intention to pick holes in the book that I started to read The Price of a Cigar. Here, I thought, was a kind of yuppified version of the strike, which would do little justice to the cause that my immediate family and many of my neighbours' families had been involved in and which would, at best, seek to romanticise the event out of all recognition. How wrong I was!

Peter Wood has produced a truly magnificent book. Painstakingly researched and well documented, in The Price of a Cigar he has cleverly woven into the historical events a novel about the effects the strike had on the ordinary working-class community of that time, which gives the book real warmth and substance.

To anyone who is interested in the history of trade unionism and the labour movement: read this book!

To anyone who thinks that the struggle is over: read this book!

To those who believe the way forward for Labour is to seek to break the links with the trade unions: read this book!

To anyone who is looking for a damn fine read or a special present for Christmas: get this book!

I had occasion to meet Peter Wood on the Isle of Dogs recently and I shook his hand, not just to congratulate him for The Price of a Cigar, but on behalf of Ted Johns Sr, Tom Murphy, and the thousands of otherwise anonymous eastenders whose story Peter Wood has told so graphically and movingly in his book.