I was in New Zealand
to do interviews for the publication of The Wrecking Crew and one question kept
coming up – since you've sailed in it, why don’t you write a novel about the America’s Cup? I tried to
explain that while the Kiwis had a minor obsession with the world’s premier
sailboat race, most of the rest of the world didn’t even realise that they
didn’t care.
Larry Ellison, Russell
Coutts and the other characters that inhabit the contemporary Cup-world are interesting enough, but they aren’t quite in the same league as the
likes of T.O.M. Sopwith and Harold Vanderbilt. In the midst of the Great
Depression and the rise to power of Hitler; Sopwith and Vanderbilt still managed
to find the time and money to build and race the extraordinary J Class yachts.
Not to mention changing the course of
history...
Hold on.
It suddenly occurred
to me... what about a story set in the milieu of that most dramatic, romantic
and tumultuous era, the 1930s? I didn’t begin it for quite a while as I was
already half-way into another book, and although I knew the core historical story
that I wanted to tell, it took a long time to figure out how I wanted to tell
it.
Eventually, I decided
to make the book’s principal characters fictional, and set them amongst a
handful of real – but peripheral – people, whose actions did not have to be
much altered or invented to make my historical fiction mesh with reality. And I
decided to make it a thriller – believe it or not, The Fulcrum Files started out closer to
the romance genre.
First and foremost of
the real characters is the aforementioned Sir Thomas Sopwith, as famous for the
Sopwith Camel and Hurricane fighters as for his two challenges for the
America’s Cup. Chairman of the Hawker Siddeley Aircraft Company – a vast
military aviation and engineering conglomerate - Sopwith was one of a handful
of people that could afford the tens of thousands of pounds required to mount a
Cup Challenge in the 1930s.
In those days, the America America in 1851,
after a race around the Isle of Wight . By
1935, fifteen successive ‘Challengers’ (mostly British, but the Canadians had
also tried) had failed to wrest the Cup back from the New York Yacht Club’s
nominated ‘Defender’, in the one-on-one ‘match race’ format used.
It was Sir Thomas
Sopwith’s Endeavour that was defeated
in 1934 in a highly controversial match against Harold S. Vanderbilt’s Rainbow (‘Britannia rules the waves, but
America
During this time,
Sopwith made some momentous decisions. I’m not going to tell you what they were
here - you’ll have to read the book – but suffice to say that they were more
than enough to hang a thriller on.
Spoiler Alert...
While I’m not going to
spoil the main plot of The Fulcrum Files for you, I know that part of my fascination with historical
fiction is working out what’s real and what’s made up – so I thought I’d give
you a couple of teaser points from all the research that I did to write the
book. But even these could spoil your enjoyment of the story if you haven’t read
it – you have been warned.
The close association
of the aero-industry to the world of yachting in the Solent
area during the 1930s was genuine. Apart from Sopwith; Supermarine – builders
of the Spitfire – had their offices and plant in Woolston on the Itchen in
Southampton, and management kept a boat anchored on the river. The plane was
tested at nearby Eastleigh airport.
Richard Fairey also
built aeroplanes and owned and raced a J-class yacht. He did tentatively
challenge for the America’s Cup in the K Class, but the New York Yacht Club
turned him down. He had an aircraft factory in Hamble and post-war it did much to
raise the popularity of sailing as a mass participation sport thanks to the Firefly
dinghy, which is still around today.
Sopwith might well
have won the Cup in 1934 if it wasn’t for a strike by many of his professional
crew. They wanted a little more pay to make up for the late date of the Cup
match, which meant that they would miss the beginning of the fishing season, losing
their places on the boats. Sopwith refused to negotiate and took a largely
amateur crew in their place – which many observers at the time believed to have
made the difference in the 1934 Cup match.
There was also a
female MI5 agent who worked undercover amongst the right-leaning elements of
the British establishment. Joan Miller was partly responsible for the rounding
up of a spy ring centred on the Russian Tea Rooms in Kensington. Her boss was
Maxwell Knight, head of the anti-political subversion unit and possibly Ian
Fleming’s inspiration for ‘M’.
I hadn’t realised
before I started The Fulcrum Files quite how much research was involved in
historical fiction – everything has to be checked, nothing can be taken for
granted. The research, like the writing, took a long time – one of these days I’m
going to try and get a research/reading list together, but just the idea of
typing it all out makes me feel tired.
If you are interested
in the background events that provided the starting point for this book, then
you might like to read Pure Luck,
Alam Bramson’s biography of TOM Sopwith, and Joan Millers autobiography, One Girl’s War. As for me, I think I’ve
read enough history for a while, the next one will definitely be set in the
present day, even if it’s not set in contemporary culture...
Mark Chisnell ©