Ruined City

The story is set in the Depression years of the 1930s, when a rich London financier, Henry Warren, suffering from health problems and a broken marriage, decides to disappear from his old life, and travel incognito in the industrial North, now plagued with unemployment.

After a successful operation, and a burgeoning friendship with Alice, the hospital’s almoner, he takes stock of the local situation, and resolves to use his wealth to help the community.

Knowing that the shipyard is for sale at a knockdown price, he buys it secretly, but finds that he can only attract business from a dubious oil-rich Balkan state, in need of tankers.

But when the oil-state suffers a revolution, its business is lost, and the only way to save the yard is for Warren to take personal responsibility for the deception, earning him two years’ jail.

Shute (now managing director) and a Fokker representative "who was well accustomed to methods of business in the Balkans" spent three weeks in Athens but did not close the deal.