Fifty Ships

A bomb lands on the house where Foyle's driver is lodging, and Sam Stewart survives it only to lose her home. Her landlady loses a collection of jewels and antique coins to looters, and the thieves turn out to be a gang of Auxiliary Fire Service volunteers working out of the local fire station. Sam, made homeless, spends the following nights moving between temporary arrangements; she stays with Milner until his wife Jane comes home unexpectedly while the two are dancing, and then sleeps in a police cell at the station rather than admit to Foyle that she has nowhere to go.

That domestic thread runs against a case that reaches much further. Richard Hunter, an alcoholic handyman from Yorkshire, is found dead on the beach with a single gunshot to the head, and the local verdict is suicide; his own son, one of the looters, believes it. Foyle does not. The day before his death, Richard had seen a newspaper photograph of an American industrialist, Howard Paige, arriving in the area. Paige made his fortune from a synchromesh gearbox and is a prominent advocate of American support for Britain; he is staying with a local magistrate and Oxford contemporary, Arthur Lewes. At a dinner at the house Foyle is reintroduced to Elizabeth Lewes, the woman he had hoped to marry more than twenty years earlier, before her father refused a policeman as a son-in-law. She is unhappily married and tries to rekindle the old attachment; Foyle declines it. The same night a light signals a submarine offshore and a man is rowed ashore, and by morning a stranger claiming to be a Dutch refugee has been arrested trying to order a beer at ten in the morning. He is a German spy, facing execution, and his cousin, the local doctor's wife, signalled the submarine for him.

The solution turns on the past rather than on the war. Richard Hunter and Howard Paige had been at Oxford together and had both been interested in car construction; Paige took Hunter's design for the synchromesh gearbox, built a fortune on it, and Hunter knew it. Foyle establishes that Paige murdered Hunter to keep the theft concealed. Before he can make the arrest, Paige's minder intervenes: Paige is in Britain to argue the American case for supplying arms, and the political weight behind him is more than one policeman can move. Denied his arrest, Foyle warns Paige that the war will not last forever and that when it ends he will still be what he is. The series keeps that promise: the confrontation is picked up much later, when Foyle returns from America in the seventh series having met Paige again. The title refers to the Destroyers for Bases agreement of September 1940, the deal that made such protection the price of diplomacy.

The strength is the ending. Foyle is denied his arrest by the war's own diplomacy, and the film resists the temptation to give him a consolation; Henry Goodman plays Paige as a man entirely at ease with what he has done, which is what makes the frustration land. The weakness is that three cases in one film is a lot, and the looting thread is largely spent before the murder begins. It is significant as the introduction of Elizabeth Lewes, the one part of Foyle's life that predates the series, and as the beginning of a thread the run does not close for five more years. It is also the point where Sam's age is fixed at twenty-two and her homelessness is played for comedy that shades into isolation.