Sometime later, I received a call from my acquaintance, who said they had spoken to Sean directly, after he had been handed my letter by the person to whom I sent it. (I only thought the person would tell him about it, not actually show it to him!) It turned out he had no knowledge of the requests I had previously sent to his agents (on more than one occasion) and immediately said that he would love to help us, as he had wanted to do more for the charity for some time.

As you can imagine, we were delighted.

A couple of weeks later, I was in a pub on Southend Sea front, with the family of one of our US chefs, when I received the call from his PA. He asked me what I needed for the book and took my address, (after I heard Sean ask him if they had it!) promising to send it all as soon as possible.

Part Three in an On-Going Series About The Making of Sharpe Chefs

by

Adele James

It was never going to be easy getting Sean on board. He works so often abroad and is so often very busy indeed. But I was willing to try. At first it seemed the natural thing to do, to go through his agents. They were very kind, very polite and very non committal - and I soon realised that I was barking up the wrong tree.

The fact is that agent’s deal with an actor’s work, not his personal projects. And this charity is very personal to Sean. So I had to change tack.

I have been very lucky to have been acquainted with a lovely person who knows Sean. They explained that he has so many requests asking him for things, to do things, to give things or to accept things; that he would no time to act if he did them all. It becomes a full time job trying to sort out what to do for whom. However, they kindly offered to act as a go between to get a request direct to Sean.       

They were true to their word and in a short time we had a written endorsement, a photograph signed especially to us and a signature to use for the beginning of our book. Sharpe had delivered again.

We knew getting the book out there was not going to be easy, we knew that we were going to have a lot of hard work to do to get the book to a good standard, now that a publisher had taken us on. We were so new to all this and it was all going to be a tremendous learning curve for all of  us - all the technical work was yet to be done -  but we knew that we would be ok.

We had Sharpe with us….and Sharpe’s Women would not fail!

We knew he would be busy (and we are pleased about that), so we decided to only ask him to endorse the book, the usual contribution given by a patron of the charity. I wrote to the person who would see him and waited.