1 Kiril Yanev, The Man from the Legend: A Life of Frank Thompson, Sofia, 2001.
2 In 2010 I edited his and Dame Iris’s surviving correspondence, together with another letter-run and journal, in Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1938–1946, London.
3 Knight Mystic – Verses (1907); The Enchanted Lady: A Comedy (1910); Saul: A Drama (1915); John in Prison – Verses (1912); Ennerdale Bridge & Other Poems (1914); Waltham Thickets & Other Poems (1917); Mesopotamian Verses (1919); The Leicestershires Beyond Baghdad (1919); Vae Victis (1919).
4 Theo (born 1892), Beth (1893), Helen (1894), Faith (1902), Marie-Josephine aka Jo (1911).
5 Mollie (born 1882), Edward (1886), Alfred (1887), Anne-Margaret (1889), Arthur (1890), Frank (1893).
6 No relation of the Frank Richards who wrote the Billy Bunter stories.
7 Judging from a letter from Graves, they were at this cottage by August 1924.
8 Together with the British School of Archaeology at Athens.
9 The naming of children (later of grandchildren) was a battlefield and, if there were a struggle of wills here, EJ won with Frank, and Theo with Palmer – her younger son given a name he hated, because of its impeccable Jessup pedigree. EP probably got teased at Kingswood for having a name that reminded boys of a popular cheap scent, Parma Violet (according to Dorothy Thompson). Disliking her own name of Theodosia did not render Theo any more understanding.
10 Michael (born 1919) and Andrew (1922). Their father was Arthur Duncan Gardner (1884–1978), who married Violet Newsam.
11 Anthony Carritt was killed in Spain aged twenty-three, the same age as Frank in Bulgaria. Brian Carritt, Rex Campbell Thompson and Andrew Gardner died at twenty-one.
12 Arthur Darbyshire, Boars Hill neighbour and Research Fellow in genetics.
13 They moved in a few days before Christmas 1925.
14 Laura duly threw herself out of a fourth-floor window of Robert Graves’s Hammersmith flat, breaking her pelvis and some vertebrae, following which Robert opted to leap out of a window on the third floor; the ensuing scandal won in 1929 huge international newspaper coverage. The crippled Laura and the twice-born (so he claimed) Graves, after bitter words with Nancy, adjourned to Majorca. See Richard Graves, Robert Graves: The Years with Laura 1926–1940, London, 1990, ch. 3.
15 In the Western Desert in 1942 he, yet again, caused raised eyebrows when a visiting officer found he had drawn cats all over his route-map.
16 ‘That tooth’, said his dentist in 1961, when Dancy took up the Marlborough headmastership, ‘might do for Lancing. It will not do for Marlborough.’
17 ‘Creams’ is crossed out: EJ has written ‘soap’.
18 Frank had ‘outgrown the pompous and declamatory, at first even to the point of “bad form” – it “isn’t done” to talk like an orator. But he is much better now, quite terse and pithy and much more natural . . . You start with an advantage over him in that you naturally are brief and direct’ (Theo to EP, 14 Feb. 1938, Bodl. d 2701).
19 EJ described EP to Frank (23 Sept. 1943) as ‘saturated [at Kingswood] with moral earnestness . . . the earnestness stuck only too well’.
20 Peter de Wesselow, Hallett, Frank, Peter Wiles. The annalist recorded that its object was the dilettantish study of useless languages so as to establish a superiority complex. De Wesselow knew a little Dutch; Wiles a little Italian and Russian plus what might have been Danish; Hallett knew Spanish; Thompson some Russian and a very little Italian; Thompson also presented Russian newspapers and a stolen Dutch hymn book to the society. In addition they all knew Latin, Greek, French and German.
21 Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949), Bulgarian Communist politician, from 1934 General Secretary of the Comintern, and from 1944 leader of the Bulgarian CP, was in 1933 on trial charged with complicity in setting the Reichstag on fire.
22 More likely ‘You’ve Got What Gets Me’ from Gershwin’s Girl Crazy (1932). ‘You’ve Got What It Takes’ dates from 1960.
23 His Reconstructing India was timed to coincide with the 1930 Simon Report; soon A Letter from India (1932), a report on the crisis, was followed by So a Poor Ghost (1933), which he termed a seditious pot-boiler. EJ wrote with a new soulmate and India hand, Geoffrey Garratt, The Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India (1934), an admired history of India since the East India Company’s founding in 1599, showing British rule as a succession of unhappy improvisations. And he followed this with two novels drawing on his own family and experience as a Bengal missionary, Introducing the Arnisons (1935) and John Arnison (1939). Finally he wrote The Life of Charles, Lord Metcalfe (1937) about the Liberal Governor-General of Bengal who served 1835–6.
24 As against this reading, Frank’s niece Kate writes (letter to author): ‘His use of familiar names . . . [is] more likely to be facetious than ingratiating . . . He idolised no one. His criticisms of people, particularly of those who were believed to be above criticism, often got him into trouble. Although in some ways he took himself extremely seriously, he also had the ability to laugh at himself, and to tell stories against himself (often misunderstood), and no one who came into his orbit was beyond the same treatment. (Viz. the door traps set on visiting Indian dignitaries etc.)’
25 Michael Foot is throughout not the politician but his distant cousin M. R. D. Foot, at Winchester and New College with Frank, and later a leading expert on SOE.
26 19 November 1941: ‘A bad piece of news. I’m afraid John Pendlebury is almost certainly dead. If so, he died performing a task which he prophesied to me three and a half years ago, and which will be revealed to his everlasting credit when the war is over . . . As the Cretans are the toughest kindest and most humorous people I have ever met, it is difficult to think of a higher crown for human achievement.’
27 At New College scholars were required to read the lesson; both M. R. D. Foot and Frank declared themselves agnostic; Frank, as if to make doubly sure, got drunk and overslept.
28 EJ to Frank: ‘[EP] is almost a Puritan in many ways. He never touches alcohol except an occasional cider, detesting beer and keeping off spirits. His constant cigarettes are rather a sign of nervousness seeking release’ (5 Aug. 1943, UNC).
29 He noted as much in 1943, saying his vice was more likely to be girls.
30 Denis Healey recounts the fury caused in the OULC (Labour Club) by Tom Harrison, founder of Mass Observation and then at Cambridge, with his savage essay on what he called ‘Oxsex’, which Healey thought ‘not unfair’ (The Time of my Life, London, 1989, p. 32).
31 Addressed by Abe Lazarus (a friend of the Carritts) who in 1937 just missed being elected as a Communist to the Oxford City Council for the Cowley ward.
32 The Irish, she claimed, came of older, darker and holier stock than the English and possessed a sense of tragedy, while the Englishman had only a sense of propriety; so Shakespeare and Keats, she light-heartedly contended, were of course both Irish. See ‘The Irish: Are They Human?’, Cherwell, June 1939, collected in Yozo Muroya and Paul Hullah (eds), Iris Murdoch: Occasional Essays, Okayama, 1998, pp. 12–16.
33 For example, ‘Himeros’ (the god of uncontrollable desire): ‘Putting down my pen, I looked out into the garden / At the chestnuts thoughtfully budding; the tired wall / Exulting silently in the evening; the grass / Still like a pool beneath a waterfall. / A white cat ambled along the wall and vanished; / In the quadrangle someone was laughing; once again / It hopped up to bask in the sunlight. Nothing would answer / The scum of anger simmering in my brain. / Then suddenly something cracked. My heart went numb. / My rage, frustration and hate all dropped asleep. / I thought of you. I knew that you would not come. / And I longed to lie with my head on your knees and weep.’
34 From the Greek chiliasmos, meaning ‘a thousand years’: the essence of this teaching tells us that Christ will once again return to earth, defeat the Antichrist and establish a kingdom on earth in which the righteous will reign with Him for a thousand years, enjoying all the good things of temporal life.
35 As Arnold Rattenbury (EP’s friend) pointed out, listing painters, composers and many writers: ‘Around Our Time and Theatre Today, the journals on which I worked, were [plenty of independent-minded Communists such as] the happily idiosyncratic . . . Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edgell Rickword, Patrick Hamilton, Montagu Slater, Randall Swingler and, around them, particularly in nearby pubs, such friends as Nancy Cunard, Lennox Berkeley, Roy Fuller, John Minton, Dylan Thomas, Julian Trevelyan and so on . . .’ See ‘Convenient Death of a Hero’, London Review of Books, vol. 19, no. 9, 8 May 1997, pp. 12–13.
36 Little demonstrates the giddy lack of realism and the gullibility of Frank’s and Iris’s generation more than the contempt they shared for ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘bureaucracy’. This referred to CP members who used administrative procedures to frustrate initiatives or to avoid making firm decisions, as well as to full-time Party workers whose job was to watch and report on the rank and file. They evidently swallowed Marx’s make-believe about the withering away of the state.
37 Catherine met her future husband Clifford Dalton late in 1941 and they married at the register office in Aldershot on 31 January 1942. Since she alleges that he – a nuclear scientist who died of cancer – was in 1961 ‘murdered by the Australian secret service, who then killed others as a cover-up’, she is no stranger to conspiracy theories. See Catherine Dalton, Without Hardware, Towamba, NSW, 1970, 3rd edn, 1980, passim.
38 The theme continues in a ‘Nervous Monologue’, ascribed by Kusseff to October 1939, in which he addresses Death: ‘Okay Death. Now we’re at shooting distance. Let’s have a look at each other . . . What do you see? A young man, rather frightened, biting his lip and trying hard to smile, his throat all dry, his muscles cold and tightened, telling himself Life never was worthwhile . . . What good are folks like us to you, who take a hundred before breakfast every day? And I? Some seaweed on the shore, a cloud on the horizon, nothing more . . .’
39 This Peter Wright, recalled by EJ as ‘an excellent chap who looks like a sulky lioness’ and recurring later in Frank’s story, is unrelated to the author of Spycatcher of the same name.
40 Churchill’s 4 June speech mentioned only 30,000 killed, wounded and missing – 50 per cent of the real total; and the sinking of the Lancastria with between 3,000 and 6,000 on board on 17 June was not acknowledged (The Sinking of the Lancastria, BBC Radio 4, July 2010).
41 Military Intelligence – remembered today chiefly for MI5 and MI6 – had in reality so many branches that Frank’s schoolfriend the SOE expert M. R. D. Foot gave up when he heard of an outfit called MI27: nothing concrete could be discovered about it.
42 And also Anna: ‘Oh, that Burganoff. You never know if he’s on his way to the washroom or the secret police’; and a Russian visa official to an unseen caller: ‘Hello! Comrade Kasabian? No, I am sorry. He hasn’t been with us for six months. He was called back to Russia and was investigated. You can get further details from his widow.’
43 Frank made this discovery reading Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868–1932) in February 1941 and wrote, ‘Pushkin-the-family-cat will be pleased to hear his poetic namesake was evidently a great tibophil . . .’
44 EJ mentions this without vouchsafing how their beloved cat met this end.
45 Frank’s affectionate paternalism towards his batmen – Trollope, then Lorton – is notable. Trollope was a London house-painter from Finchley. ‘Likes lighting fires, climbing trees, making jam . . . sleeps 14 hours a day and would like to spend the other 10 eating and drinking – graced with the slowest and best-humoured smile I have ever seen’ (FT to his family, 23 Jan. 1940, UNC).
46 It also suggests an awareness that homosexuals sometimes network with one another, on the analogy of the Hanseatic League: not as good a joke as the similar ‘Homintern’ sometimes ascribed to W. H. Auden.
47 Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746–1817), Polish national hero and leader of the 1794 uprising against Russia.
48 See Bruce Arnold, Derek Hill, London, 2010, for an account of Biddesden Farm in the Second World War.
49 Astor’s story of debonair cavalry officer Major Warre’s attempt to discipline his second-in-command – the genial, portly, cosseted Lord Banbury – is telling. Warre, in new riding breeches, matching top boots and a recent MC, was attempting to drill four rows of Phantom men, some recent recruits, in front of a small manor house near Lechlade. They were brought to attention, standing in line, while Major Warre went into whispered conference with his sergeant major. The air of expectant silence was suddenly rent by his tapping his boots and letting out a piercing scream: ‘Lord Banbury, you will come out here and stand in front of the men!’ After a moment the sash-window into the dining room was raised sufficiently for Lord Banbury, wiping some breakfast from his moustaches, to answer in his fruity voice, ‘All right, Toby [sic]; but don’t shout.’ The sheer Bertie Woosterish amateurism of this moment, its distance from German military professionalism, delighted Astor.
50 This was one Private Philip Schapiro, Phantom intelligence clerk, 4 foot 3 inches tall and from Merton College. Popular belief in the regiment was that Frank and Schapiro had between them so many languages that one or other of them could have acted as interpreter all the way from Athens to Oslo, including Budapest: R. J. Hills, Phantom was There, London, 1951, p. 54.
51 Rex’s parents ‘increased his inferiority complex by letting him do things then stopping him at the last moment’ (letter to his family, 20 Apr. 1938, UNC).
52 In his Libyan journal Frank praises the outstanding efficiency and courage of the Australian sappers, without whom Bardia would never have fallen so swiftly.
53 ‘Red Gladiolus’, ending ‘Death is the end. But life goes on for ever.’
54 This was apropos learning German, an important language for the future, a language Frank liked, and the language of socialist tradition.
55 Signing off as ‘Kosciuszko’, the eighteenth-century Polish nationalist hero.
56 An airgraph was a single quarto sheet distributed and collected by post offices, sent to a processing station, censored, given a serial number and microfilmed with 1,700 other messages on 100 feet of film. When in April 1941 the first airgraph dispatch arrived in London from Cairo, 50,000 microfilmed letters were found to weigh just thirteen pounds instead of three-quarters of a ton. On arrival each airgraph was developed, magnified and delivered in a manila envelope. Newspaper correspondents estimated in July 1943 that the maximum number of words on an airgraph was 830.
57Frank debates this ‘line’ in letter after letter – for example on 24 February 1942: ‘Last night we were seven officers in the mess together and someone produced Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Each of us had to choose two poems and read them out himself. I chose “Old ship” that any man is bound to love and is about this part of the world; and [Edmund Waller’s] “Go Lovely Rose” one of the few poems that is unquestionable like a tib [cat] or a white violet. I wish I could have read some Campion.’
58 In notes towards a late 1943 Cairo story, he distinguishes the cheapest and most repulsive whores who offer merely outdoor release from the ‘flash five quid fillies’.
59While regimental historian Philip Warner optimistically implies some success, Mather, the officer in charge, wrote sceptically, ‘I cannot believe it was very effective’ (Carol Mather, When the Grass Stops Growing, London, 1997, p. 59).
60 For the delivery of mail in the desert, see the following chapter. That December Nikolai Bakhtin’s An Introduction to the Study of Modern Greek arrived in the middle of nowhere and Frank devoured it ‘almost at one gulp’. Leo Pliatzky meanwhile watched a motorcyclist arrive in the dust of the desert with a letter from his old college requiring him to pay his overdue battels (the bill for board and provisions).
61 The Coneygar was a piece of land abutting the Thompson house in Bledlow.
62 Brian probably had tubercular meningitis, according to Andrew Gardner’s surviving brother, a doctor, in 2009.
63 Wright’s SOE personal file makes clear that he knew French and Spanish, not German.
64 His brother Dr Michael Gardner said Andrew died of a ‘conus’ effect – a tumour on the artery at the base of the brain (conversation with author, 3 July 2009).
65 Theo wrote, ‘You are a brick, Frank . . . You never tell us if you are feeling “down” – not until a year or so later! Sometimes I wish you would burst out and tell us what you feel when things go wrong, as they must at times . . .’ (14 June 1943, UNC). A recent airmail letter-card from him – by contrast – had improved family morale at once.
66 Frank probably heard of SOE through Peter Wright that April in Alexandria. He had some immunity to Churchillian rhetoric. Aerogram from M. R. D. Foot (13 Mar. 1943, UNC): ‘don’t decry the baroque heroics of the PM; those who see straight aren’t harmed by them, & they help to keep on the rails those who can hardly see at all’.
67 Initially 4,400 bodies – the full tally became clear later.
68 Anders was released by the Soviets from the Lubyanka prison, where he was tortured, with the intention that he should form a Polish army to fight alongside the Red Army in 1941, but continued political friction with the Soviets as well as shortages of weapons, food and clothing led to the eventual exodus of Anders’s men from the USSR together with perhaps 75,000 Polish civilians via the Persian corridor into Iran, Iraq and Palestine.
69 See Chapter 11.
70 Saying to himself a German phrase that he liked: Es gibt immer Zeit eine Pfeife anzuzünden (There’s always time to light up a pipe).
71 Assistant Military Landing Officer.
72 Compare Keith Douglas’s detestation of the Italian soldiery, whom he graphically depicts combining cruelty with servility and cowardice (Alamein to Zem Zem, London, 1946, reprinted 1996, p. 54).
73 It is also unaccountably missing from his Selected Poems (2003), but can be found in Theodosia Jessup Thompson and E. P. Thompson, There is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson, London, 2nd edn, 1948, p. 135.
74 Miss Papadimitrou was doubtless one of the three Greek girls in Alexandria who he would boast (see Chapter 11) were wearing his badge.
75 See p. 147.
76 The Entertainments National Service Association or ENSA provided entertainment for British armed forces personnel.
77 A spirit famously satirised in a song by A. P. Herbert: ‘Oh, won’t it be wonderful after the war / There won’t be no rich, and there won’t be no poor . . . Why didn’t we have this old War before?’
78 Compare Frank writing sceptically to Iris (14 Aug. 1943, UNC) of Aragon’s collection of poems on Dunkirk, Le Crève-Coeur (Heartbreak), which both loved and which was then enjoying cult success: ‘How strange that the only decent poet in this war should be a communist! I can’t understand that, can you?’
79 He was translating an article by Ilya Ehrenburg, who argued that the post-war world would be ‘built by people who have lived through much, who have been enriched by defeats and victories, who have opened up in themselves seams of feeling they never knew they had . . . [and] a morale born in sacrifice, blood and fire’. Frank heartily endorsed Ehrenburg’s sentiments, adding in propria persona: ‘It’s a grand world we will be building, and the business of building will be far more interesting and exciting than any of the so-called adventures that war brings.’
80 They travelled to Cairo with assurances of safe passage from SOE Cairo, only to find themselves in danger of arrest on arrival. Lord Glenconner, SOE Cairo’s head, felt his integrity impugned by this breach of good faith: see his unpublished memoir in the Imperial War Museum.
81 ‘The Secret of Youth’: ‘The young ones / those are they / Who, when the fighters’ ranks are thinning / In the name of all young folk / say / “We shall recast the whole of living.”’
82 Brutus: ‘If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; / If not, why then, this parting was well made’ (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act V, scene 1). In his last letter Frank quotes a later scene from the same play.
83 These Slavic interests included Stenka Razin (Cossack rebel, 1630–71), Pugachev (Cossack rebel, 1774–5), Lomonosov (Russian), Stambolisky (Bulgarian), Vuk Karadžić (Serbian) and Niemcewicz (Polish).
84 Herbert Morgan Roger Keyes (1913–2007) was the Balliol don who had overseen the OULC play It Can Happen Here in March 1939 and whom Frank met again in Cairo, now a captain in the service of the Royal Sussex Regiment and the Intelligence Corps.
85 EAM was the political branch of the CP and ELAS the military. EDES was Zervas’s Republican Partisan Movement.
86 ‘I have been stripped of my few remaining illusions in the last year – (I speak solely of political illusions) – and harbour now a great deal of malice towards some. I have lost altogether the pseudo-heroic mood I had three months ago, when I first volunteered for parachute duties. I still press for more active work because it seems to suit my temperament better than sitting in an office, but I don’t worry overmuch. If they choose to keep me at a base now my training’s over, they may. I feel it won’t be a tragedy if I survive the war. I can see so many evil men and so many myriads of petty men surviving well entrenched, and I don’t think that I, for all my manifest vices, am either of these. I believe that every man of goodwill is going to be badly needed in the years that lie ahead. But for all that, I would rather be now on the Sangro River – I know that for certain and don’t say it to reassure you nor even myself’ (10 Dec. 1943, UNC).
87 ‘Bulgarian territory proper’ refers to the country’s pre- and post-war boundaries: not to Macedonia or those parts of east Serbia and Thrace claimed by Bulgaria from 1941.
88 W/T = Wireless/Telegraphy
89 John Tregidga, a BLO in Serbia from 3/4 June 1944 working with Serb and some Bulgarian Partisans, noted the tendency to regard a British mission purely as an instrument for obtaining supplies, while ‘intelligence of any sort was something Partisans passed to the British, if at all, only after repeated requests’. Moreover this often turned out to be unreliable ‘and not infrequently completely false’. National Archives HS 9/1481/8.
90 However, the SOE agent Basil Davidson, himself at one time briefly in charge of Yugoslav operations in Cairo, assured the Partisan General Slavcho Trunski that the British fear of Bulgaria going Communist post-war did indeed impede drops (Slavcho Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, Sofia, 1979, p. 51), a view he also voiced elsewhere.
91 This radio was operated by Ivan Peychev and Pavel Tsarvulanov. Yanev, citing Tsola Dragoycheva, The Victory (1979), recounts its moving from the 2nd to the 1st Brigade (The Man from the Legend, ch. 5). See also Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, p. 37. This is surely the second transmitter that Kenneth Scott was so puzzled by during his interrogation (see p. 324).
92 Hugh’s optimism may have been influenced by his being – though later Tory – then anti-Mihailović and pro-Communist, and accounted during these years a Soviet sympathiser by SOE’s Cairo chief of staff, Brigadier C. M. Keble: see William Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE, London, 2000, p. 132; and Nigel West, Secret War, London, 1992, p. 83. Also see his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry: ‘His early sympathy with the Soviet Union was justified by his generation on the grounds that Stalin was Hitler’s only opponent.’
93 Casson hoped to take command of SOE’s section working into Greece, but never got to Cairo: the aircraft taking him there crashed just after take-off from Cornwall, in circumstances never fully explained.
94 Rana Dasgupta’s fine novel Solo (2009) shows Bulgaria bullied by each neighbour in turn – Turkey until 1878, Germany after 1941, and finally the USSR from 1944.
95 Frank’s Bulgarian biographer Kiril Yanev recounts that Davies met his death somewhere in the Ostrozub area. Army soldiers captured him during one of the raids and immediately knew that they had an important figure ‘and he was an Englishman at that. They searched him thoroughly and found some pounds and a massive gold ring (a lucky charm Davies had brought all the way from Britain). They tortured and beat the Major, and eventually shot him. According to Dencho Znepolski, Davies’s execution was necessitated by the fact that he had been robbed of his possessions, and there was a need to cover that robbery . . .’ (Yanev, The Man from the Legend, ch. 4).
96 Time magazine 22 May and 26 June 1944 details some adventures of four Allied journalists dropped into Yugoslavia that spring: Time’s Stoyan Pribichevich, Reuters’ John Talbot, Fowler – an American photographer – and Slade, a British photographer. They posted Frank’s letter home, though it was dated 21 April, only on 24 June: getting out of occupied Serbia was not always easy or fast. John Talbot was taken prisoner when the Germans staged their air attack on Tito’s HQ at Drvar, Bosnia, in May 1944 and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp.
97 Homeric epithet for Ares, god of war, meaning plague-like or baneful.
98 From Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, lines 418–19, a Chorus concerning Menelaus going to war when Paris abducted his wife Helen, and meaning ‘because they lack real eyes, all their love (Aphrodita) goes for nothing’. See Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, London, 2001, chs 5 and 7, for Frank’s and Iris’s passionate admiration for Agamemnon.
99 Frank’s close friend Tony Forster believed that Frank and Iris might well have married happily had he survived, and that Frank would not have countenanced infidelity: letter to author, 1998.
100 Compare, for example, his lines about ‘important things’ from his untitled 1943 poem about homecoming: ‘discussing important things, / A name for our new cat, the apple-crop, / Bee-orchids growing on the Coneygar?’ See p. 255.
101 ‘Big Day’ probably refers to the putative rebellion in Bulgarian towns advocated by the CP in early May rather than Operation Zeppelin, the deception plan to keep the Germans occupied in the Balkans with a perceived Allied offensive, reducing the number free to engage the Allies landing in France during the Normandy invasion.
102 The revolutionary General Tempo, aka Svetozar Vukmanović: see his Struggle for the Balkans, London, 1990, passim.
103 The instruction continued: ‘and failing this with Tran Odred’ (E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944, London, 1997, p. 34). The Tran odred or detachment did not penetrate far into Bulgaria, so staying with them might have saved the lives of Frank and his brigade.
104 Yanev names two brothers whom the Partisans had appointed as their guides, who betrayed them for money: Dimitar and Alexander Hadzhiyski (The Man from the Legend, ch. 5).
105 Stuttaford’s wrote to Frank on 8 March that his credit of £2 11s was enough for only five more parcels.
106 As SOE Albanian section’s spring 1945 Report shows, stress on welfare – ‘one of the most important aspects of the Section’s work’ – was a key element. Letters and parcels from HQ, duly censored, were prepared for dropping to the various missions. Books and periodicals, sought and bought locally in Bari or Cairo, were dispatched in the same way. Current literature was extremely hard to obtain but even ‘old favourites’ were welcomed by men with a great deal of reading time. I owe this point to Rod Bailey.
107 On 18 January 1946 Lehmann, then helping to make gramophone records of poems by soldiers killed in the war, wrote again wanting to include some by Frank ‘in whom the Russians are very interested’.
108 Arlott wrote two letters from Southampton, dated 5 and 29 March 1945, requesting Frank’s dates of birth and death and his rank, and declaring that he ‘would v much like to come & visit’. EJ had sent a number of poems which Arlott liked and hoped with luck to use in ‘the magazine [sic]’.
109 Yanev says Frank mixed up Serbian and Bulgarian words (The Man from the Legend, ch. 6); General Slavcho Trunski when I met him in 1998 agreed.
110 When Philippa Foot and I visited Bulgaria in 1999 we found nobody at all – neither General Trunski, nor the Litakovo headmistress Todorka Kosteva, official guide to the monument and the events of 1944, nor anyone else – who believed that Frank had been put on trial. The tale of the trial is also discounted by Frank’s Bulgarian biographer Kiril Yanev.
111 EJ was too ill to attend. The account of meeting EP as well as Theo is in Yanev (The Man from the Legend, ch. 9). Presumably Sharova in later life conflated the 1945 meeting with Theo alone in London, which both News Chronicle and Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, p. 66, alike make clear did happen, with the 1947 visit of EP and his mother to Bulgaria.
112 By December 1944 EP’s file for Beyond the Frontier suggests that his parents had already had the chance to interview, among others, Peter Wright, Hugh Seton-Watson (who recorded that he confided in them ‘more frankly than he should’) and Major Strachey.
113 An attempt to mediate with limited results was made by George Mackeson, a mutual friend of Talbot Rice and EJ, who had painted EJ’s portrait.
114 ‘Witnesses reported that they died with clenched fists and the partisan slogan “Death to Fascism” on their lips’ (EP, Beyond the Frontier, p. 86).
115 This letter was sent on 23 January 1946 from the Bulgarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Petko Staynov to Colonel-General Biryusov, the ACC’s Vice-President: that Biryusov was Russian may finally have expedited disclosure. Frank is inaccurately said to have been killed in early July: he died in June, probably on the 10th.
One Boris Likanov Stoyanov, who was found in possession of Frank’s shoes, is said alone to have admitted guilt. A further group, charged together with the original five with ‘atrocities’, claimed to have fired over the Partisans’ heads: Ilya Dushanski and Boris Lukanov (sic, with a ‘u’) Stoyanov, who admitted that he had killed three out of six or seven Partisans. Georgi Tzelov admitted that he had tied up two of the group before firing. Stoyan Gergov refused to admit that he fired. Tupankov fired ‘with his machine gun’.
Elsewhere in another archive yet another list of culprits is named. Here six ‘subordinates’ (sic) are said to have been tried by the Novoselski and Botevgradski People’s Courts, sentenced to death and executed: for their role in the interrogation Georgi Manov, Dicho Dichev and Boris Tomov (none of these is mentioned in the 23 January 1946 letter); for their role in the execution Stoian Lazarov, Angel Stanchev and Ilia Tupankov (who correspond, albeit with differences in transliteration). Only Tupankov admitted his guilt. He and Manov both claimed that Stoyanov had confessed that he himself shot Thompson (Veliko Tarnovo letter N-4454/19–20.12.1945). The name of Dimiter Avgardski, whom we know independently to have been present at the execution, is unmentioned in either of these sources.
116 ‘Poor Edward is dying of cancer. Frank’s death has been a terrible blow to him, but, at the same time, he is very proud of him’ (Before Freedom: Nehru’s Letters to his Sister 1909–1947, ed. N. Sahgal, London, 2004, p. 461).
117 Davies’s courage, charm and resourcefulness were, independently, admired by his good friend, SOE’s Bickham Sweet-Escott; see his Baker Street Irregular, London, 1965, passim.
118 In a 1977 Bulgarian TV film about Frank, General Trunski heavily implied that Davies might have been betraying Partisan positions to the enemy: see Major Frank Thompson in the British Film Institute. In Beyond the Frontier, ch. 1, EP reported Trunski as accusing Cairo of doing precisely the same.
119 EP proceeded directly from Sofia to help build the legendary Šamac–Sarajevo railway in Yugoslavia with his future wife Dorothy Sale: see E. P. Thompson (ed.), The Railway: An Adventure in Construction, London, 1948. A Major Frank Thompson Brigade comprising Britons went to Bulgaria in 1947 for a brief sightseeing tour, reorganised and returned as a working brigade to Bulgaria the following year.
120 Roger Woddis, playing in The Russian Question five nights a week at the Unity Theatre in London, had in November 1947 interested the BBC in a possible radio programme on Frank and There is a Spirit in Europe.
121 A letter from Colonel Jack Collins to EJ dated 24 February 1945 suggests that Sharova’s untruth that Frank died giving the clenched-fist salute might have been one source of EJ’s dismay which caused him to baulk at a clause in Frank’s will bequeathing a sum to the CP (Bodl. 5285 fol. 33). Final settlement of Frank’s estate seems to have been accomplished in 1947. EP twice asserts that Frank declared himself Communist (Beyond the Frontier, p. 85). No Bulgarian source agrees – see, for example, Yanev, The Man from the Legend, ch. 4: ‘he never disclosed his political affiliation’; Trunski (according to Yanev’s account) typically recorded that, when asked what he thought of Communists, Frank said that he respected them, but was always careful to distance himself from any imputation about his own political beliefs. Once again Sharova’s CP propaganda created mischief.
122 Frank agreed with Rebecca West in Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (1941) that it was an amazing affront to suggest that God should exact and others tolerate a vicarious atonement, that is via Jesus Christ. He declared himself by contrast more and more drawn to Buddhism.
123 Except that Yanev sometimes uses the unreliable Stowers Johnson as a source.
124 Major Dugmore reported that ‘few men would have taken such a stern view of their duty; he could have chosen a safer alternative, but at the last moment, he refused it, and marched off; I didn’t see him again’ (letter to EP from Kenneth Matthews, citing Dugmore’s SOE report, 1945).
125 Frank sent this off in January 1943 (Bodl. 5285 fol. 30). ‘Desert Memories’ was in 1947 deservedly republished in toto in There is a Spirit in Europe.
126 Frank was introduced to Bryn Davies by Hal Lidderdale and Roger Keyes (who was Davies’s Assistant Professor) and, while it is possible that Davies failed to encourage Frank’s literary aspirations, it is more likely that Frank never ‘sold’ himself.
127 EP claims that on 21 April 1943 all Balkan operations were put on hold while elsewhere writing of the sky on 10 and 11 May thundering with containers from around thirty sorties (Beyond the Frontier, pp. 32 and 93).
128 Philippa Foot observed in 1999 that in John Bayley Iris at last found someone who resembled Frank in being both brilliant and warm-hearted, combining – like Iris Murdoch herself – head and heart.
129 The volume of Catullus authenticated the coin. She, Tony Forster and EP contemplated writing a book together about Frank; nothing came of this.
130 The first chapter of this book, which concerns Heidegger and Wittgenstein, has now been published in Justin Broackes (ed.), Iris Murdoch: Philosopher, Oxford, 2011.
131 Iris’s friendship with EP proved durable. She wrote in 1958–9 at his request a review of Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago for his journal the New Reasoner, borrowed his second name when in A Severed Head (1961) creating her American demon Palmer Anderson, and flew out with him to New Delhi to commemorate Indira Gandhi in 1987.
132 At the Fifth Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party.
133 On 31 March 1949 Kostov was dismissed from his post as acting President of the Council of Ministers and in June indicted for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. Dismissed also from the Central Committee, expelled from the Party and deprived of his seat in the National Assembly, he was tried that December along with ten others. Among grounds given for his execution was the charge that he had acted under orders from the British, American and Yugoslav intelligence services and had contact with members of the ‘British Intelligence Service’. In the war between Muscovite and home-grown Communists, of which Kostov was the best-known victim, contact with BLOs such as Frank was now presented as proof of ‘treason’.
134 Bulgarian Partisans were subjected to electric shocks. Dorothy Thompson (letter to author, 15 Feb. 1999) recalled the film-maker Tony Simmons at an unspecified later date uncovering some of Frank’s clothing, whose condition strongly suggested torture.
135 This ‘shock’ was surely the realisation that what Frank represented politically would supplant Fascism. Avgardski is testifying, probably in the 1970s, at a time long before it seemed feasible that Communism in its turn would fall and be supplanted: the possibility that Avgardski needed to propitiate the powers-that-be may place a limit on his veracity. So his version of Frank’s end with speeches from both parties is probably prettified to give the event gravitas. Naku Staminov’s account (see Prologue above) seems more probable, with Frank yelling in angry protest.
136 The Turkish Citadel.
137 Captain Yanko Stoyanov, who executed Frank, was no relation to the General Kocho Stoyanov who interrogated and (probably) tortured him, and who blew his brains out in Pancherevo, a suburb of Sofia, in early September 1944 before the Partisan patrols could find him. Moreover, neither apparently corresponds to any ‘Stoyanov’ in the letter sent to the ACC detailing the punishment of Frank’s murderers.
138 Tran is a Bulgarian dialect spoken in the areas north of Sofia, named after the Tran region near the border with Serbia. Hence the surname Trunski/Trunski.
139 Frank’s haversack may have been destroyed by ignorant police officers or stolen, or taken to Moscow by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, something that happened to the belongings of other BLOs in the Communist bloc. No leads in Moscow’s direction have at the time of writing yielded results.