Notes
Abbreviations
BF = E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944, London, 1997
Bodl. = Bodleian Library, E. J. Thompson papers
CN = Catherine Nicholson
CWA = conversation with author
DT = Dorothy Thompson
EJ = E. J. Thompson
EP = E. P. Thompson
FT = Frank Thompson
IM = (Dame) Iris Murdoch
KUA = Kingston University Archive
Lago = Mary Lago, India’s Prisoner: A Biography of Edward John Thompson, 1886–1946, Columbia, MO, 2001
LTA = letter or email to author
MRDF = Michael R. D. Foot
SK = Simon Kusseff
Spirit = There is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson, London, 1947; 2nd edn, 1948 (unless otherwise stated, references are to the 1947 edn)
UNC = uncatalogued papers from the E. P. Thompson collection in the Bodleian, identified by date
WAW = Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1938–1946, ed. Peter J. Conradi, London, 2010
Prologue: ‘The Story of a Great Englishman’
‘a mock trial’: this trial legend recurs in Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979), Fred Inglis, The Cruel Peace (1991) and EP, Beyond the Frontier (1997).
‘nursery rhymes’: the lyrics are by Assen Bossev, famous writer of children’s poetry; music by Krassimir Kyurkchiiski.
‘Five other British writers’: Rod Bailey, Alan Ogden, Simon Kusseff, a newspaper columnist interested in Frank and Iris Murdoch, and Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit (1913–2003) who entertained various colourful hypotheses about Frank, such as that he might have been, as well as an expendable probe and an honourable soldier, an agent of Churchill, a Soviet agent or a Titoist.
‘a bulky three-part “Chronology”’: this now lives in the Iris Murdoch archive in Kingston University: AS6/1/59.
‘conducted with Frank’s friends’: while I remain very grateful for this help, unacknowledged interpolations in Kusseff’s work created so much confusion that I had to return to original sources in the Bodleian Library and elsewhere.
‘Lord of Appeal [mark: ten]’: Robin Maugham, Escape from the Shadows, London, 1972, p. 118. Maugham started a progressive magazine called Convoy in which he interested EP.
‘our own virtue’: FT to EP, 5 June 1943, UNC.
‘highly inaccurate’: Basil Davidson to EP, undated, 1980, UNC.
‘framed to be a soldier’: Slavcho Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, Sofia, 1979, p. 15.
Chapter 1: The Missionary Position
‘the serenely beautiful child’: Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, London, 1969, p. 237.
‘lose a sovereign’: DT, CWA.
‘a graceful upper-class blonde’: as evoked in his Burmese Silver, London, 1937, and his poem ‘South Oxfordshire’, in 100 Poems, London, 1994, p. 88. DT recalled EJ’s admiration for Lady Vansittart as for someone from this ‘stable’.
‘self-righteous men’: Bodl. 5356 fol. 27.
‘closed down so suddenly’: Bodl. d. 2702 fol. 62.
‘Boutros al-Boustani’: Bistani, as Jessup spells him, founded the National School in Beirut, was editor of the first modern Arabic encyclopedia and the first two Arabic newspapers. He spoke French, Italian and English, read Syriac, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Greek and translated the Bible into Arabic.
‘Nominal Christians’: it is worth recalling the antiquity of these Nominal Christians. The distinguished Hourani family, whom Dr Daniel Bliss converted to Jessup’s form of Presbyterianism, accounted themselves Christian by the seventh century, before Islam reached Syria: see Cecil Hourani, An Unfinished Odyssey, London, 1984, p. 33.
‘a bitter feeling of . . . party spirit’: H. H. Jessup, The Women of the Arabs, New York, 1873, p. 46.
‘light and liberty’: H. H. Jessup, Fifty-three Years in Syria, New York, 1910, p. 113.
‘acted out in Life’: ibid., p. 91.
‘Statistics were massaged’: A. Tibawi, American Interests in Syria 1800–1901, Oxford, 1966, pp. 186 and 280.
‘Cathartic or Emetic’: Jessup, Fifty-three Years, ch. 7.
‘amanuensis and drudge’: Faith Jessup Kahrl, Memoirs, privately printed, 1989, p. 17.
‘outdid them’: Tibawi, American Interests, p. 119.
‘throw stones’: Theo to FT, Apr. 1943, UNC.
‘conformity expected’: Tibawi, American Interests, p. 276.
‘lice and bedbugs’: Jessup, The Women of the Arabs, ‘A Chapter for Children’.
‘language of instruction’ George Antonius, The Arab Awakening, London, 1938, p. 94: this changed to English from 1880.
‘literature to politics’: ibid.
‘Armenian’: Tibawi, American Interests, p. 133 n. 2.
‘held by Jessup’: ibid., p. 281.
‘natives’: ibid., p. 237.
‘$200 a month’: ibid., p. 211.
‘luxury’: ibid., p. 210 n. 3.
‘rectitudes’: Kahrl, Memoirs, p. 149.
‘seventeenth century’: Theo writing her Vassar Alumnae record.
‘$27 million’: Time, 26 Feb. 1965.
‘behave obligingly’: Kahrl, Memoirs, p. 203. Wealthy Uncle Stanley Jadwin – ‘he just fell into a tub of butter’ – lost his son Stockwell in a motor accident in 1928 shortly after his graduation. As Stanley now had no surviving namesake Faith named her son born in 1931 Stanley. When her sister Beth in competition named a daughter Ida Stanley, Faith’s complaints about this affronted bachelor Uncle Paul who cut Faith out of his will and left more to Theo: DT, CWA.
‘good works’: Hourani, An Unfinished Odyssey, pp. 33, 4.
‘all around’: Kahrl, Memoirs, p. 258.
‘absurd’: Lago, p. 22.
‘our happiness to you’: ibid., pp. 64 and 122. Theo’s notes on EJ’s life (Bodl. e. 2930-1 d fols 189–213) emphasise his sacrifice ‘as eldest boy’ and make no mention of Frank’s. EJ praised and perhaps patronised Frank to his mother: his ‘modest & unselfish simplicity of life’ and also his religious feeling made Frank ‘worth fifty of him’. See also Bodl. c. 5368 fols 189–213.
‘wrestling Jacob’: Jacob’s struggle with an angel is recounted in Genesis 32 and is emblematic of spiritual conflict, especially to a Methodist familiar with Wesley’s hymn ‘Come, O Thou Traveller Unknown’.
‘personal nature’: Lago, p. 32.
‘greatest living poet’: ibid., p. 87.
‘more at home’: E. P. Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore, Alien Homage, Delhi, 1993, pp. 13 and 102.
‘India’s prisoner’: E. J. Thompson, A Letter from India, London, 1932, p. 32, à propos EJ’s novel A Farewell to India (1931).
‘livery of neither’: EP and Tagore, Alien Homage, p. 10.
‘Leicestershires’ reprinted as Tigers along the Tigris: The Leicestershire Regiment in Mesopotamia in the First World War (2007). EJ also retold the story of his war in Crusader’s Coast (1929) and in his novel These Men, thy Friends (1927).
‘beloved’: EJ’s laboured elegy to his brother fronts The Leicestershires:
Our soldier youth thrice-loved, whose laughing face
In battle’s front can danger meet with eyes
No fear could e’er surprise;
Nor stain of self in their gay love leave trace,
His nature like his name,
Frank, and his eager spirit pure as flame.
Tagore plus the Elizabethans were his models: neither made for lively verses, or helped him evoke his grief.
‘dissenting Christian tradition’: EP and Tagore, Alien Homage, p. 40.
‘idealists’: Jameson, Journey from the North, p. 237.
Chapter 2: ‘Stay Away from Boars Hill’
‘servants and meals’: Lago, pp. 140–9.
‘on the globe’: ibid., p. 151.
‘the soul’s eternal safety’: ibid., p. 262. The chief evidence is in EJ’s Introducing the Arnisons (1935); but EJ edited in 1932 O World Invisible: An Anthology of Religious Poetry. He was not willing to break entirely with Christianity.
‘it isn’t true’: Lago, p. 65.
‘comical, drawling’: ibid., p. 184. This was in 1919 on the way out to India.
‘traveller’s Guide’: Bodl. 2695 fol. 228.
‘£160’: soon going up to £241; Lago, p. 193.
‘provocation’: Virginia Woolf, Diary, ed. A. O. Bell and A. McNeillie, London, 1977–84, vol. 3, p. 13.
‘continuing aggravation’: EJ took up editing Benn’s sixpennies again in 1943–4, now selling for ninepence.
‘no trouble’: Bodl. 5290 fol. 155.
‘to take it up’: S. Deborah Baker, In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, London, 1993, p. 154.
‘protective colouring’: Dilys Powell, Villa Ariadne, London, 1973, p. 44.
‘a kind of Quaker’: Bodl. 5359 fol. 141/2, 25 Nov. 1928.
‘a suitable answer’: Bodl. 5304 fol. 90, 29 Nov 1934.
‘Methodist prime ministers’: Thatcher having converted to Anglicanism in 1951.
‘silly old man’: Bodl. 5359 fol. 141/2, 25 Nov. 1928. This luncheon was conceivably the occasion – never forgotten by Bridges – when he unjustly charged EJ with sharp practice while playing cards: this might account for EJ’s asperity. See E. J. Thompson, Robert Bridges, London, 1944, passim.
‘every minute’: Lago, p. 230.
‘young women’: Manchester People’s History Museum, unpublished interview with Gabriel/Bill Carritt, May 1983.
‘leg of lamb’: Gabriel Carritt endorses this memory of inadequate creature comforts, as did his first wife Margot Gale, later Kettle, to DT.
‘cultural excellence’: Michael Carritt, A Mole in the Crown, privately printed, 1985, p. 5.
‘dotty’: John Mortimer, Clinging to the Wreckage: A Part of Life, London, 1982, passim.
‘dimwit’: BF, p. 50: ‘It was recognized on all sides and most of all by myself, that I was the family duffer.’
‘high problems’: Lago, p. 227.
‘one other play’: The Last Voyage (1934) concerned Raleigh. Similarly, Three Eastern Plays (with a terminal essay on Suttee) by Edward and Theodosia Thompson (1927). In addition Skikanta (A Tale. Part I) by Sarachchandra Chattohyaya was translated by K. C. Son and Theodosia Thompson with an introduction by E. J. Thompson in 1922.
‘for a house’: Theo cited Doit Garratt as another moneyed English wife with a less well-off husband (Geoffrey): source DT.
‘about money’: SK’s interview with Barbara and Peter Sloman c. 1998: ‘in the 1920s Edward was very worried about the way Theo spent money’.
Chapter 3: A Class Apart
‘some of the happiest days’: WAW, p. 135.
‘Bible Revision teacher’: Walter Oakeshott is named as the stammering master by John Hasted, Alternative Memoirs, privately printed, 1992, p. 20. Seymour Schlesinger emailed me (Nov. 2009), ‘Oakeshott was perfectly fluent. But his predecessor as headmaster, of whom I was very fond, was Spencer Leeson, later Bishop of Peterborough, who had a marked stammer.’
‘suitable occasions’: another practical joke against fellow Wykehamist Baron von Blumenthal, great-grandson of the Prussian Crown Prince’s chief of staff, involved motorcars and a hundred spectators. Though its details are now lost, its aftermath needed the mediation of a third Winchester man, who rebuked Frank for ‘still finding the whole thing rather funny’. Blumenthal’s letter of reconciliation is dated 18 Sept. 1935.
‘later changed his name’: FT to Tony Forster, Jan. 1939, UNC. ‘Poor devil he has changed his name, his nationality, his wace and his weligion, his home and the school he is reading at Oxford; and now he can’t think of anything else to change.’
‘My very dear friend’: letter to his family, Nov. 1938. Bodl. d. 2700 fol. 57.
‘don’t you remember?’: 4 Nov. 1935, Lago, p. 273.
‘changed my address’: EP to FT, 2 Apr. 1944, UNC. It is very unlikely FT could ever have received this, which also has ‘swop’ for ‘swap’, ‘serjeant’ for ‘sergeant’ and so on.
‘larded and furrowed’: Bodl. d. 2701.
‘£115’: in the ‘Headmaster’s Report to the Administrative Governors of Kingswood School, May 28th 1937’ it states that the sons of itinerant Methodist ministers paid £38 a year for their education instead of £115. Since a June 1938 letter from FT says EJ was ‘preaching’ at Kingswood it is conceivable that he got the discount due to a minister. EP’s Kingswood file has disappeared so we have no record of what his exhibition was worth. In the ‘Headmaster’s Report to the Administrative Governors of Kingswood School, February 28th 1941’ it states that E. P. Thompson gained an open scholarship, £60, in Modern History, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
‘joining the sixth form’: EP ascribed his success to high Dragon standards.
‘peers in the other school’: G. M. Best, Continuity and Change: A History of Kingswood School 1748–1998, Bath, 1998, p. 183. And DT: ‘Edward and Arnold [Rattenbury] didn’t seem to have had any friends from the Uppingham days.’
‘Archangel Michael’: in Dorothy Sayers’s ‘lousy’ (Theo) play The Zeal of thy House, concerning William of Sens.
‘condescension of posterity’: E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, 1963, p. 13. ‘Condescension’ haunts his writing: in ‘The Nehru Tradition’ in Writing by Candlelight, London, 1980, he is rescuing India from ‘the condescension of the West’. In Persons and Polemics, London, 1994, pp. 2–9, he rescues Mary Wollstonecraft who now ‘needs no one’s condescension’.
‘a bit of a prig’: EJ to EP, 13 Oct. 1942, UNC.
‘certain puritan strains’: letter to Wendy Clark, 1945, UNC.
‘non-conformist conscience’: 3 Feb. 1938, UNC. FT led the motion ‘that this house would welcome state prohibition of gambling’, Frank arguing that gambling was ‘not a vice, but a folly’. He lost the motion.
‘humanism’: letter to Wendy Clark, 1945, UNC.
‘signs of genius’: 19 Nov. 1941, UNC.
‘kept everyone amused’: Tony Forster, LTA; Seymour Schlesinger, CWA. Freeman Dyson, LTA: ‘I’m sure ribaldry was part of his character.’
‘break his reserve’: Bill Carritt interview with SK, 1990 KUA S6/2/56/30.
‘become a Catholic’: Spirit, p. 91. ‘Seven years ago I was determined to join the Church of Rome.’
‘a Communist after a few years’: Lago, p. 274.
‘a libertarian Bolshevik’: M. R. D. Foot, Memoirs of an SOE Historian, Barnsley, 2008, p. 34.
‘red ties’: Hasted, Alternative Memoirs, p. 26. Stowers Johnson, Agents Extraordinary, London, 1975, p. 21, implies that Frank at school wore red articles of clothing as acts of rebellion.
‘psychological problems’: Manchester People’s History Museum, unpublished interview, May 1983.
‘runs on without them’: 20 Sept. 1936, UNC.
‘a tag from Lucretius’: ‘Suave mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis, E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem.’ This poem was not included in his Selected Poems but survives in the Iris Murdoch archive at Kingston University.
‘to perish, even to kill’:
Watching the armies of the world march past
In perfect step, eyes sparkling, heads erect,
Knit with the slowing consciousness of brotherhood,
Exultant in their glorious ideals.
What shall we say, my darling: you and I
Apart on our hillock of mutual sympathy,
Too tir’d, too sad to join?
‘he might marry’: Catherine Dalton, Robert Graves against the Gannon Cult, Eden, NSW, 1998, pp. 5–7. Since after March 1939 Frank was in love with Iris, a love-passage with Catherine probably preceded that date.
‘probably try and stop me’: Colin Carritt’s unpublished 2006 memoir, ‘The Oxford Carritts’. Noel’s wife Liesel (a German Jewess née Mottek) preceded him by six weeks.
‘must be dead’: he died in hospital in Madrid on 13 July 1937. His mother wrote into her copy of Auden’s pamphlet-poem and call-to-arms Spain that year, ‘For Anthony . . . he wanted to offer his life, and if it was taken, merged into the aggregate of all those lives given for Spain, it was his unanswerable contribution to a cause much greater than any single life. All those did not die for nothing . . . For provinces and nations can be signed away, but youth and honour never.’
Chapter 4: Laughter in the Dark
‘killed in a war’: journal, 20 Sept. 1936, UNC.
‘Presided at my birth’: in the copy FT gave IM this is called ‘Farewell to Fame’ and is dated spring 1937; in Selected Poems, it appears as ‘Resignation’ and with the alternative first line for stanza 4 ‘Bruis’d but at rest, in deep green clover’.
‘more influence’: invited to the Athenaeum by his Bledlow neighbour Clement Oswald Skilbeck (1865–1954) on 25 Feb. 1943, EJ saw five people he knew, including Gilbert Murray and Sir John Squire; this prompted his meditation on exclusion.
‘India’s prisoner’: EJ, A Letter from India, p. 32. EJ does not say when or where this exchange took place; Boars Hill is as likely a venue as anywhere else.
‘when Gandhi visited’: Lago, p. 245; and see EP, Writing by Candlelight, pp. 135–49.
‘passion than reason’: Lago, p. 250.
‘scarcely top-drawer’: Frank’s niece Kate Thompson writes (LTA, 10 Oct. 2011), ‘I think you are overly hard on him regarding the comment he made about Nehru, especially given the setting. Weighed against the overall strength of their friendship and mutual respect, it carries little significance. (Also, a very small point regarding Nehru, he wrote to EJ from prison as well as between spells in prison, on at least one occasion.)’
‘Pompous, long winded’: Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat, London, 2010, p. 67; ‘distinguished’: Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, 20 Apr. 1920, p. 32.
‘domestic politics’: the Thompsons read the Manchester Guardian, whose leader-writer S. K. Ratcliff was a good friend to EJ and visited.
‘girl in Brooklyn’: DT, CWA.
‘Alexander Korda’: despite Theo’s disdain for Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) in which Catherine Howard sports an Amurkan accent. FT to EJ, May 1938, UNC: ‘Dadza had better be careful or Korda will be grooming him as Britain’s next “Public heartbeat no 1”.’
‘a lot to run’: EJ to FT, Nov. 1938, UNC.
‘as closely as his shadow’: Norman Reddaway to EJ and Theo, late 1944, UNC.
‘the whole boat’: FT to EP, 11 May 1938, UNC.
‘light verse’: Imogen Grundon found among Pendlebury’s papers Frank’s facetious excoriation of the ‘Ballade of Damnation’ by George E. Gilleron fils; FT wrote some witty doggerel of thanks also, UNC.
‘the writer on India’: Imogen Grundon, The Rash Adventurer: A Life of John Pendlebury, London, 2007, p. 219.
‘cricket match the following day’: in Winchester rather than at Lord’s, therefore not the Eton and Harrow match.
Chapter 5: Oxford in the Age of Heroes
‘in his cups’: the friend was Seymour Schlesinger; Frank’s joke was a private one involving someone on screen sharing the name of a mutual friend.
‘Stop apologising’: Leo Pliatzky, CWA, 25 Nov. 1997.
‘up at Oxford with him’: Peter Sloman, Seton-Watson, de Wesselow, MRDF, Cheslyn Jones, Ensor, Wright, Willett, von Blumenthal (aka Charles Arnold-Baker), Seymour Schlesinger, Tony Forster.
‘wildly, beautifully’: WAW, p. 107.
‘rough on the Pekinese’: FT, ‘Snapshots of Oxford’, UNC.
‘observed in each’: Carol Stewart saw in Iris ‘simplicity, naiveté, power, and space’. Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, London, 2001, p. 83.
‘fullness of your breast’: compare Keats’s ‘Bright Star’: ‘Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast’.
‘as a counter-charm’: FT’s version in ‘Snapshots of Oxford’, UNC, makes the digging-up of the irises his mother’s idea, presumably as therapy, and omits mention of the Doug Lowe ‘trigger’, recalled independently by Leo Pliatzky who did not believe that IM and Doug Lowe were lovers.
‘political ones . . . exuberantly’: IM to EP, c. Dec. 1945, UNC.
‘supplies’: Philippa Foot, CWA.
‘attentiveness’: John Willett, CWA, 1998.
‘easy game’: Denis Healey, The Time of my Life, London, 1989, passim.
‘permitted fusion’: Spectator, 12 Jan. 1940.
‘Monday Club’: Robert Conquest, LTA, Apr. 1998.
‘Greek and Socialism’: FT to John Lehmann, Nov. 1941, UNC.
‘putting [Frank] to bed’: FT, ‘Snapshots of Oxford’, UNC. MRDF (LTA, 30 Aug. 2010): ‘I do remember once having to put Frank to bed, drunk, but have no recollection of being ordered to do so; I also remember, more vividly, the march from behind the BM to Belgrave Square; holding one pole of a banner – Frank held the other – marked “Arms for Spain”.’
‘I liked the poem’: WAW, p. 95. IM doesn’t identify this poem, which could also possibly be his later ‘To Irushka’.
‘Frank had joined up’: Lago claims Frank was called up in error on 9 Sept., then refused not to obey the summons. No evidence has come to light to support this contention; but Lago’s claim that Theo won the battle after which Frank stayed on in Oxford one further year is definitely untrue.
Chapter 6: Lessons in Gunnery
‘a devouring flame’: EJ to EP, 28 May 1940, UNC. ‘That is why some Dutch are “quisling-ing”.’
‘talk about it’: Oct. [1942], ‘The last morning was given up to two Indians, who were simply terrible. One – supposed to talk for the Moslem League – turned out to be a Congressman, dull and useless. The other was a Parsee, a ghastly chump with sultry manner . . .’ EJ assured Gilbert Murray none the less that some Indian leaders are really great men ‘by any standard of any age or land’ (UNC).
‘keen and intelligent’: FT’s Army Record (held at the Army Personnel Centre, Kentigern House, 65 Brown Street, ?Glasgow, G2 8EX), p. 3.
‘access in the army’: Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, p. 15. Bill Carritt remembers Frank visiting around once every month; Christopher Seton-Watson believed that Frank sought the Party line from the Carritts.
‘never made an officer’: Bill Carritt obituary, Guardian, 24 May 1999. Like Frank, Bill Carritt joined the Royal Artillery.
‘Michael . . . forfeited his pension’: Colin Carritt, The Oxford Carritts. Though the documents were removed, no one was ever charged; prosecution might have caused the Foreign Office some embarrassment.
‘In the public domain’: Jane Harrison, Myths of Greece and Rome, London, 1928.
‘waste of energy’: 18 May 1940, UNC.
‘exactly popular’: Mar. 1939, UNC.
‘fascination for me’: to Désirée Cumberledge, 1 Apr. 1940, UNC.
‘he was ineligible’: two grave figures appeared at Saunders Close on 3 Sept., half an hour after Chamberlain’s broadcast, at 11.15, asking EJ to act as air raid warden. On 14 May 1940, the Government made an urgent appeal to all men aged under sixty-five not already serving to become part-time soldiers; by the end of July over a million had done so. Mrs Folley, the Bledlow neighbour who informed EJ that he was ineligible for the Home Guard, was wife of the warden with whom he worked.
‘separation and anxiety’: it seems they returned to Bledlow at the end of July 1941.
Chapter 7: An Officer and a Gentleman
‘working in Military Intelligence’: Bodl. 5285. fol. 1. EJ wanted Frank’s name put forward in the event of war, which he then expected, for a job in Military Intelligence. General Jack Collins responded with advice on how to do this.
‘Dear Muvverkins’: 10 July 1940, UNC.
‘Virgin Mary’: IM’s journal entry on 4 June 1945 concerning her visit to Westminster Cathedral (‘The candles flicker before the saints & I recall how Frank once lit a candle to the Virgin Mary. I am glad he was here with me’) is also open to the more oblique interpretation that Frank’s candle-lighting happened elsewhere while her remembering him in that place was as if she ‘materialised’ him in person.
‘the breaking of body and mind’: Lago, p. 294 (EJ to EP, 11 June 1940).
‘niggers at once’: FT to EP, undated but probably Jan. 1941, UNC.
‘half-witted boy’: Frank gave this copy to Leo Pliatzky.
‘Sporting Times’: EJ to FT, 1 Jan. 1942, UNC.
‘America every day’: to EP, Jan. 1940, UNC.
‘fifty-two different places’: FT to his family, 23 Jan. 1941, UNC.
‘home life’: FT to EP, probably Mar. 1940, UNC.
‘insider dealing’: Tony Forster to FT, Sept. 1943: ‘Do you think you cd recommend me for your show if there looks like being a vacancy? . . . Lay it on pretty thick?’ FT to his family: ‘I managed to fix it . . . for Tony’ (UNC).
‘criminality’: Peter Baker, Confessions of Faith, London, 1946, p. 33.
‘wildly unorthodox’: Graham Lord, The Authorised Biography of David Niven, London, 2003, p. 143.
‘History of the Balkans’: probably The Eastern Question: An Historical Study in European Diplomacy by J. A. R. Marriott (aka Arthur Ransome), London, 1917.
‘Madonna of the Green Eyes’: this will dates from before July 1940, when IM received the poem mentioned. The poem to CN doesn’t survive.
Chapter 8: Cairo Frustrations
‘Three other officers’: Donald Melvin, Edgar Herbert and Graham Bell. They thus had little knowledge of Phantom and also no experience of active service.
‘started on Arabic’: with the help of Edgar Herbert who had worked five years in Egypt and Sudan with the Eastern Telegraph Company.
‘Dartmoor in fog’: Rex, serving with the RAF Volunteer Reserve, died on 4 Apr.
‘seeing Jerusalem’: their first trip on 12 Sept. 1941.
‘interested him’: Forshall left the unit because unable to get on with his successor. Daly is much mentioned in Waugh’s Diaries (London, 1976), e.g. pp. 487, 494, 511, 515, 546.
‘an excellent officer’: Carol Mather, When the Grass Stops Growing, London, 1997, p. 58.
‘Knew how to give it too.’: in spirit EP and Theo date Frank’s best-known poem to February 1940. No other evidence supports this dating; and against it is the fact that this poem does not appear in the ring-bound collection of his poetry that Frank typed out to give to IM on the occassion of her twenty-first birthday in July 1940.
‘with a tank’: Wendy lived then in Shaw Cottage but moved in 1943/4 to a grander house near by, Clanville.
‘admiration of young men’: Faith Kahrl to Theo, undated, probably 1946, UNC.
‘gifted people’: EP on Wendy Clark’s death to her daughter Helen Henry, 20 June 1986, UNC.
‘letters from Frank’: note from Désirée’s brother Peter Cumberledge, 1996, UNC. Désirée was born 26 Sept. 1919 in Bengal, where her father was a banker. She won an exhibition to Girton, but elected to go to St Hugh’s instead, where she won a scholarship to read English 1937–40, taking a second-class degree. She wanted as a girl to be a missionary; she felt Frank’s death deeply and would speak of him in later years in the family.
‘fascinatingly interesting’: IM to Theo, 29 Aug. 1941, UNC.
Chapter 9: Under the Libyan Dog-star
‘(June 1942)’: Inscribed ‘To Theo please God but I shall love thee better after death’, Aug. 1942.
‘who learned of this’: when in February 1942, Krishna Menon, secretary in London of the India League, invited EJ to speak at a big Kingsway Hall meeting, EJ replied that if Nehru persisted in requesting independence at once, he might refuse.
‘unusual form of society’: Theo to EP, summer 1943, apropos Margaret Mead’s And Keep your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942), Bodl. d. 2701.
‘Louise de Rosales’: née Louise Bagg.
‘gloomy Intelligence officer’: this was Sir John Garmondsway Wrightson, third Baronet. Philip Warner, Phantom, London, 1982, pp. 14–15, makes it clear that it was Wrightson who was given the tasks of exploring Asdic on the sewage pipes, and was later custodian of the pigeon loft.
‘bigger casualties’: 24,500 out of 119,000, with another 13,800 becoming POWs.
‘enemy transport’: no diarising was permitted at the front, but Frank’s letters supply a fragmentary record; fellow officers left other accounts, and in April 1942 he compiled a retrospective Libyan diary.
‘best friend’: thus Leo Pliatzky in 1997, though ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’ was written for the 1949 musical of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The Armstrong Whitworth Whitley was a night bomber introduced 1937, retired 1945.
‘yellow and blue’: Spirit, pp. 51–2; and Mather, When the Grass Stops Growing, p. 72.
‘in Man’s history’: Spirit, p. 55.
‘then in evidence’: that lime juice was sometimes to be found is clear from FT to IM, 27 July 1942: ‘Beyond the Libyan border the price of whiskey drops by 5/- a bottle. The teetotaller however receives no such stimulus, the price of lime-juice remaining virtually the same’ (WAW, p. 112).
‘poor old boy’: Spirit, p. 50. Daly’s poor fluffy Norwegian barge dog they finally sent back to the Delta to avoid the summer heat.
‘the day before’: diary notes, 20–21 Dec. 1941: ‘A Visit to Tobruk. I drink a bottle of whisky. 22nd: I take over Force.’ To CN, 21 Dec. [1941], he claimed still to make sense despite this intake. UNC.
‘quite frequently’: Spirit, p. 88.
‘warmhearted’: IM to David Hicks, Apr. 1942; see WAW, p. 195.
‘would not wish to kill’: Leonie Platt to FT, 13 Apr. 1942, UNC.
‘most rational of men’: Carol Mather also calls Grant ‘sane and level-headed, the very antithesis of Dermot [Daly]’ (When the Grass Stops Growing, p. 72).
‘eight punishing days’: the recapture of Tobruk took place on 21 June 1942. The distance travelled was 1,800 miles – see Warner, Phantom, p. 52, and R. J. Hills, Phantom was There, London, 1951, p. 77.
‘Brother Ivan’: phrase used both to IM, 4 Sept. 1942 (WAW, p. 114) and to his parents, 6 Oct. 1942 (UNC) when he adds, ‘I am confident we shall never have any balls to stop in this area.’
‘conventional nor conservative’: in 1943 Nicholas Rostov at the end of War and Peace reminded Frank ‘strikingly’ of Rex, ‘a rather stupid, hasty-tempered country squire’, UNC.
‘all over the world’: Brian’s Dragon School eulogy.
‘within me laughs’: C. Day Lewis, ‘A Time to Dance’: ‘My friend who within me laughs / bids you dance and sing.’
‘the other one is you’: WAW, pp. 116 and 133.
‘capacity to doubt’: ibid., pp. 123–4.
‘class background’: ibid., pp. 111 et seq. This may refer to his fellow education officer Sergeant Frank Jacobson, who wrote to Frank’s family claiming Frank never moved from the CP and wished, in event of death, his family to know that his political convictions were unchanged. Since Jacobson and Frank separated in early September 1943 when Frank joined SOE, after which they were stationed in different countries, Jacobson is voicing his own sense of certainty as much as Frank’s. Jacobson also told EP in 1946 that there would be no references to him in Frank’s diaries or letters because of their shared CP affiliation. How could Jacobson know this? Frank referred freely to fellow CP member Peter Wright in his letters. It is possible that Jacobson was the irritating ‘militant’ socialist FT referred to in his 1942 letter to IM.
‘Sir Galahads’: 19 July 1942, UNC.
‘humanism’: letter to Wendy Clark, 1945, UNC.
‘glossing over it’: BF, p. 61.
Chapter 10: A Desultory Tale
‘motoring offences’: 5 Apr. 1943, UNC.
‘privations’: 17 May 1943, UNC.
‘idealism’: Jameson, Journey from the North, p. 237.
‘English as blackthorn-flower’: ‘Tent-pitchers’, June 1943, in Frank Thompson, Selected Poems, ed. Dorothy and Kate Thompson, Nottingham, 2003, p. 37. When in late 1943 Frank contemplated writing a story about two squaddies on leave in Cairo, he commented that he did not think he knew enough of the background.
‘almost like peace-time’: FT to his family, 2 Oct. 1944, UNC. Both EJ and Theo independently judged the record by May 1943 to be eight days.
‘remarked to Iris’: WAW, pp. 136–7. ‘Do I write? I’ve written only three poems & no prose in the last year. Just before that, I wrote quite a little prose. My father got one short story published for me in the Manchester Guardian and a selection of my letters without warning me in the New Statesman.’
‘similar assumptions’: EJ to EP, undated, probably 1939, UNC.
‘must read it again’: EJ’s taunt when sending FT These Men, thy Friends – ‘Anyway you never read them’ – seems false.
‘kinsmen anywhere’: 16 Apr. 1943, UNC.
‘morale-boosting apart’: see his entry on SOE in The Oxford Companion to World War II, ed. Ian Dear and M. R. D. Foot, London, 2001, pp. 793–6.
‘Polish ambitions’: EJ to FT, 27 Mar. 1943, UNC, and see WAW, p. 223: although Britain and France went to war to protect Poland’s sovereignty, no forces were sent in its defence, Poland was betrayed into the Soviet zone at Yalta and Churchill forbade Poles from marching in the 1945 Victory parades in London.
‘to learn Polish’: his first teacher was a Mme Bonnietska who had spent one year in Siberia.
‘Iraqi CP papers’: we know about these articles from Sergeant Frank Jacobson; see Spirit, p. 89, where EP believes the gist of this letter (7 Mar. 1943) and that of the articles to be the same.
‘Kensington Gardens’: John Jones, ‘She laughed and sang’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 Oct. 2001, p. 40.
‘hallmarks of an agent’: Christopher Seton-Watson, who reconnected with Frank in Tripoli in July 1943, while he thought Communists ‘used’ Frank, believed that it was ‘unlikely’ Frank was a CP mole or spy: interview with SK, 20 Jan. 1995.
‘Margot Gale’: ‘The CP had a number of underground members who were active in Labour and other non-CP organisations. Margot Kettle, for instance, was the national secretary of the NUS when we were students. She was very beautiful and very efficient and was not publicly known to have been a CP member (at that time she was still known as Margot Gale and was married to Bill Carritt). There were a number of others – I was myself asked by the student organiser before I went up to Cambridge to agree to do a job that would have meant keeping my CP membership secret. I said that since I was publicly known in South London as secretary of one of the biggest branches of the YCL I couldn’t keep my association with the CP secret.’ DT, LTA, Mar. 2009.
‘nightmare of command’: 23 Feb. 1943, UNC.
‘he admonished’: WAW, pp. 147–8.
‘Vansittartist’: after Lord Vansittart, a friend of EJ’s from 1938 on, through Alexander Korda.
‘soldiers’ clubs’: FT to EP, 21 Apr. 1944, UNC.
‘Why is it so bloody?’: see Spirit, p. 136, where the Balkans and Beveridge are FT’s two pet subjects.
‘stay in Malta’: Hills, Phantom was There, ch. 9.
‘class and time’: as he himself noted to IM, Apr. 1943, ‘I have a conventional mind formed along Wykehamical lines’ (WAW, p. 137).
‘may also have done’: the letter requesting that his will be destroyed has not come to light. Source is SK.
Chapter 11: Recasting the World
‘A young Apollo’: Frances Cornford, ‘Youth’.
‘high command’: Norman Reddaway to SK, 7 Aug. 1991.
‘lieutenant-commander’: Spirit, p. 99.
‘the child within them’: 18 Dec. 1943, UNC: the context is Frank’s admiration for Soviet children’s books.
‘still romanticised’: ‘Everybody romanticised Greece – I did to Frank when talking about it’ (Christopher Seton-Watson to SK, 30 Jan. 1995).
‘co-saboteur’: Myers like Frank was hurt and offended by the pro-Greek Royalist bias he met in SOE Cairo. In August 1943, with a representative guerrilla delegation, Myers left Greece for Cairo. There the delegates demanded, among other things, that the Greek King, George II, should not return to Greece until a plebiscite had been held. This was not what the King or the British authorities wished to hear. The delegation was sent back to Greece and Myers made a scapegoat by the Foreign Office, which unjustly accused him of being too ‘pro-ELAS’ and having dreamed up the plebiscite idea. Myers was forbidden to return to Greece, though not before he had visited London and nearly persuaded Churchill to tone down his support for the Greek monarchy. A sensitive, loyal man, who in Greece had remained tightly focused on carrying out his brief, Myers was hurt and disappointed not to be going back. Instead, he watched from the sidelines as Greece slipped further into the civil conflict he had predicted. His sister married Bickham Sweet-Escott.
‘hospitable to Winchester men’: partly due to the influence of Sweet-Escott who was in Cairo in 1941 and again there as adviser to SOE’s Force 133 for a year from December 1943. In a letter to Frank’s parents, 28 Oct. 1944, he says he had never met Frank yet ‘many of us feel we have lost a friend & that all of us are certain we have lost a very gallant officer. He was a very brave man and we are all of us proud to have served with him.’
‘about its role’: Monty Woodhouse, Apple of Discord, London, 1948, p. 45.
‘all record’: Denys Hamson, We Fell among Greeks, London, 1946, p. 149.
‘Baghdad and beyond’: Spirit, p. 16.
‘According to one source’: James Klugmann’s biographer Geoff Andrews in a work-in-progress cites Stowers Johnson, Agents Extraordinary, pp. 64 et seq. Nigel West, Secret War, London, 1992, p. 196, also claims that Klugmann recruited Frank to SOE. Although West’s Secret War is not always considered reliable, and although BLOs had to swear to being neither Communists nor Fascists, in practice there were a good number of CP BLOs, especially in Yugoslavia. See also Basil Davidson, Special Operations Europe, London, 1980, pp. 86 and 100, for SOE importing thirty revolutionary ex-Yugoslav Canadians as BLOs. Kenneth Syers, who met Frank in Yugoslavia, is another case in point, as is Peter Wright, a military attaché in Belgrade before 1947. Questions asked in Parliament in March and April 1950 concerned the CP activities in Yugoslavia of Kenneth Syers, Peter Wright, Betty Wallace and James Klugmann (see http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1950/mar/29/communists-in-the-public-service).
‘colonial liberations’: Basil Davidson, Special Operations Europe, London, 1980, p. 100.
‘those staged by ABCA’: see Richard Kisch, The Days of the Good Soldiers: Communists in the Armed Forces WWII, London, 1985, pp. 9 et seq., for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, founded August 1941, purveying a new and often radical concept of adult education in the Middle East, especially after Alamein.
‘he found sympathetic’: see Davidson, Special Operations Europe, pp. 154–7. Frank could in principle have attended the first three. It was at the fourth, in February, that half the 500 present cast their votes in a mock general election during which Labour ‘romped home with 119 votes, Common Wealth (close to Labour) got 55, Liberals 38 and Conservatives came last with 17’. In the March session a Labour ‘government’ duly took office, complete with King’s Speech, while the April 1944 session, which debated the nationalisation of banks, was the last. German radio had mischievously broadcast that British troops in Egypt had taken over and set up Councils of Soldiers and Airmen; and the GOC Brigadier Chrystal arrived with the military police to try (unsuccessfully) to suppress the Forces Parliaments. Many of its leaders were quickly posted to distant places, and Leo Abse imprisoned on an island in the Gulf before being shipped home.
‘radical populist euphoria’: E. P. Thompson, ‘Edgell Rickword’, Persons and Polemics, pp. 238–9.
‘deemed contemptible’: E. P. Thompson, Diary, London Review of Books, 7 May 1987, pp. 20–1.
‘the decade of heroes’: EP wrote that ‘Marxism, in the decisive emergencies of Fascist insurgence and of the Second World War, began to acquire the accents of voluntarism. Its vocabulary took on . . . more of the active verbs of agency, choice, individual initiative, resistance, heroism, and sacrifice . . . It seemed, as the partisan detachment blew up the crucial railway bridge, that they were “making history” . . . It was a decade of heroes, and there were Guevaras in every street and in every wood. The vocabulary of Marxism became infiltrated in a new direction: that of authentic liberalism (the choices of the autonomous individual) and perhaps also of Romanticism (the rebellion of spirit against the rules of act). Poetry, rather than natural science or sociology, was welcomed as a cousin . . . Voluntarism crashed against the wall of the Cold War. No account can convey the sickening jerk of deceleration between 1945 and 1948 . . . “History”, so pliant to the heroic will in 1943 and 1944, seemed to congeal in an instant into two monstrous antagonistic structures’: E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London, 1978, pp. 264–6. Cf. also Arnold Rattenbury’s 1997 view that ‘after the war Frank became for many of us an emblem of anti-fascist heroism – a glorious simplicity where much was soon to become murky’: ‘Convenient Death of a Hero’, London Review of Books, 8 May 1997, pp. 12–13.
‘the idealism of the young’: Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals, London, 1959, p. 57.
‘hung as a heretic’: FT to CN, as recalled by SK. No copy of this letter has come to light.
‘Cairo and Teheran conferences’: Bickham Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, London, 1965, p. 188 (1st Cairo conference, 23–26 Nov.; Teheran conference, 28 Nov.–1 Dec.; 2nd Cairo conference, 4–6 Dec.).
‘outlaw war for ever’: 29 July 1943, UNC.
‘reading it in England’: Christmas was always spent with the Pilkington-Rogers family; in 1944 they stayed one week. The letter was to be read both at 8 a.m. UK time on Christmas Day and at 9 p.m.
‘Tarzan’: EP was also now nicknamed ‘Tarzan’. The brothers had grown similar not just in weight but in looks and were now indeed occasionally mistaken one for the other.
‘ham-fisted’: ‘my CLUMSINESS and absent-mindedness seem to become more catastrophic with each passing year’ (Sept. 1943, UNC).
‘commando school’: probably on Mount Carmel, Military Establishment 102, which boasted a Pole called Stanisław Lazariewicz, among the greatest experts on European firearms: see Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, p. 171. Or possibly on the Red Sea, which SK seems to indicate.
‘outstanding success’: Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, p. 171. Kennedy was the principal lover of Christine Granville (see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
‘like Peter Wright’: Wright told DT post-war that he flunked parachuting and opted for a desk job instead.
‘at least an idealist’: 18 Dec. 1943, UNC.
‘And time to begin a new’: these lines from Dryden’s The Secular Masque provide the epigraph to IM’s Under the Net (1954).
‘romantic’: his letters have ‘the genuine romantic Thompson stamp’ (19 Oct. 1942); he is ‘a romantic too’ (17 Feb. 1943) and ‘far too much of a Romantic & a Damned Individualist ever to embrace a philosophy essentially so serene [as Epicureanism]’ (5 July 1943). Most notably she wrote on 20 Mar. 1943, ‘Shall we ever make out of the dreamy idealistic stuff of our lives any hard & real thing? You will perhaps. Your inconsequent romanticism has the requisite streak of realism to it – I think I am just a dreamer. Shout in my ear, please.’ see WAW, passim.
‘will also be added’: airgraph from Theo, 14 Nov. [no year], UNC.
‘observed from Algeria’: on 7 Nov. 1943, after being rebuked by Frank for being a poor correspondent (justly, he conceded).
‘with ELAS units’: National Archives, SOE, Operations in the Balkans: A Guide to the Newly Released Records in the PRO, London, n.d., p. 22.
‘reproduced in miniature’: Woodhouse, Apple of Discord, p. 111.
‘Bankers and Brewers’: such as ‘Harcourt, McMullen, Tamplin, Glenconner’. Sweet-Escott, another banker, arrived in Cairo only in December.
‘survived the war’: WAW, p. 160, 1 Dec. 1943. To EP he wrote on 22 Dec., ‘I’m bitterly ruing the day I ever learnt [modern Greek]. It’s landed me in a stooge job which I’m finding it difficult to shake off, although I have had offers of more useful work elsewhere’ (UNC).
‘just you see’: Nov. 1941, UNC.
‘what a splendid Europe’: FT to EP, 11 Jan. 1944, UNC.
‘On your doorstep’: the British Council had approached EJ and Theo about running a hostel for Iraqis in Beirut, or going to Ankara or Cairo – though EJ feared that being on Frank’s doorstep might ‘cramp his style’. In October Theo ‘in town’ visited a friend working in the State Department to enquire about using her Arabic and wrote to FT, ‘We may do something more interesting this year than posts of sub warden for air-raids and senior member of the first aid post’ (UNC).
Chapter 12: With the Partisans
‘perhaps its consummation’: Spirit, p. 17.
‘One appealing story’: told to DT in 1994. Kiril Markov, aka Zlatan, also recalled Briton and Bulgarian hugging one another with joy; see Kiril Yanev, The Man from the Legend: A Life of Frank Thompson, Sofia, 2001, ch. 4.
‘Albanian Chetniks’: aka Balli Kombëtar. ‘Chetniks’ is Davies’s appellation. John Earle, dropped into Serbia in 1944, comments (LTA, 15 Jan. 2012): ‘Balli Kombëtar were nationalist and anti-Communist guerrillas, but anti-Serbian and not Chetniks. I think B.K. were Muslim, while Chetniks were of course Serbian Orthodox Christians. Chetniks are deeply rooted in the Serbian folk memory. The word comes from “č”,a company or band of armed men, and chetniks historically fought against the Turks in times gone by and then against the Austrians in World War One.’
‘One ludicrous account’: Robert Conquest, LTA, 22 Apr. 2008. ‘Shortly after the war Slavcho Trunski, head of one of the few Bulgarian bands that survived – because near the Yugoslav border – wrote a piece in the army paper, perhaps Narodnaya Voiska, slandering Davies on these grounds. Conquest was sent to the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry bearing the British complaint. Georgi Dimitrov, by now Prime Minister, had for some time also taken on the role of Foreign Minister. Conquest gave him the letter and explained the position. There were just the two of them in his office. Dimitrov said he would handle this legitimate complaint – and an apology was printed in the next day’s press.’ But when I met General Trunski in October 1999, two weeks before his death, he was still depreciating Mostyn Davies vis-à-vis drops.
‘when he was captured’: the source for this is Stefan Vimitroff, who had been required to translate Frank’s first, three-hour interrogation, and later wrote consolingly to Frank’s parents about his remarkable demeanour (FT’s Personnel File, National Archives HS 9/1463).
‘the Bulgarian section’: and Albanian and Romanian.
‘No hope’: BF, pp. 30, 32. Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, among others, wondered whether James Klugmann might from Bari have delayed and/or in other ways sabotaged communications between Frank and SOE Cairo. While this is possible, it is hard to see what motive Klugmann could have had in doing so, and Klugmann stayed friends with EP and Dorothy Thompson post-war, until 1956. See Geoff Andrews’s forthcoming biography of James Klugmann.
‘of killing Partisans’: Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution, London, 1952, p. 95.
‘SOE London’s Balkans section’: and Near East also.
‘where he had lived’: Sweet-Escott in Baker Street Irregular claims that Hugh spoke Bulgarian; however on meeting Stoycho Moshanov in Cairo in late August or early September 1944 Hugh spoke to him in French (Yanev, The Man from the Legend, ch. 9). Hugh had by 1943 finished writing Eastern Europe between the Wars, 1918–1941 (1945).
‘and pro-Tito’: Michael Lees, The Rape of Serbia, London, 1990, p. 54, points out that Hugh campaigned for Tito in a Spectator article as early as January 1943.
‘no SOE expert on Bulgaria’: in London in 1943 Major E. C. Last, working on both Bulgaria and Yugoslavia together, was joined by a Rodney Searight: see Nigel West, Secret War, p. 338. Rod Bailey wrote to me in 2010, ‘Boxshall . . . was on the Romanian desk and may [possibly] have had some responsibility for watching Bulg ops from London. Possibly Dayrell Oakley Hill in London had an interest in Bulg. Or possibly Jerry Faure-Field. See Wildest Province for details of all three. At any event, none were Bulgarian experts. Keep in mind that London could only watch ops in the Balkans from a great distance, temporally and physically. Cairo/Bari had a closer eye on what was going on. Whether Cairo/Bari had a Bulgarian “expert” in the sense that the Albanian Section had Margaret Hasluck, I don’t know. But I don’t think so.’ Rod Bailey’s The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle was published in London in 2008.
‘and satirised’: see Michael Lees’s unreliable The Rape of Serbia, passim; but also Hugh Seton-Watson in The East European Revolution, p. 95, and Elisabeth Barker, British Policy in South-East Europe in the Second World War, London, 1976, pp. 93, 95. Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender, London, 1961, p. 165.
‘renouncing menstruation’: John Earle comments (LTA, 15 Jan. 2012): ‘Quite true. No drunkenness either, in contrast to the Chetniks. There was a very puritanical spirit. Besides that, though, there was little choice. If there was shelter for the night, men and women would doss down together fully clothed. Women, like men, had to undergo surgery without anaesthetics because there were none. Women probably “renounced” menstruation because their bodies were too worn out to conceive. This was a question that fascinated Evelyn Waugh.’
‘hotly idealistic force’: ‘The sexual morality of the Partisans is almost 100% . . . a few lax individuals have been executed by firing squads’; ‘Tito has welded his guerillas into [a fighting force] . . . its spirit is amazing and exhilarating . . . ’; ‘Churchill had said that Tito’s force of 250,000 men was pinning down 14 German divisions’: see Time, 18 Oct. 1943, 1 May, 8 May and 12 June 1944. Moreover John Henniker-Major, who disliked Waugh, none the less fully endorsed the accuracy of his account: Independent, obituary 3 May 2004. See also http://www.cdsee.org/pdf/workbook4_eng_ed2.pdf for the fury of the Serbs when the British dropped condoms to them.
‘interested in Bulgaria’: Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, p. 215.
‘the views of Hugh’: ibid., pp. 84 (Hugh Seton-Watson ran the Yugoslav section in Istanbul) and 219. Hugh took over as second-in-command to Bickham Sweet-Escott for Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria: ibid., p. 203. See also William Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE, London, 2000, p. 132.
‘the Balkan Entente’: comprising Turkey, Yugoslavia, Greece and Romania.
‘ended with murder’: BF, p. 23.
‘bombastic oratory’: ibid., pp. 17, 26 and 82.
‘overestimated their strength’: see also Barker, British Policy in South-East Europe, p. 189.
‘the war of attrition’: letter from Henniker, National Archives HS 5/192.
‘around twenty men’: p. 2 of ‘Information gained by the [Mulligatawny] mission on the O.F.’ within National Archives HS 5/193.
‘upon requisitioned stock’: National Archives HS 7/103.
‘membership of OF’: Bulgarian sources put the number higher. ‘The number of approximately 10,000 partizans and in additional 27–30,000 supporters (yatazi) is considered as the most reliable : 
[Dochev, Donko, Partizans: Myth and Reality (Sociological Survey)], Plovdiv, 2004, pp. 9–10; 
[Daskalov, Rumen, From Strambolov to Jivkov: The Big Disputes Concerning New Bulgarian History], 2009. There was a rapid growth of their number in 1943 at the end of the summer and the beginning of the autumn due to the turn in the course of the war and Tsar Boris’s death’: Professor Kalinova via Maria Stoicheva, Apr. 2011. Most British sources ascribe the rapid growth of Partisan numbers to the period when Soviet troops were approaching Bulgaria during the summer of 1944: see e.g. R. Crampton, A Short History of Modern Bulgaria, Cambridge, 1987, p. 130.
‘their unity of purpose’: Barker, British Policy in South-East Europe, p. 189.
‘The most optimistic guess’: The Oxford Companion to World War II, p. 134.
‘One SOE source’: this is Norman Davis, writing on 4 March 1946 in SOE HISTORY 68, Review of SOE Activities in Bulgaria, 1939–45, National Archives HS 7/103. This file contains three papers, of which the unsigned third takes a more sanguine view than Davis’s.
‘a certain nuisance value’: Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, p. 206.
‘his last three surviving letters’: in 2002 Kenneth Scott, by contrast, remembered that they had time to pen only short impersonal notes (SK). The possibility that Frank wrote a fourth letter from Occupied Serbia to MRD Foot cannot be excluded, which might have made Foot fear that he had acted in bad faith in taking Iris as a lover: Foot, who kept copies of all his own war-time letters to Frank, by contrast burnt Frank’s to him, and when asked why, replied unpersuasively, “lack of space”.
MRD Foot is the un-named Establishment source EP cites in the opening pages of Beyond the Frontier circulating the strange tale that Frank entered Bulgaria only by threatening Scott with a pistol.
‘The contrast between these treats’: thus Znepolsky in Spirit, 2nd edn, pp. 213–17.
‘the better it will be’: Leo Pliatzky to FT, 13 Dec. 1943, UNC.
‘Iris was not enough’: Theo writing to EP (undated, but late 1948, UNC) – ‘I want you to marry’ rebutting EP’s fear that she was against his marriage. He and Dorothy married that December and their son Ben was born one week afterwards.
‘his own private thoughts’: Yanev, The Man from the Legend, ch. 4.
‘to cross the border’: see e.g. Johnson, Agents Extraordinary, passim; and BF, pp. 15–16.
‘events in Bulgaria’: the word ‘there’ in context could mean either East Serbia or Bulgaria; but Bulgaria is not excluded.
‘A Major Saunders from Entanglement reported’: on 12 May. BF, p. 79.
‘each house burned down’: Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo, Struggle for the Balkans, London, 1990, p. 314.
‘hungry and unarmed men’: BF, p. 30.
‘in contact with the Bulgarians’: letter from Henniker to EP, 1979, UNC.
‘to go it alone’: BF, p. 80.
‘twenty successful sorties’: EP in BF, p. 32, says thirty sorties; but records suggest fewer. National Archives HS 5/192 on 11 May cites drops on three dates: three on the 9th, seven on the 10th, and ten expected that night, the 11th, which would have made a total of twenty.
‘entering spring gallop’: BF, p. 31. A letter from Henniker to EP (15 Mar. 1979, UNC) says, ‘I dropped to Dugmore (at Entanglement) in April. I brought 5 new British Military Missions. Saunders for Crna Trava, Lambie for Macedonia, myself and Syers for the Radan plus Slim Parish an American.’ Elisabeth Barker to EP (undated, UNC): ‘According to Phyllis Auty (the historian) Kenneth Syers [who was with MI6 rather than with SOE and who did not use the W/T set belonging to SOE mission Demagogue but had his own communications, and whose mission was in any case to liaise with the Serbs rather than to enter Bulgaria] told her Frank suggested that Syers go with him to Bulgaria, but that he replied he was afraid and declined.’
‘accompany them’: interview with SK, 22 Jan. 1999.
‘assumed unrealistic proportions’: Yanev, The Man from the Legend, ch. 5.
‘a mass-uprising’: BF, p. 81; the former commander of the Crna Trava (Serbian) Partisans, Djura Zlatković, reported as much.
‘southern Serbia itself’: Mackenzie, Secret History of SOE, p. 441, on which page Major Dugmore’s contribution is also outlined.
‘Sunday school outing’: BF, p. 82.
‘wiped out a fortnight before’: by 3 May. See Yanev, The Man from the Legend, ch. 5: ‘crushed and dissolved . . . defeated’.
‘in a state of euphoria’: According to Yanev: ‘We were followed from the very onset of the operation in Kalna. It is said that planes were taking photos of our march and that the intelligence was analysing the aerial photographs. The secret police agents were alerted . . . What is more, we were moving undisguised, engaging in fights with the enemy along the way and organising meetings in the villages. It must not have been hard to follow our march. We had not organised in advance the connections, the meetings, the secret meeting places with the Fatherland Front committees, with the party organisations and the associates from the Ferdinand, Berkovitsa, Sofia, Pleven and Plovdiv regions. The route had not been preliminarily studied and investigated. We lacked guides to help us move from place to place. We were not informed on time that the Chavdar Brigade had also suffered a heavy defeat, and that, therefore, joining it was impossible’ (The Man from the Legend, ch. 5).
‘the first ambush’: Scott’s narrative puts the crossing earlier (12/13 May) and places the incident near Kom in Bulgaria.
‘some better ones’: reported by Robert Conquest, LTA. Scott told Robert Conquest, in Sofia with the Allied Control Commision that, realising they were on the brink of ruin, they decided to break off.
Chapter 13: Conversing with the Dead
‘towards these deaths’: see E. P. Thompson, The Heavy Dancers, London, 1985, ch. 4, ‘The Liberation of Perugia’.
‘EP sailed for home’: Lieutenant-Colonel R. L. V. ffrench-Blake’s adjutant Richard Main reported EP’s distress to him. His Italian war-diaries, which mention EP, are in the Imperial War Museum. Ffrench-Blake never knew that EP was in the CP and discovered what a ‘tremendous left-wing guru’ he was only from EP’s obituaries in 1993. These made him wonder what EP had felt about the regiment’s ‘blue-bloods’: his own daughter married a son of the Duke of Grafton. CWA, 11 Aug. 2009.
‘a play about Balkan Partisans’: co-written with ex-Draconian Richard Tolson, this is in a booklet in the Imperial War Museum.
‘published his first prose’: Our Time, Dec. 1945.
‘sent by the Germans’: Evening News, 20 Nov. 1944.
‘communicate with him’: this letter arrived 4 Sept. 1944.
‘a macabre, unnerving cable’: See M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France, London, 1966, p. 43. This is uncorroborated by Frank’s SOE files at Kew or in the Bodleian Library.
‘a neighbouring mission’: Sweet-Escott on Scott’s capture, Baker Street Irregular, p. 212.
‘Room 238’: MI9, concerned with escape, with which SOE was on good terms, was also located on Northumberland Avenue, in Room 424 of the Metropole Hotel.
‘and the Comintern’: Arnold Rattenbury, ‘Convenient Death of a Hero’, London Review of Books, 8 May 1997, pp. 12–13.
‘at first refused permission’: on 18 November 1944 – an episode alluded to by Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, p. 215.
‘one’s routine training’: MRDF, LTA, 2 Feb. 1999. ‘Of about a hundred SAS men taken prisoner in 1944, only six (of whom by a blind stroke of fortune I was one) ever returned.’
‘A seventy-year-old Scottish poet’: 1876–1960 – see her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry.
‘what does that matter?’: EJ to EP, 11 Nov. 1944, UNC. Frank agreed. A letter written home on 29 Apr. 1942: ‘My poems get prosier and more old-fashioned every day. It is a terrible thing to have read nothing but the classics during one’s most impressionable years. Now any newer elements have been subtracted and I find myself incapable of thinking in terms of anything but the classics and classical symbols.’
‘Oxford province at all’: 23 Jan. 1946, UNC.
‘One small publisher’: this was Lindsay Drummond – recommended by Lehmann – who on 15 Oct. 1945 suggested Theo try Allen Lane at the Bodley Head, especially as they were just about to publish the poetry of Gervase Stewart, another fine young poet killed in the war.
‘wrote from the Hogarth Press’: on 19 July 1945.
‘a policeman-poet’: Arlott (1914–91) publishedOf Period and Place (poetry) with Jonathan Cape in 1944.
‘Patric Dickinson’: 1914–94.
‘Damascus Road’: broadcast 2 Apr. 1945, BBC Home Service New Poems programme: fee of 2 guineas.
‘two weeks later’: 24 Oct. 1944.
‘incredibly boring things’: DT: CWA, 14 Aug. 2009.
‘Richmond hotel’: Mrs Crawford, at Ivy Hall Hotel, Petersham Road, Richmond Surrey, 3 Dec. 1944.
‘IS life after death’: Theo to EP, 20 Oct. 1944, UNC.
‘should want to live’: Lago, p. 314.
‘his own high choice’: 24 Nov. 1944, UNC.
‘self-censorship’: Theo to EP, 25 Oct. 1944, UNC.
‘the exact phrase’: see also the final page of EJ’s These Men, thy Friends.
‘the first comfort’: writing to David Talbot-Rice.
‘to turn Frank into a hero’: Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, p. 213.
‘Frank’s current (2004) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry’: Rod Bailey has undertaken to revise this.
‘you both constantly’: Bodl. 5304 fol. 124, 22 Oct. 1945. Moreover ten months earlier Murray wrote that the thought of EJ’s suffering, bodily and mental, ‘really haunts me’: 5304 fol. 123, 12 Jan. 1945.
‘numbers, movements and mail’: see Michael Boll, Cold War in the Balkans: American Foreign Policy and the Emergence of Communist Bulgaria, 1943–1947, Lexington, KY, 1984, passim.
‘its earliest days’: Davis was being held over for job of Press Attaché (that is, Conquest’s position), where he ‘might not be needed for some time’.
Chapter 14: Afterlife
‘the Bulgarian Partisans’: Spirit, 2nd edn, p. 203.
‘refused permission’: see ibid., foreword: ‘The permission of the King – without which no Briton is allowed to accept a medal – is never given to posthumous decorations by a foreign Power.’ For names of the medals given, see Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, p. 9.
‘received the DCM’: on 10 Dec. 1946: Spirit, p. 182.
‘the grimmest reading’: Imperial War Museum, Chavasse papers (Captain E. F. J. Chavasse, ref. 06/23/1) and Mostyn Davies papers (Major M. L. Davies DSO, ref. 03/24/1).
‘his comrades in Litakovo’: see Spirit, foreword, pp. 205 and 219.
‘praised him insufficiently’: Lago, p. 273.
‘body and mind’: writing to EP, 11 June 1940 (Lago, p. 294).
‘writing a play’: though SK maintains that EJ sent Frank these lines in a letter, no evidence to support this has come to light.
‘Atonement was restaged’: around December 1943, by Ruth Spalding who founded the Oxford Pilgrim Players, a cooperative and itinerant company of actors.
‘really blame them’: FT to EP, 13 Jan. 1944, UNC.
‘glass of water’: letter from Stefan Vimitroff to Theo, 16 Aug. 1946, FT’s Personnel File, National Archives HS 9/1463.
‘both described looting’: see Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem, London, 1946, reprinted 1996.
‘in literary Cairo’: see Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War 1939–45, London, 1989, ch. entitled ‘The Writers’.
‘toe the Moscow line’: BF, p. 96.
‘rumours circulated by a school-fellow’: M. R. D. Foot. Although Professor Foot denied having any recall of this in 2011, a Manchester ex-colleague, with a great deal of circumstantial detail, attested otherwise.
‘SOE files were destroyed’: see Duncan Stuart, ‘“Of Historical Interest Only”: The Origins and Vicissitudes of the SOE Archive’, Intelligence and National Security, vol. 20, issue 1, 2005, pp. 14–26. Neither I nor Jane Jantet could find in Frank’s files at Kew about half his signals quoted by EP in Beyond the Frontier. By temperament I’m more inclined to ascribe this to cock-up than to conspiracy, and it is thought that copies of some of Frank’s signals survive in Washington DC.
‘establishment conspiracy’: EP maintained that ‘the papers of SOE seem to be a kind of private archive to which only selected friends and relatives of the archivist are given access’ (BF, p. 108). The archivist with whom EP duelled between March 1974 and March 1979 was Lieutenant-Colonel Eddie Boxshall (SOE archives custodian 1959–82), born in Bucharest, speaking accented English and counting in German. Boxshall had before 1940 visited England for a few months only and sometimes coped with outsiderdom by hostility to disclosure. For tales of Boxshall’s intransigence see MRDF, Memoirs of an SOE Historian, pp. 134–7. Bickham Sweet-Escott to EP, Mar. 1979, UNC: ‘I shouldn’t worry about Boxshall . . . you [already] have all that is available.’
‘obstructing all honours’: the charge was that the UK had both failed to award him posthumous British honours and enforced the refusal by the Crown for them to take his Bulgarian honours home.
‘Vladimir Topencharov’: he was also brother-in-law of Traicho Kostov – see Time, 23 Feb. 1948. Such links were used in evidence by the prosecution during the Kostov trial.
‘thanks to Conquest’: animus was reciprocal. Conquest commented (LTA, Sept. 2008), ‘one of the Mission told me that [Theo] was not taken in by the regime, but that [Frank’s] brother was!’ He added: ‘I know, or knew, many British soldiers with fine records who had no awards . . . How does one track such a procedure, and where, if such a procedure exists, do you find the documents, or evidence of my “supporting” non-recognition? Plainly this is one of those legends handed down in families, that one hears of. Meanwhile I am slandered on non-existent grounds!’ DT observed (LTA, Mar. 2009): ‘I don’t think Edward was a good judge of character though I don’t mean that he was always wrong. He made immediate judgements on rather superficial things [two examples follow] . . . He let us in for some iffy appointments when we were running the peace movement again by making snap first judgements.’
‘after 11 May’: BF, p. 33. In fact a cable from Claridges survives from 16 May 1944.
‘sorties to Bulgaria’: Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, pp. 213–14.
‘at their disposal’: even Slavcho Trunski, who can scarcely be accounted reliable, and who says sorties were disappointing and stopped in April (which we know to be untrue), inhibited by a British Government order ‘early in May’ (Grateful Bulgaria, p. 52), agreed that the Partisans were better equipped than the Royalist Bulgarians, though he appears to be crediting Russian drops for those (ibid., p. 37). By April 1944 Trunski claims that they were sufficently well equipped to plan to send a consignment to Sofia (ibid., p. 41).
‘dropped for Bulgarian use’: Yanev, The Man from the Legend, ch. 4. Unfortunately the pilots’ manifests inventorying each drop measure many items by weight, not number, thus making some details hard to verify.
‘working together’: on 6 Apr. 1944 Churchill also wrote to the British Ambassador in Algiers: ‘I suppose you realise we are weeding out remorselessly every single known Communist from all our secret organisations?’ (BF, p. 95).
‘Soviet area of concern’: Boll, Cold War in the Balkans, p. 37. This was a view rejected by the US only on 10 June.
‘to be brokered?’: EP mistakes the date of Bagrianov’s accession to power as 1 June, rather than 10 June (BF, p. 97). For these dates see Boll, Cold War in the Balkans, passim.
‘If his destruction’: EP was alerted to the possibility of British collusion in Frank’s murder in 1950, when the topic of British involvement in Bulgarian affairs was intensely topical. Traicho Kostov, leading figure of the Bulgarian CP, had just been executed for, inter alia, spying for the British intelligence services. Peter Tempest, a fellow Communist married to the London correspondent of Rabotnichesko Delo (the leading Bulgarian newspaper in the Communist era), Brigitta Yossifova, and lecturing in Sofia, wrote to EP maintaining that Nikola Geshev, Head of Department A of the state security service, and charged with defeating the Communists in Bulgaria, was in the pay of the British and had interrogated Frank – a claim unconfirmed by any other sources – before conniving at his destruction. And ‘Geshev would never have dared to put [Frank] to death if he had thought that the British authorities valued his life.’ (Peter Tempest to EP, 30 June 1950, UNC.)
Frank was certainly astonished by how much his interrogators knew about him and his mission, and it is likely that Geshev had an informer planted among Frank’s Partisans, and it is just conceivable that Geshev had been told that Frank was a Communist. Yanev speculates about the informer (The Man from the Legend, ch. 4); Stowers Johnson (as always giving no sources) wonders about Geshev discovering Frank’s politics (Agents Extraordinary, pp. 180–1) and further speculates that the police chief was the English-speaking Bulgarian who visited Kenneth Scott in prison shortly before his release. Geshev was likely to have been severely alarmed by the approach of the Soviets and powerful enough – so the argument goes – to risk taking drastic steps to oppose their takeover. (Geshev was probably shot and killed escaping the Soviets by crossing the border to Turkey around 9 September 1944.) Thus, while captured English and American airmen were sent to the relatively comfortable POW camp in Shumen, those considered to be agents and spies were arrested and treated the same way as their Partisan associates. It is a terrible irony that Frank’s fledgling Bulgarian itself probably provoked the suspicions of his captors.
That Geshev was obliged to be pro-German while supposedly in the pay of the British has never deterred advocates of this theory. The ex-Phantom Peregrine Worsthorne endorsed EP’s suspicions: ‘In executing Major Thompson, the Bulgarian authorities were doing the British government’s dirty work’ (‘Cold Injustice’, New Statesman, 21 Feb. 1997, pp. 45–6). But nothing about this conspiracy theory today is persuasive. No reputable historian in either country now believes that Geshev was paid by the British. Elisabeth Barker, an authority on South-Eastern Europe during the Second World War, gave a paper at an Anglo-Bulgarian conference at St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1977 arguing that it was ‘nonsense that the British had any contact with Kostov or with the war-time Bulgarian Police Chief’ (letter to EP, 10 Dec. 1978). Further, Kiril Yanev is also adamant that there was no contact between Nikola Geshev and Frank. There were two separate departments tasked with fighting disruptive activities against the state. While Geshev was head of Department A of the political police, dealing exclusively with the activities of the then-illegal Communist Party, the foreign ‘infiltrators’ were the subject of the Reconnaissance Division of the army, its Division I dealing with espionage and Division II with counter-espionage. The person heading Division II was General Sava Kutsarov, and Frank was interrogated by Captain Nacho Yolov, from the same unit, focusing primarily on British and American POWs in Bulgaria, in Litakovo; while the decision for his execution came from General Kocho Stoyanov, Commander of the First Sofia Army, a different institution, who decided to pass a sentence in line with what other illegals got. Yanev insists that there were no points of contact between the police headed by Geshev and Military Reconnaissance headed by Kutsarov (LTA, 18 Oct. 2011).
‘fists and tears’: BF, p. 51.
‘too bloody innocent’: EP, Writing by Candlelight, pp. 132–3.
‘foremost a poet’: see Scott Hamilton’s excellent The Crisis of Theory: E. P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics, Manchester, 2011. Hamilton has accurately blogged that ‘It is hard to believe now, but EP Thompson never intended to become a historian, and didn’t even consider himself a historian until at least halfway through his remarkable life. As a young Communist in the years after World War Two, [he] joined the party’s literary organisation, not the legendary group of historians that included Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, and John Saville. Until the late 1950s, at least, [he] considered his main vocation to be poetry. [He] came to history accidentally, as a result of his research into the great English painter, poet, and designer William Morris.’
‘intentions of the dead’: see Bryan D. Palmer, ‘Homage to E. P. Thompson’, pt 2, Labour/Travail, vol. 33, 1994, p. 68.
‘chief among those heroes’: Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory, passim.
‘as a touchstone’: as W. L. Webb noted in his moving obituary, Guardian, 30 Aug. 1993.
‘total mendacity’: BF, p. 98.
‘scattered the soil’: LTA, 31 Jan. 2002.
‘Iris was not enough’: undated, but late 1948, UNC.
‘how to enjoy living’: IM to Leo Pliatzky, 16 May 1945, private papers.
‘Frank’s edition of Catullus’: IM’s journal, 19 Feb. 1966: ‘Venisti, o mihi muneris beati. (With acknowledgements to Catullus 9.5). I have just noticed that the Catullus out of which I copied these words belonged to Frank.’
‘Lawrence of Bulgaria’: The Times, 27 Aug. 1975.
‘horror of violence’: Sue Summers, ‘The Lost Loves of Iris Murdoch’, Mail on Sunday, 5 June 1988, p. 17.
‘illusions of grandeur’: The Times, 27 Aug. 1975.
‘hoped to be married’: Summers, ‘The Lost Loves of Iris Murdoch’, Mail on Sunday, 5 June 1988, p. 17. In 1996 Iris Murdoch claimed to the present writer that she and Frank were to be married.
‘wait over forty years?’: Rosemary Hill, London Review of Books, 22 Apr. 2010, ‘I Will Tell You Everything’.
‘symbolic confrontation’: BF, p. 42.
‘contact with his base’: Mackenzie, Secret History of SOE, p. 495.
‘Grateful Bulgaria’: this chapter owes something to that book, as well as much to Yanev, The Man from the Legend.
‘a fiftieth anniversary service’: Robert Pearson and the Ambassador spoke and laid wreaths, as did the Bulgarian commander of the First Army. English and Bulgarian versions of two poems – Christo Botev’s ‘Sharing’ and Frank’s ‘Epitaph for my Friends’ – were read and the ‘Last Post’ sounded.
‘Pearson took Frank’s sister-in-law’: together with Stuart Leasor, adviser to the Bulgarian Ministry of Finance in 1994. Unfortunately the video has corrupted and is unwatchable. Stuart Leasor: ‘I was working in Bulgaria, in 1993, running a public awareness campaign to inform the public and businesses about the introduction of VAT. However I was living with Colonel Robert Pearson, the UK defence attaché and his family, since I had known them for years, having served together in the 17th/21st Lancers. So I was a sort of quasi-military, in that I used to go the British Embassy a lot, and attended various military do’s with the Pearsons. It was outside the defence section in the embassy that I first saw a photograph of Frank Thompson, and this photo led to Robert and my going on his trail.’
‘he changed his mind’: although Bulgaria was no longer Communist, 1994 was before it had any realistic chance of joining the European Union or NATO. Many then in power had transferred straight from a CP whose influence was still extensive, and the secret police probably had divided loyalties. Fears about what stories and untruths might come out from the Communist period preoccupied many. When in 1994 Eastern Orthodox Easter fell on 1 May, some marched so that they could later claim allegiance to either Christianity or Communism, whichever seemed more politic.
‘outlandish conspiracy theories’: one Bulgarian ‘expert’ on British intelligence work in his country told me in 2010 that the Germans were organised enough and technically able to know exactly when and where aircraft bound for the Balkans were going to drop, intercepted Frank’s requests, adding their own wish-list of armaments, and promptly purloined them.
‘he “respected” Communists’: Trunski, Grateful Bulgaria, p. 52.
‘stubbornness of his conscience’: the phrase is Isaiah Berlin’s to describe Anna Akhmatova, see Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, London, 1998, passim.
‘reprisals so atrocious’: an unnamed SOE observer in 1946 recorded his belief that excessive cruelty shown to Partisans helped turn Bulgarians against the regime and expedited its downfall. See National Archives HS 7/103.
‘a detailed description thereof’: Cf. BF, p. 97: ‘Thompson’s notebooks were seized and a translator was interrogated about their contents before the Regency council.’
‘Family jokes abounded’: for Alfred, see p. 209.