‘The Story of a Great Englishman’
On 8 March 1945 the left-wing News Chronicle published a full-page account of the last days of Frank Thompson, headlined ‘The Story of a Great Englishman’ and garnered chiefly from a Bulgarian delegate to the World Trades Union Congress in London. Since no details were officially known, this ‘eye-witness report’ was significant.
Frank, ‘brilliant 23 year old son of Mr Edward Thompson the poet’, was a British liaison officer dropped into the Balkans to work with Bulgarian Partisans, who were fighting in hopes of overthrowing their government, which was Royalist, Fascist and pro-German. Captured in May 1944, he had been executed around 10 June after a mock trial at Litakovo, fifteen miles from Sofia, with four other officers, one American, one Serb and two Bulgarians. One arresting detail concerned the treatment meted out to the fifty-seven Partisans captured out of all those he had been sent in to liaise with: some had had their eyes gouged out before being shot. Here was a casual brutality shocking to readers schooled in the relative decencies of the war in Western Europe. Many of the executioners had themselves already been put to death.
The unforgettable and highly charged part of the News Chronicle article concerned Frank’s demeanour during his trial. Attempts to stir the local citizenry to lynch the Partisans failed, and the village hall was packed with spectators when the brutal and as yet unnamed Bulgarian Army captain started his interrogation. Frank leaned against a pillar, calmly smoking his pipe. He was asked for his name, rank and political opinions, and then: ‘By what right do you, an Englishman, enter our country and wage war against us?’ Frank astonished his listeners by answering without an interpreter, in fluent, idiomatic Bulgarian, replying that the war was much bigger than the battle of one nation against another, and the greatest thing in the world now was the struggle of Fascism and anti-Fascism. ‘Do you not know that we shoot men with your opinions?’ the captain said. Frank answered that he was ready to die for freedom and that he was proud to die with Bulgarian patriots as his companions. The crowd was deeply stirred and one old woman, passionately weeping, stood to denounce the trial, declaring that the whole village was on the side of the Partisans. Proceedings were brought swiftly to a close, after less than half an hour.
Major Thompson took charge of the condemned men and led them to the castle. As they marched off before the assembled people, he raised a clenched fist, the salute of the Fatherland Front which the Allies were helping. A gendarme struck his arm down, but Thompson called out to the people, ‘I give you the Salute of Freedom!’ All the men died raising this salute. The spectators were sobbing; many present declared the scene one of the most moving in all Bulgarian history, that the men’s amazing courage was the work of the English officer who carried their spirits, as well as his own.
They were hurriedly buried in an unmarked grave. The article ended with part of a Christmas letter Frank had written to his parents in 1943.
My Christmas message to you is one of greater hope than I have ever had in my life before. There is a spirit abroad in Europe finer and braver than anything that tired continent has known for centuries and which cannot be withstood. You can, if you like, think of it in terms of politics, but it is broader and more generous than any dogma. It is the confident will of whole peoples, who have known the utmost humiliation and suffering and who have triumphed over it, to build their own life once and for all.
The News Chronicle’s ‘scoop’ created a stir, and gave credence to a version of Frank’s end that endured until his 2004 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry. In Bulgaria too the story of Frank’s fearless denunciations of Fascism at his trial and his confident bearing on his way to execution stirred readers to their depths: he stands to Bulgaria as Byron to Greece. Frank was posthumously decorated, a railway station near Sofia was named after him and a kindergarten; nursery rhymes are still sung about his adventures. A reliable if flowery Bulgarian biography of Frank was published in 2001, as yet untranslated.1
I first encountered Frank Thompson when writing Dame Iris Murdoch’s authorised biography.2 I was greatly attracted by his brilliant, warm-hearted, brave personality, and moved by the remarkable tragedy of his early death. I was not alone in thinking that he seemed a good deal nicer than Dame Iris then was. At a celebration of Frank’s life at the Bulgarian Embassy in the year 2000, one of his schoolfellows described him as having ‘ten thumbs, a brilliant mind, and an enormous heart’. When the previous October I was invited by Professor Philippa Foot to accompany her on a trip to Bulgaria, Frank’s Oxford friend Noel Martin, to whom I mentioned this forthcoming trip on the telephone, said lightly, ‘Kiss the ground for me, won’t you?’
Philippa shared a wartime flat with Iris Murdoch, where, in November 1944, she brought Murdoch the news that Frank was Missing Believed Killed and, as at no other moment in her sixty-year friendship with Philippa, Iris wept. In March 1939, when Frank first fell in love with her, Iris had persuaded him to join the Communist Party.
In Sofia Philippa and I met ex-Partisan General Slavcho Trunski, fourteen days before his death; he reminisced fondly about Frank, and shed tears. We travelled to Litakovo, where a group of five villagers including the Mayor showed us the hand-carved pipe Frank had smoked in captivity, and then we all progressed in silence to his grave. Philippa surprised me – not the only occasion – by opening a bag she was carrying and handing me a single red carnation to place there, as if from Iris.
Then we waited for some hours to meet Naku Staminov, who was delayed by a meeting about privatising land. Staminov’s recollection contradicted the ‘official’ version of Frank’s death. In June 1944, at twelve years old, he followed a group of a dozen Partisans including Frank, the tallest, handsomest and strongest, who was chewing something, and witnessed his execution. Frank wore a green jacket with a zip-fastener, and Naku later recognised his picture in the newspaper as that of the foreigner whose murder he had unexpectedly watched. (The last parcel Frank’s mother sent him – I later discovered – was dispatched at Christmas 1943 and contained copies of Life magazine and a zip-up waterproof jacket, which he acknowledged by cable.)
The Partisans that day were surrounded by Gendarmerie but seemed calm. Later Naku learned they had been lied to and told that they were being marched to another village. There was complete silence while the killing took place. They were shot in a ditch. Frank half turned, shouting something furiously in English before being raked with fire. He was the last to stop convulsing. A ring was cut off his finger with a knife. Naku was sick with terror for months afterwards, and his mother gave him a lead bullet as a Balkan charm to counter its effects. We watched him, reliving that terror, develop a facial tic.
The contrast between Staminov’s memory and the ‘official’ version could not be starker. On the one hand a national hero whose noble bearing in adversity inspired a whole nation; on the other a uniformed British officer duped before being shot in a ditch. This book is concerned with establishing the truth about how Frank died, and with what, in his short life, led up to and helped shape this fate. It also examines the nature of heroism itself: can a seemingly pointless death be accounted heroic?
When I was sixteen my grandmother took an overdose and died. This was in 1961. There is still family debate about how befuddled whisky had made her when she kept swallowing those sleeping pills, and how desperate she was. Despair began twenty years before when her favourite child, blond, blue-eyed and weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, was shot down during a so-called tip-and-run raid off the Lincolnshire coast and killed. That was his final trainee-navigator’s flight, in November 1941. By extraordinary chance her grave-digger turned out to have dug her son’s twenty years before, and asked, vividly recalling her grief, whether she had ever ‘got over it’. In some sense she did not. She wore his ‘wings’, made up as a marcasite brooch, for her remaining days of good works, tippling and bridge.
About 1961 Frank Thompson’s mother Theo, who had moved to Grange-over-Sands because it reminded her of the Lebanon where she grew up, also took an overdose. Her daughter-in-law Dorothy recalled that Theo wanted to quit while the going was good and before frailty overcame her; but the death of her favourite son Frank in 1944 may have played its part in weakening her will to continue. She survived and moved to live near her surviving son E. P. Thompson and Dorothy for her last years.
The Second World War casts long shadows, with some of which the final section of this biography is concerned. I was living in Kraków, Poland in 1990–2 when Russian troops were finally expelled and I vividly remember one journey from London. No London–Warsaw planes had been allowed to fly over fortified Berlin since 1945: each detoured instead over Danish Jutland before veering sharply south. On one such trip, despite our taking off late, it was announced that we were the first flight given permission to overfly Berlin, and so would land early. I (whose family originated in Dresden) was moved that another symbol of the Cold War had thus gone, a war that had caused much suffering, and whose first victim – or so his brother believed – was Frank Thompson himself.
I was not alone in finding Frank attractive or wishing to write his biography – the literary form in which the dead are invoked in order to teach the living. Five other British writers had the same idea. Dr Rod Bailey, arguably the best younger writer on SOE, arrived for tea with a file of Frank-related research papers gathered over years in Washington DC and elsewhere and generously handed them over without conditions. Rod has been a marvellous support, without whom (to take two examples) I should not have known what Expeditionary Force Messages were, nor what happened to the widow of Major Mostyn Davies, the officer Frank Thompson was dropped into Bulgaria to assist (see Chapter 14).
After my Iris Murdoch: A Life was published in 2001 I received a letter from Frank’s sister-in-law Dorothy Thompson: she had joined the Communist Party in 1938 aged fifteen, her husband the historian E. P. Thompson had joined the CP in 1940 aged seventeen, and Frank had joined in March 1939 aged eighteen. Dorothy wrote to thank me both for sympathetically understanding and then also for ‘explaining’ the militant idealism of her generation to her children and grandchildren. And although the E. P. Thompson papers, which include all of Frank’s, are in closed collection in the Bodleian Library until the year 2043 – because Dorothy thought that a biography of EP should not be written until fifty years after his death – she gave me privileged access without which the writing of this biography would not have been possible.
For a while Simon Kusseff, given permission to write a life of Frank around 1993, and I planned to co-write Frank’s biography. Simon had in 1998 generously given me a bulky three-part ‘Chronology’ (in effect a quarry) of Frank-related documents when I was writing Iris Murdoch: A Life. In 2008 he added a collection of interviews conducted with Frank’s friends. Part two of my book in particular is indebted to his labours
Kusseff took the view that Frank’s emphasis on our need for a ‘new communal ethic’ spoke prophetically to today’s crises of financial meltdown and global warming. Now, after much further research – and for all that the world seems on the brink of another 1930s-style depression – this seems fortuitous, if not wrong-headed. Frank’s outer circumstances are inevitably of their epoch and three examples suggest how remote these are. First, Frank’s Colonel in the Royal Artillery in 1940 kept a handbook entitled ‘Social Classification of Officers’: Frank got bad marks for claiming to be a Methodist (an atheist, which is what he really was, would have been allotted menial tasks), but good marks for having been to Winchester. This was routine: his younger brother EP’s friend the writer Robin Maugham, interviewed by a colonel in the 15th/19th Hussars, read the following marks (out of ten) that his answers had earned. What games did you play at school? – None [mark: nought]. Which school? Eton [mark: ten]. Do you earn a hundred pounds a week or a year? A year [mark: nought]. What’s your father do? Lord of Appeal [mark: ten].
Then Frank’s first flight was from Malta to Tripoli in July 1943. All his many pre-war travels – to the USA, to Syria, Brittany, Haute Savoie, Greece, Rome, Austria, Ireland, then to Egypt in 1941 – were by coal-powered train and/or ship. He knew that flying was the travel of the future. It scared him and he disapproved of it, too. ‘Let me be earth-bound all my life,’ he prayed.
Finally, when he arrived in Hamadan in Persia in November 1942 he was amazed to find the streets lit up – the first street-lighting (apart from Cape Town) he had enjoyed since 1 September 1939 when the blackout started on the day that he joined up, two days before the outbreak of war. Nowhere in Egypt, the Levant, London, Oxford or Glasgow had he strolled under illuminated street lamps since that date. Frank spent nearly five long years, from the age of nineteen to almost twenty-four, in a world literally as well as figuratively darkened, something hard for us today to imagine.
‘When the lights go on again / All over the world / And the boys come home again’: a sentimental Vera Lynn song thus expressed the yearning for conflict to be over; but light-and-dark imagery haunts W. H. Auden’s wonderful ‘September 1 1939’ too, where waves of anger and fear circulate over ‘the bright / And darkened lands of the earth, / Obsessing our private lives’. Frank was compelled by the suffering of his age and conceived himself at war with the powers of darkness too. I see him, to his fingertips, as a Popular Front intellectual, that loose alliance of progressives from the CP to anti-Fascist Tories who wanted Hitler beaten so that a better world could be born. He none the less wrote, aged twenty-two, that ‘there is no point in trying to hate men. We’d be wasting our time . . . Worse than that – we’d be losing our own virtue.’ That too suggests something of his rare quality.
There are other reasons why Frank Thompson may interest us today. He is a figure in many different landscapes: Boars Hill; pre-war Oxford; the war, during which he served for nearly five years, and was a civilian-soldier in two ‘private armies’ – Phantom, then SOE; and not least a remarkable family, whose maternal forebears founded the American University of Beirut, while his own father, a missionary in Bengal, translated Rabindranath Tagore and was befriended by Nehru and Gandhi. His younger brother E. P. Thompson was both political activist and brilliant historian, among the first, in his The Making of the English Working Class, to enfranchise the voices of the poor. (EP was known by his second name, Palmer, until after 1944, when he changed over to Edward. As Edward was his father’s name too, they are distinguished here respectively as EJ and EP.)
Frank was an apprentice poet who wished to speak for his remarkable generation – who had their youth stolen from them by the chance of world war – and in his best-known poem succeeded. He is representative as well as individual. Because he died at twenty-three, his papers, diaries and enormous correspondence were, in effect, frozen. This was due partly to delay in official notification of his death, partly to his parents’ desire to commemorate him. His twenty or so boxes – many hundreds of thousands of words – provide for the strange and fascinating age through which Frank lived a picture of unparalleled depth and detail, a period of much intrinsic interest, now that its survivors are each year fewer. Juliet Gardner, author of Wartime and The Blitz, believes that the lives of no other Second World War soldiers are documented with this degree of detail.
On 13 January 1944, days before being dropped into occupied Serbia as a British liaison officer to work with the Partisans, Frank asked his brother EP to send him anything he had written ‘these last three years’. They were a family of writers. Frank rarely had enough time to write. His journals, he apologised, were written so hurriedly in such a childish style that they would only be valuable ‘as raw material for more considered writing after the war’. That all his writings are work-in-progress does not lessen their value as fresh witness to a lost age.
It is moving to me that a half-dozen of his school contemporaries are still with us, aged around ninety, and have aided this research; and it is a strange thought that we might have had the pleasure of his company for the last sixty-odd years. Frank is still much mourned. And since we cannot enjoy his company in the flesh, a biography is one way of celebrating him in spirit.
In 1975 Stowers Johnson wrote a fanciful life of Frank that offended friends and family, entitled Agents Extraordinary (see Chapter 14). Johnson gives no sources, he supplies everybody’s thoughts, and where a fact stated by him can be independently verified it often turns out to be false. Basil Davidson, who was dropped by SOE into the Balkans, characterised his book as ‘unnecessarily ill-informed’, naive and ‘highly inaccurate’. This is frustrating, because not everything within it can be invented. For another account of Johnson and of Frank, the reader is referred to Alan Ogden’s Through Hitler’s Back Door: SOE Operations in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria 1939–1945 (2010). I made a tactical decision to base my own account on two first-hand narratives written in 1944, held in the National Archives in Kew: those of Major Mostyn Davies and of Kenneth Scott, two men who fought with Frank in Bulgaria and whose accounts are thus free from accretions of later Cold War legend.
A sense of communion with Frank continues today: he has been the subject of biographical chapters in recent books by writers as different as Freeman Dyson (1979), Fred Inglis (1991), Luisa Passerini (1999), Alan Ogden (2010) and the present writer (2001). Books about him in Bulgaria abound. He haunted his friend Iris Murdoch, who believed that had he survived she and Frank would have married, and colours a number of characters in her novels. Many of his letters survive because they were prized, and, like his best-known poem, retain their power to make us feel spoken to.
On 15 August 1945, the day of Victory over Japan, The Times published Frank’s ‘An Epitaph for my Friends’. It is his best poem, much anthologised:
As one who, gazing at a vista
Of beauty, sees the clouds close in,
And turns his back in sorrow, hearing
The thunder-claps begin
So we, whose life was all before us,
Our hearts with sunlight filled,
Left in the hills our books and flowers,
Descended and were killed.
Write on the stone no words of sadness
– Only the gladness due,
That we, who asked the most of living,
Knew how to give it too.
Frank Thompson was not a great poet. He died before he could turn himself convincingly into a minor one. Much that he wrote was in the nature of a first draft or quarry to be reworked after the war. Yet ‘An Epitaph for my Friends’ goes some way to suggesting what English poetry may have lost in June 1944. In the best collection of Second World War verse the editors single out this poem to represent the rest. It was read by Edward Fox on the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day before an audience including the monarch and the Prime Minister. Lines from Frank’s poem are written on the monument at Netley on Southampton Water to commemorate D-Day.
The language is simple, the rhetoric stoical and prophetic. It is the poet’s imagined adjustment to his own possible end that touches us, combined with his light-hearted willingness to embrace a very particular fate. Fewer than 500,000 British men and women died in that war, less than 1 per cent of the population. If you compare casualty rates to those in Poland (16 per cent), USSR (13 per cent) or Germany (10 per cent), British losses were very small. ‘An Epitaph for my Friends’ is Frank Thompson’s bid to speak for his entire generation. It is both modest and boastful: modest in relinquishing his individuality, boastful in speaking for ‘the few’, and making ‘the many’ (including we who come later) indebted to his self-sacrifice. Its full title, ‘Polliciti Meliora’ – Latin for ‘Having Promised Better Things’ – implies that the poet may die in order to create a better world. A vision of progress inspires Frank, and his willingness to sacrifice himself is its warranty. Through his courage he also passes on to us his own burden of caring for the world we share. This poem, too, is a device whereby the dead speak directly to the living.
The poem’s ‘books and flowers’ are not soldierly weapons; and the two women who knew him best at Oxford in 1938–9 both thought Frank an improbable soldier: there is no record of his ever having fired a weapon in anger. Iris Murdoch told him that there was no bitterness in his letters; and after his death she wrote that ‘He didn’t seem in the least framed to be a soldier.’ Nor did many others: joining up to be part of an amateur, civilian army also makes him typical of his generation.
Literature was one theme Frank and his parents corresponded about. Here, since few censors read Homer, was first of all a way of encoding information. Iris Murdoch could ask in 1943 whether he was ‘anywhere near the precincts of the foam-born lady’, knowing he would recognise the reference to Aphrodite’s legendary birth out of the sea near Cyprus; while in his final letter to her in April 1944 he allusively implied his location on the Serbian–Bulgarian border. A dictionary he was carrying once stopped an enemy bullet and saved his life. And a volume of the great Roman poet Catullus was found on him after his death. But literature also enshrined all that he cared most about; he believed that the arts were the focal point of human living, and literature paramount. He fought a ‘poet’s war’.
He was that extremely rare combination, an intellectual with a heart, a brilliant man capable of emotion. Formidably clever and observant, he was, as he put it, ‘more inclined to love than analyse’. One fascination of his story is watching the gentle scholar with his books and flowers evolve into an adventurous soldier. His poems, many letters and his journals talk to us still – as they did to his family – with a startling intimacy.