Frank Thompson, brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, was born on 17 August 1920 in Darjeeling, India. His family returned to England in 1923, settling near Oxford. He was educated at Winchester College, where he began writing poetry, and New College, Oxford. While at Oxford he met and fell in love with Iris Murdoch who influenced him to join the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1939.
I staggered home and lay on a sofa… announcing to the world that I had met a stunner of a girl and was joining the Communist party for love of her
Thompson joined the British Army as a volunteer on 2nd September 1939, training with No. 122 Officer Cadet Training Regiment before being commissioned as 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery on 2nd March 1940. In July of the same year he was posted to GHQ Liaison Regiment, trading in intelligence, reconnaissance and the monitoring of communications across the Middle East. In September 1943 he joined the Special Operations Executive in Cairo.
On 25th January 1944 Thompson and 3 other commandos were sent on a parachute mission to establish a link between the British staff and the Bulgarian partisans. Thompson and a group of partisans were captured during a clash with the Bulgarian Gendarmerie in the village of Batuliya near Sofia in late May 1944; Thompson was tried as a spy and was executed on 10th June 1944. He is buried alongside 11 Bulgarians in the village of Litakovo.
Frank Thompson’s Poetry
Resources for Frank Thompson
Peter J. Capaldi, A Very English Hero: The Making of Frank Thompson (2013) Bloomsbury
Kristen Ghodsee, Who Was Frank Thompson?
Kristen Ghodsee’s video about Thompson on YouTube
Photograph By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36577021