Frank Thompson (SOE officer)

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For other people named William Thompson, see William Thompson (disambiguation).
Frank Thompson
Second World War  †
RelationsE. P. Thompson (brother)

Second World War
.

Early life, family and education

Thompson was born in Darjeeling, Bengal Presidency, British India to a British missionary family. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford.[1] Freeman Dyson, a fellow pupil at Winchester, has described Thompson's extraordinary facility with diverse languages and that "Frank was the largest, the loudest, the most uninhibited and the most brilliant." Dyson "learned from him more than I learned from anybody else at the school".[2]

His younger brother,

E.P. Thompson, was an English historian, socialist and peace campaigner.[3]

Second World War

In 1939, while studying at the

Second Lieutenant into the Royal Artillery on 2 March 1940.[4]
He served in England, North Africa, Syria, Iraq, Sicily, Serbia and Bulgaria. He was part of the Special Operations Executive.[5]

On 25 January 1944, along with three other

executed by firing squad in the nearby village of Litakovo.[6][2]

Post War

After the war and the establishment of a Communist government in Bulgaria, the nearby villages of Livage, Lipata, Tsarevi Stragi, Malak Babul, Babul and Zavoya were merged and renamed to Thompson (Томпсън) in the British officer's honour. Similarly, the railway station at Prokopnik, the site of a fierce battle, became "Major Thompson Station".[2] Thompson Hill in Antarctica is also named after Frank Thompson.

Biographies

E.P. Thompson wrote two books about his brother, the first with his mother, There is a Spirit in Europe: A Memoir of Frank Thompson. The second, Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944, appeared in 1996.[3][7][8]

References

Footnotes
  1. ^ Simms, Brendan (7 July 1997). "A major, a martyr, a train station". Times Higher Education. Retrieved 11 January 2015.
  2. ^
    ISBN 0465016774
    .
  3. ^ a b Rattenbury, A., 1997. Convenient Death of a Hero. Review of Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944 by Thompson, E. P. London Review of Books [Online] vol. 19 no. 9 pp. 12–13. Available from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n09/arnold-rattenbury/convenient-death-of-a-hero [Retrieved 2 March 2011].
  4. ^ "No. 34806". The London Gazette (Supplement). 5 March 1940. p. 1367.
  5. ISBN 978-0-8223-5835-0
  6. ^ Frank Thompson's grave in Litakovo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEHtLqB_tM4
  7. ISBN 0-85036-457-4
  8. ^ Brisby, Liliana (29 March 1997). "The ups and downs of Major Thompson". The Spectator.
Bibliography

Further reading
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