Another doomed youth

It is very possible that unless you are a Bulgarian or a Wykehamist or an SOE buff or ideally all three you will not have heard of Frank Thompson. Somewhere outside Sofia there is a railway station and a kinder-gartern named after him, but apart from one touching but derivative poem, printed in the Times on VJ Day 1945 and regularly anthologised since, Peter Conradi’s ‘very English hero’ is hardly known here at all.

William Frank Thompson was born in Darjeeling in 1920, the son of a Methodist missionary and the grandson and great-grandson on his mother’s side of a formidable dynasty of American Presbyterian missionaries to Syria. When Frank was just three his father left India to take up  a teaching post in Bengali at Oxford, and the young Frank grew up in the Islip of Robert Graves and among the poets and vegetarians of Boars Hill, the precociously gifted  and privileged child of a privileged world that was about as remote from his narrow Methodist background as it is possible to imagine.