SWINDON HERITAGE – Winter 2016 – 54
55 – Winter 2016 – SWINDON HERITAGE
Fitter, author,
soldier... spy?
As efforts are made
to revive the memory
of the ‘forgotten’
author Ralph Bates,
GRAHAM CARTER
looks into the
enigmatic life of this
Swindon-born man
N
ot many people from Swindon – as far
as we know – have merited their own
dossier at MI5. But Ralph Bates did.
The author, who died in 2000, never did
turn out to be a threat to the country’s
security, and his intelligence file is now
downloadable from the internet, but he
nevertheless remains an enigmatic figure,
whose story and character we may never
get to the bottom of.
Swindon historian Mike Yates has spent
the last few years trying to unravel the
facts behind a man who was nationally
revered as a writer, rubbed shoulders with
some of the greatest literary figures of his
era, and is probably the prime example of
the call to arms that idealistic writers and
Opposite: hardback covers of Ralph Bates’ artists felt when they volunteered to fight
in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, but
works. Top: Ralph Bates during the
whose own life was as complex as any
Spanish Civil War.
hero in any of his novels.
(All images courtesy of Mike Yates)
Born in Morse Street on November 3,
1899, at first Ralph Bates was as typical a
son of Swindon as it was possible to be.
His grandfather was an engine fitter in
the Railway Works, and his father a
‘turner, fitter and lathe man’, so it was
virtually inevitable that he would follow
them both ‘inside’, and he duly became an
apprentice fitter, turner and erector in B
Shop in 1916.
With no mountains to climb locally, an
incident from his early days in the factory
is said to be a precursor of a later love of
mountaineering. According to the story, he
“climbed up the drive belts and control
shafts of the machines after they had been
turned off for the weekend, to the
overhead roof struts, before crawling along
from strut to strut across the shop and
returning to the floor level on the other
side of O Shop.”
SWINDON HERITAGE – Winter 2016 – 56
From page 55
It certainly shows that young Ralph’s
mind was not necessarily on matters close
to home, and although he was said to be
always proud of having been an employee
of the Great Western Railway, he later
came to look back on Swindon as “a
spectrumless town”.
Ironically, the wanderlust and curiosity
about the outside world that shaped his
life was perhaps as the result of the
enlightened approach to life and education
prevalent in Swindon at the time. He
played the church organ from an early age
and was still a schoolboy when he joined a
local reading group.
It was while a member of the group that
he read a book by EH Spender, called
Through the High Pyrenees, which sparked
a lifelong interest in travel, and Spain in
particular.
Swindon Works also gave him firsthand experience of the lot of the working
man, and a passion for socialism and trade
unions worldwide, which would form the
basis of many of his books.
But it was his failed attempt to join the
Royal Flying Corps in 1916 that may have
had an even greater impact on his political
outlook.
“I never flew. After nine weeks of
training in a Cadet Wing I was washed out
at a medical examination,” he recalled,
Time Magazine claimed: ‘Bates’s
Spanish Civil War stories are
better than Hemingway’s’
adding: “I was not intelligent enough to
know that no working man would ever get
a commission... I was not a gentleman and
one or two courageous snobs in the Wing
had let me know it.”
He talked of this being “the beginning
of my alienation”.
In December 1917, a year into his
railway apprenticeship, Bates found
himself in the First World War, drafted into
the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment,
where he trained soldiers how to deal with
poison gas attacks.
After the war he returned to Swindon,
where he probably witnessed – and may
even have been involved in – an infamous
riot of 1919, when disgruntled veterans
objected to money being
spent on a flagpole while
they struggled to find work
(as featured in our Autumn
2013 edition).
By the mid-1920s,
Bates was putting his
own thoughts down on
Ralph Bates’ biographer, Michael Yates, at home in Old Town
paper, in poems and essays, and mixing
with members of the Communist Party of
Great Britain (CPGB).
Around the same time he probably also
made his first trips to Spain, perhaps
during recessions, when Swindon
railwaymen found themselves laid off.
Since Mike Yates, who lives in Old
Town, Swindon, published a biography in
2014, he has uncovered more fragments of
Bates’s remarkable story, including that
MI5 file.
Mike says we can find more clues to the
author’s life if we read between the lines of
one of his most successful novels, The
Dolphin in the Wood. This proverbial tale
of a fish out of water is considered at least
semi-autobiographical.
A document dated May 2, 1930
shows him finally
resigning
from the
Works, and
he headed
for Spain,
where he
spent some
time organising a union in
a fish cannery,
before settling,
now married, in
the Pyrenees,
and becoming a
published
novelist.
His first book,
Sierra, was
published in 1933,
followed by Lean
Men, a year later, in
which the narrator
leaves Wiltshire for
Spain and finds a
country in turmoil.
His only work of
non-fiction, a
biography of the composer Franz Schubert,
followed, before The Olive Field, which
was arguably his best novel, was published
in 1936.
That was to be a critical year in not just
Bates’s life, but also world history.
By this time he was already being
monitored by security services back home,
and it was noted that he was among those
attending a meeting of the International
Association of Writers for the Defence of
Culture in London in June 1936, alongside
57 – Winter 2016 – SWINDON HERITAGE
the likes of HG Wells and Cecil DayLewis.
The following month he was back in
Spain, on a walking holiday, when the
storm broke.
General Franco masterminded a fascist
coup against the democratically elected
Spanish Government on July 17, 1936, and
the country collapsed into civil war.
As Ralph and his wife, Winifred, cut
short their holiday and headed for
Barcelona, he immediately
joined the United Communist
and Socialist Party of
Catalonia (PSUC), thus
becoming the first of a
stream of writers who would
join what came to be known
as the International
Brigades.
They included WH
Auden, George Orwell and
Laurie Lee; Stephen
Spender and Ernest
Hemingway also found
themselves there as
journalists and
observers.
But while Spender,
for instance, called it
“a war of poets” and
others “a war of
ideas”, Bates, who
already had a fluent
command of Spanish
and even local
dialects, was in
uniform, and
fighting on the front
line.
His Spanish
allies in the fight
against the fascists
called Bates
‘El Fantastico’
because of his
boundless
energy and
because he
seemed to
require little
sleep.
As well as
being the first
of these conscience-led
writers on the scene, in his nineties he
would be honoured by the East German
government as the last of them still alive.
The complex course of the war was
mirrored by the political situation, and the
disunity of Franco’s opposition was
probably its downfall in the end. While the
Nazis in Germany provided military
support to Spanish fascists, the opposition
looked in vain for support from outside.
Bates was briefly despatched to New
York to try to whip-up support, and also
travelled to Canada and Mexico during the
war, but he was soon back in Spain, where
he was a founding editor of a republican
newspaper called The Volunteer for
Liberty.
His most harrowing experience of the
war was still to come, however, and he
found himself surviving the Battle of
Brunete, in July 1937, which claimed the
lives of around 300 British volunteers.
In all, an estimated 2,000 British
volunteers fought for the Spanish
republicans, of whom 500 were killed,
including Swindon
man
Percy Williams, whose
story was featured in the Autumn 2014
edition of this magazine.
Also taking up the cause was Ralph
Bates’s younger brother, Ronald. He
contracted typhoid and was evacuated on
the last International Brigades train to
leave Barcelona in December 1938, a
month ahead of the fall of the city, which
effectively ended the war.
Ronald returned to Swindon and his
Quarry Road home, but Ralph probably
never came home, eventually settling,
instead, in New York, where he worked as
a writer and journalist.
This was despite the post-war paranoia
in the United States over supposed
infiltration by communists, when the
authorities might have been expected to be
suspicious of his previous political
allegiance and his monitoring by MI5.
He had continued to write during the
civil war, and another book, Sirocco and
Other Stories, published afterwards, in
1939, recalled incidents from it.
A review in Time
Magazine said:
“Ten years ago
Ralph Bates was
just another
energetic, downand-out, classconscious working
man, while Ernest
Hemingway was an
energetic, up-andcoming self-conscious
writing man. Today,
Bates’s Spanish Civil
War stories are better
than Hemingway’s.”
What some consider
to be his greatest work,
The Dolphin in the
Wood, was published in
1950, and although he
had seen and experienced
much since leaving, his
memory of Swindon could
not have been dimmed,
because the story is largely
set in the fictional north
Wiltshire village of
Wellingdon Parva.
He eventually retired with
his second wife, Eve, to the
Greek island of Naxos, but
still kept an apartment in New
York, and it was there that he
died on November 26, 2000,
aged 101.
In 2014 Mike Yates wrote:
“Today Ralph Bates is all but
forgotten, which is sad because
he had so much to say about the
world that he knew and cared
for.”
The biography that those
words appeared in was the first
step to reviving his memory, and the
people of his home town will soon be able
to do their bit to remember a famous son of
Swindon by supporting a plan to install a
blue plaque in the town to honour him.
Born and brought up in Swindon, the
dolphin may have left the wood to make
his mark on the wider world, but hopefully
his home town can make sure his
extraordinary life is remembered after all.