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Concept
Ralph Bates (writer)
Summary
Ralph Bates (3 November 1899 – 26 November 2000) was an English novelist, writer, journalist and political activist. He is best known for his writings on pre–Civil War Spain.
Bates was born in Swindon, England in 1899 and as a teenager worked at the Great Western Railway factory. In 1917, he enlisted in the British Army and served in World War I, training soldiers to prepare for poison gas attacks.
After returning from the war, he began to travel, to France and then, in 1923, to Spain, where he had wanted to visit since boyhood (his great-grandfather, a steamer captain, was buried in Cadiz). He stayed in the country permanently from then on, travelling and doing odd jobs. He published his first work, Sierra, a collection of short stories, in 1933; in 1934, a novel, Lean Men. 1936 saw the publication of Bates's best-known work, The Olive Field, about olive workers in southern Spain. The book received good critical notices in the United States. For such writing, Bates has been hailed as a master of the "proletarian novel", alongside Tressell, MacGill and Grassic Gibbon, a genre offering "a new set of narrative concerns and characters".
When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Bates was walking in the Pyrenees with his wife Winifred. Bates immediately enlisted with the government forces, initially working in propaganda and information services, and made rank of political commissar. His wife worked with him as a journalist and broadcaster in the Ministry of Information, then joined the British Medical Unit in June 1937. In October 1936 he visited the British Tom Mann Centuria, arranging replacement of their commander and convincing them to join other English-speaking volunteers in the Thälmann Battalion of the XII International Brigade, training in Albacete. Later that year he travelled to the United States to raise awareness of the plight of the Spanish Republic. Bates was briefly arrested for arms smuggling when traveling through France back to Spain in February 1937.
Official source
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