Ralph Bates (writer)

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).

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".

Bates immediately enlisted with the government forces, initially working in propaganda and information services, and made rank of political commissar.

[3] 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.

[8] After the end of the Spanish Civil War, Bates moved to Mexico, where he lived for a number of years, publishing The Fields of Paradise in 1940.