Sam Thompson
1916 - 1965
Sam Thompson was born in Belfast and began woking as a painter in the shipyards at the age of 14. Sam Hanna Bell encouraged him to write and produced Brush in Hand and other early plays for radio. He also acted in several Ulster Group Theatre productions. He was a lifelong trade union activist and a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. As well as the plays listed here, he wrote Cemented with Love (1963), a television play about an election campaign; and The Masquerade, an unproduced play that was discovered after his death.