Sam Thompson (playwright)

Sam(uel) Thompson (21 May 1916 – 15 February 1965) was a Northern Irish playwright best known for his controversial plays Over the Bridge, which exposes sectarianism, and Cemented with Love, which focuses on political corruption. His works fall into the social realist genre but are distinct in their dramatisation of Northern Irish issues; they were ground-breaking in documenting sectarian violence before the eruption of the Troubles.

Born and educated in a working-class Protestant area in Ballymacarrett, Belfast, Thompson was the seventh of eight children of a lamp-lighter and part-time sexton of St Clement's Church. He spent most of his working life as a painter in the Belfast shipyards, starting aged 14 at Harland and Wolff and working for Belfast Corporation after the Second World War, and much of his writing draws on these experiences.

Thompson was a lifelong socialist and a committed trades unionist; he became a shop steward at the Belfast Corporation. His opposition to sectarian discrimination was to cost him his job. He stood unsuccessfully for parliament as the Labour party candidate for the rural South Down constituency in 1964.

He married May Thompson in 1947. He suffered a heart attack in June 1961, dying suddenly from a second heart attack in 1965.

Thompson was encouraged to begin writing for radio in 1955, aged 39, by novelist and radio producer Sam Hanna Bell, who overheard him telling stories of shipyard life in a pub. His first piece, the radio documentary feature Brush in Hand about shipyard apprenticeship, was broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland in 1956.

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