The Last Bread, A Play in One Act.

London: Labour Publishing Company, 1926 (May).

Bates's first published book was issued as part of the "Plays for the People Series." Dedication: "To Edmund E. Kirby [an influential teacher] in deep gratitude." Bates later referred to the play as "my angry-young-man broadside" in which "I had caustically poured some of my bitterness about the post-war twenties, not having read Knut Hamsun's Hunger for nothing...[I expressed] my bitterness at the cankering poverty and dole-queues of the twenties in a searing one-act play" (The Vanished World, p. 188; The Blossoming World, pp. 8, 24). In the play Jim, on strike from work, his wife Emma, and their daughter Rose are reduced to their last sixpence, candle, and morsel of bread.