Graham Greene wrote once that Claud Cockburn was one of the two greatest journalists of the 20th century, the other being GK Chesterton. However debatable that might be, Cockburn remains today an icon for campaigning journalists, someone who single-handedly, using a mimeographed news sheet, fought fascism and appeasement in 1930s Europe.
He wrote several rattling-good memoirs too, the last of which was titled Cockburn Sums Up. This new retrospective, written by his son Patrick, himself a first-class journalist, is also a rattling-good read. It provides a new summing-up of his father’s brilliant and manic press career and his role in the invention of “guerrilla journalism”, drawing on unpublished material, including 26 bulky files compiled by MI5 agents who spied on Claud.
Claud Cockburn came from a noted aristocratic and literary family; he was a cousin of the novelist Evelyn Waugh and a distant descendant of the British general who burned down the White House. As with many Oxford contemporaries in the late 1920s, the rise of fascism in Europe propelled him to the political left, and he embraced the Communist Party as the only organised resistance.
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At the age of 23 he more or less stumbled into journalism by turning up at the Berlin bureau of the Times and offering to help out. His dispatches were so impressive that he was invited to join as a subeditor, prior to a posting in New York. He is remembered for winning a competition among fellow subeditors for the most boring headline, with “Small Earthquake in Chile, Not many dead”, though no copy of the Times has ever been found in which it appeared.
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In New York, another of his utterances entered journalism folklore: “Believe nothing until it is officially denied” – his reaction to JP Morgan’s assurance that all would be well on the eve of the Wall Street crash.
Always restless, and believing the world “was sliding swiftly into a catastrophic crisis”, he shocked colleagues by quitting the Times and going back to Germany to challenge fascism by word and deed. It didn’t last long. He had to flee in 1933 to escape the Nazis when Hitler came to power.
Penniless but fired up with antifascist zeal, Claud returned to London and within weeks launched a news sheet, The Week. Despite its tiny circulation, it became eagerly read by opinion makers throughout Europe for the scoops obtained from sympathetic ministers, civil servants, foreign contacts and journalists, who fed him material they could not get published elsewhere.
His revelations maddened British politicians, in particular the thin-skinned prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, who bolstered The Week’s circulation by furiously warning newspapers to pay no heed to “the false prophet of disaster”. His vivid descriptions of atrocities in Germany similarity infuriated the Nazi leadership, especially Goebbels, who accused him of journalistic freebooting.
As appeasement reached its height, Cockburn exposed and shamed the secretive admirers of Hitler in British society, who often met and dined in Lord Astor’s Thames-side mansion at Cliveden. He called them the “Cliveden Set”, a term which was picked up worldwide, eventually coming to represent neo-fascist conspiracy in high places.
The duty of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable
Cockburn always wanted to be where the action was and in 1936 that was Spain, where General Franco began a military assault on the leftist republican government. He joined the international communists and anarchists flowing into Spain to join the fight, and provided battlefront despatches for The Week and also the communist Daily Worker, using the pseudonym Frank Pitcairn.
Here he freely used journalism as a weapon, on one occasion making up a story about a successful revolt against Franco in Spanish Morocco. He had never been there, but he and his colleague Otto Katz described the ebb and flow of street battles with the use of maps and guide books. The “great victory” was picked up worldwide and persuaded a wavering French government to release a big consignment of field guns held up at the Spanish border, which was the whole point of the exercise. The weapons enabled the republican side to win a battle on the Catalan frontier.
Cockburn suffered reputational damage when this came out, in one of his memoirs, but he was unrepentant as he saw all wars as information wars. Moreover, the New York Times had around the time been suppressing accurate military information from their Madrid correspondent because of the paper’s political prejudice. Invention and suppression, it proves, are two sides of the fake-news coin.
The second World War changed everything for Cockburn. The Week’s antifascist crusade now became that of the western powers. He continued writing for the Daily Worker, which became less popular later on, in Cold War Britain, and drew more attention from MI5.
Cockburn moved to Youghal in Co Cork with his family. In order to continue plying his trade, he made use of a bewildering array of pseudonyms to write for various British and international publications. He returned to London occasionally and became a founding member of Private Eye, editing an edition which caused uproar in Whitehall by disclosing the name of the head of MI6, Sir Dick White.
Under his own name, Cockburn also wrote a regular column for The Irish Times, having been engaged by then-editor Douglas Gageby, whose own maxim, displayed under the glass top of his desk, summed up Cockburn’s passionate belief: “The duty of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Here he was on friendly ground as the paper almost invariably took “a more original and less sceptical view than did the British press of goings-on across the Irish Sea and in the world in general”.
It is obviously challenging for a journalist son to write about a journalist father, but Patrick manages to remain detached while clearly immensely proud of Claud’s career as a determined, practical and even ruthless revolutionary, who saw government as “a force for evil unless permanently battered by opposition”. Patrick came to fully appreciate this contention in 1972 when he was studying in Belfast, and saw how the British government’s military intervention was making a bad situation worse.
The news landscape is much more complex and accessible today, but the lesson from Cockburn’s passionate, life-long efforts to “afflict the comfortable” is that the journalistic tactics he developed in the 1930s are even more relevant in today’s equally threatening world, in order to combat the media monopoly of the powerful and wealthy and the falsehoods peddled and truths omitted by partisan media.
Conor O’Clery is a former Irish Times foreign correspondent
