Claud Cockburn
Francis Claud Cockburn was a British journalist. His saying "believe nothing until it has been officially denied" is widely quoted in journalistic studies, although he did not claim credit for originating it. He was the second cousin, once removed, of novelists Alec Waugh and Evelyn Waugh. He lived at Brook Lodge, Youghal, County Cork, Ireland. Cockburn was "a leading British Communist Party member" and, by the 1940s, he was reputed to be a prominent figure in "the Comintern in Western Europe."
Life and work
Cockburn was born in Peking, China, on 12 April 1904, the son of Henry Cockburn, a British Consul General, and wife Elizabeth Gordon. His paternal great-grandfather was Scottish judge/biographer Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn. Cockburn was educated at Berkhamsted School, Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, and Keble College, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. At Oxford he was part of the Hypocrites' Club.Career in journalism
He became a journalist with The Times and worked as a foreign correspondent in Germany and the United States before resigning in 1933 to start his own newsletter, The Week. It has been claimed that during his spell as a sub-editor on The Times, Cockburn and colleagues competed to write the dullest printed headline. Cockburn only once claimed the honours, with "Small Earthquake in Chile, Not many dead". No copy of The Times featuring this headline has been located although it did finally appear, decades after the recollection, in Not the Times, a spoof version of the newspaper produced by several journalists at The Times in 1979 during the paper's year-long absence due to an industrial dispute.The Spanish Civil War
Under the alias Frank Pitcairn, Cockburn contributed to the British communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. In 1936, Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, asked him to cover the Spanish Civil War. He joined the Fifth Regiment to report the war as a soldier. While in Spain, he published Reporter in Spain. According to the editor of a volume of his writings on Spain, Cockburn formed a personal relationship with Mikhail Koltsov, "then the foreign editor of Pravda and, in Cockburn's view, 'the confidant and mouthpiece and direct agent of Stalin in Spain'."Cockburn's reporting in Spain was heavily criticized by George Orwell in his 1938 work Homage to Catalonia. Orwell accused Cockburn of being under the control of Stalinist handlers and was critical of Cockburn's depiction of the Barcelona May Days during which anti-Stalinist communists and anarchists were caught and executed by NKVD operatives. Specifically, in order to undermine anti-Stalinist factions on the Republican side, Cockburn falsely reported that anti-Stalinist figurehead Andrés Nin—who had been tortured and executed by the NKVD—was alive and well after escaping to fascist territory.
According to writer Adam Hochschild, Cockburn functioned as Stalinist propagandist during the war "on Party orders". In one instance, Cockburn claimed to have been an eyewitness to a battle which he invented out of whole cloth. This hoax was intended to persuade the French prime minister that Francisco Franco's forces were weaker than they appeared, and thus make the Republicans seem worthier candidates for help in obtaining arms. The ruse worked, and the French border was opened for a previously stalled artillery shipment.
Opposition to Appeasement
In the late 1930s, Cockburn published a private newspaper The Week that was highly critical of Neville Chamberlain. Cockburn maintained in the 1960s that much of the information in The Week was leaked to him by Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office.At the same time, Cockburn claimed that MI5 was spying on him because of The Week; but the British historian D.C. Watt argued that it was more likely that, if anyone was spying on Cockburn, it was the Special Branch of Scotland Yard who were less experienced in this work than MI5. Cockburn was an opponent of appeasement before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In a 1937 article in The Week, Cockburn coined the term Cliveden set to describe what he alleged to be an upper-class pro-German group that exercised influence behind the scenes. The Week ceased publication shortly after the war began.
Watt alleges that the information printed in The Week included rumours, some of which suited Moscow's interests. Watt used as an example the claim The Week made in February–March 1939 that German troops were concentrating in Klagenfurt for an invasion of Yugoslavia, which Watt says had no basis in reality.
After the Second World War
In 1947, Cockburn moved to Ireland and lived at Ardmore, County Waterford, and continued to contribute to newspapers and journals, including a weekly column for The Irish Times. In the Irish Times he famously stated that "Wherever there is a stink in international affairs, you will find that Henry Kissinger has recently visited".Among his novels were Beat the Devil, The Horses, Ballantyne's Folly, and Jericho Road. Beat the Devil was made into a 1953 film by director John Huston, who paid Cockburn £3,000 for the rights to the book and screenplay. Cockburn collaborated with Huston on the early drafts of the script, but the credit went to Truman Capote. The title was later used by Cockburn's son Alexander for his regular column in The Nation.
He published Bestseller, an exploration of English popular fiction, Aspects of English History, The Devil's Decade, his history of the 1930s, and Union Power.
His first volume of memoirs was published as In Time of Trouble in the UK and as A Discord of Trumpets in the U.S.. This was followed by Crossing the Line, and A View from the West. Revised, these were published by Penguin as I, Claud... in 1967. Again revised and shortened, with a new chapter, they were republished as Cockburn Sums Up shortly before he died.
Family
Claud Cockburn married three times: all three of his wives were also journalists.- Hope Hale Davis: child Claudia Cockburn Flanders
- Jean Ross : child Sarah Caudwell Cockburn, author of detective stories
- Patricia Byron in 1940, daughter of Major John Bernard Arbuthnot and Olive Blake, : children Alexander, Andrew, Patrick.