Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Rise of Guerrilla Journalism by Patrick Cockburn.
Claud Cockburn was one of the great journalists of the 20th century, an irreverent anti-careerist, steeped in the politics of Central Europe, happiest courting risk, coiner in the 1930s of the expression “the Cliveden Set” to describe the high-minded group who spent their weekends with the Astors and believed Hitler could be conciliated.
He wrote several volumes of autobiography, on which he drew for the brilliant Cockburn Sums Up, published in 1981 with a foreword by his lifelong friend Graham Greene.
That volume never palls. Often I take it down when I wish to remind myself of what he wrote, say, about the factual heresy:
“To hear people talking about the facts you would think that they lay about like pieces of gold ore in the Yukon days waiting to be picked up – arduously, it is true, but still definitely and visibly – by strenuous prospectors whose subsequent problem was only to get them to market.
“Such a view is evidently and dangerously naive. There are no such facts. Or if there are, they are meaningless and entirely ineffective; they might, indeed, just as well not be lying about at all until the prospector – the journalist – puts them into relation with other facts: presents them, in other words. Then they become as much a part of a pattern created by him as if he were writing a novel.”
Like Greene, Cockburn saw the limitations of the liberal world view: the assumption that if one believes with sufficient fervour in democracy and human rights, “impregnably armoured by…good intentions” (as Greene puts it in The Quiet American), one can turn anywhere, Afghanistan even, into a liberal democracy.
This outlook connects Cockburn, who in the 1930s became a Communist, to the High Tories with whom he got on so well. They had a shared contempt for liberal cant.
Cockburn’s youngest son, Patrick, has now written an excellent account of him, supplying much new or buried information about his two marriages, his long relationship with Jean Ross, on whom Christopher Isherwood modelled Sally Bowles, the files kept on him by MI5 etc.
This account also reminds us of things we perhaps knew but had forgotten. Soon after Cockburn arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1922, he was called on by his cousin Evelyn Waugh (they were great-grandsons of Lord Cockburn, celebrated Scottish judge). Waugh later wrote:
“I found a tall, spectacled young man with an air of Budapest rather than Berkhamsted [in Hertfordshire, where Cockburn was at school]. His father had been there for the last two years on diplomatic business and Claud was already captivated by the absurdities of Central Europe.”
Waugh’s letters and diaries confirm that for the next five years, he and Claud were constantly in each other’s company. We may think of Waugh as the highest of High Tories, but in his early novels he was an anarchist who set off a series of tremendous explosions under various ludicrous members of the Establishment.
So too, once he had got into his stride, did Cockburn. His father, Henry, was, we learn in this book, “the kind of independent-minded High Tory, with an overriding objection to injustice, whom his son always liked”.
Henry worked for a quarter of a century in China as a consular and then Foreign Office official. He was fluent in Chinese and was besieged in the British Legation for 55 days during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. A messenger he dispatched out of Peking was captured and crucified.
Claud was born in Peking in 1904 and sent back to Scotland at the age of two with a Chinese amah. His father had been posted to Korea, where he protested vociferously against the maltreatment by the Japanese invaders of a Korean journalist, Yang Ki-Tak, who was held in a prison reminiscent of the Black Hole of Calcutta, “in which British captives had been confined during the Indian Mutiny” (a rare slip by the author of this book – that dungeon had become scandalous a century earlier, in 1756).
For Henry to take such a strong anti-Japanese line was inconvenient for the Foreign Office, from which he proceeded to resign. After the the First World War, he came out of retirement to work for a time in Budapest, where Claud joined him during the school holidays.
To Claud, Patrick observes, what happened between the wars in Central Europe seemed more real than what was going on in England. In 1927 he arrived in Berlin, made himself useful to Norman Ebbutt, correspondent for The Times, and was soon being taken by him to drink beer with the German Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, “in whom at that time Liberals believed”, but of whom Claud later wrote:
“He was one of those Germans who had, at a fairly early date, discovered that the way to get away with being a good German was to pretend to be a good European. He had a wonderful act in which he pretended to be not only fat, which he was, but good-hearted and a little muzzy with beer into the bargain. In reality he was as quick and sharp as a buzz-saw, and if being a sharp, fast-moving buzz-saw was not enough, he would hit you from behind with a hammer…
“I think it was Stresemann, sitting under a fruit tree, talking about European unity, who first sowed in my mind the doubt as to whether my warm-hearted enthusiasm on behalf of the victims of the World War, my romantic belief in the nationalist movements of Central Europe (nationalist even when they were disguised as the resurgence of Central European democracy), and my conviction that the Treaty of Versailles had been a disastrous diplomatic crime, really covered all the facts.”
Cockburn was soon on the staff of The Times, where he spent a short time as a sub-editor in London and took part in the nightly competition to produce the most boring headline, won only once by himself with “Small Earthquake in Chile: Not Many Dead” – a headline no one has been able to track down.
He had made it a condition of joining the paper that he would be sent to New York, for he wished to see whether the great American boom of the 1920s meant the Marxist analysis of capitalism was simply wrong. He arrived there just in time to witness the Wall Street Crash, and proceeded to Washington, where the correspondent, Willmott Lewis, who became the most important of his mentors on The Times, told him:
“I think it well to remember that when writing for the newspapers, we are working for an elderly lady in Hastings who has two cats of which she is passionately fond. Unless our stuff can successfully compete for her interest with those cats, it is no good.”
One may note a more respectful attitude towards ladies with cats than has been expressed by Donald Trump’s running mate.
In 1932 Cockburn married an American journalist, Hope Hale, but he had already told her he intended to leave his job and return to Europe. Geoffrey Dawson, Editor of The Times, made every effort to talk him out of resigning, assuring him that a mere difference of political opinion was no reason to do so, for “The Times sits so firmly on the political fence”.
Cockburn would not sit on the fence. He was in the process of becoming a Communist. I remember Brian Wormald (1912-2005), distinguished Peterhouse historian, explaining that in the Cambridge of the 1930s, one became either a Catholic or a Communist.
Back in Berlin, Cockburn found the situation even more disastrous than he had expected, with storm troopers smashing their way through the centre of town. Friends warned him his name was on a Nazi blacklist and in January 1933 he left for Vienna 24 hours before Hitler became Chancellor.
He returned to London in order to start a newsletter, The Week, to publish stories about the Nazis the mainstream press was ignoring. Under Dawson, The Times praised Hitler’s “moderation and common sense”. The New York Times imagined Hitler could be “tamed”.
Cockburn saw a vast opportunity. On 29th March 1933 he sent out the first issue of The Week. In circulation terms it was a disaster: he was working from an out of date list of people who might be interested, and received only seven subscriptions.
But in June 1933, Ramsay MacDonald, the British Prime Minister, was angered by criticism in The Week of the World Economic Conference which he had convened in London in order to bring the economic crisis to an end, and was touchy enough to call a press conference at which he denounced and displayed a copy of Cockburn’s newsletter.
This helped put The Week on the map. In January 1934 an MI5 officer reported:
“Sometimes COCKBURN seems to have been singularly well-informed on matters of a confidential Government nature.”
Before long, The Week was being widely quoted by other correspondents. A well-informed group from the continent gave Cockburn stories their own papers would not publish, but which they could quote in their reports once he had done so.
He was unafraid of legal proceedings because his outfit had no money, just a primitive duplicating machine which he was buying on hire purchase. During the Spanish Civil War he nearly got himself killed, both on the battlefield and by execution behind the lines, and fell out with George Orwell: a civil war within the Left.
Cockburn thought the only hope of standing up to Hitler lay with the Communists. He and they failed, but everyone else did too, and it may be said in his defence that he was an insubordinate Communist, and got the point of the Nazis at a time when Dawson was anxiously censoring Ebbutt’s reports from Berlin for fear of upsetting Hitler.
In November 1937, Lord Halifax visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden, leading to reports in the press of a proposed Anglo-German agreement. According to The Week, the British Government proposed that “Germany would offer a ten year ‘Colonial truce’ to Britain in exchange for a free hand to attack countries in Eastern Europe”.
Cockburn wrote that “the plan as a concrete proposal was first got into usable diplomatic shape at a party at the Astors’ place at Cliveden on the weekend of October 23rd and 24th”.
According to Cockburn, his first two articles on this theme had “about as much impact as a crumpet falling on a carpet”, but the third version, published on 22 December, “went off like a rocket”, which he thought was because the words “Cliveden Set” were used in the headline.
A plain-clothes police officer reported that “Cockburn is a heavy drinker of whisky”. He was an adornment of his profession. Those who suppose that politics can be reduced to an ideology will continue to denounce him, but Tories of an anarchist bent will go on laughing at his jokes, and should buy this book.
