Claud Cockburn

There is a story that during his spell as a sub-editor on The Times, Cockburn and colleagues had a competition to devise the most accurate yet boring headline. Cockburn claimed the honours with "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many Dead." However, this is apocryphal; no copy of The Times featuring this headline has been located.<br /><br /> Under the name 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. In the late 1930s, Cockburn published a private newspaper The Week that was highly critical of Neville Chamberlain and was secretly subsidized by the Soviet government 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. Read Less

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."<br /><br /> Among his novels were The Horses, Ballantyne's Folly, Jericho Road, and Beat the Devil (originally under the pseudonym James Helvick), which was made into a film directed by John Huston with script credit to Truman Capote (the title was later used by Cockburn's son Alexander for his regular column in The Nation).<br /><br /> He published Bestseller, an exploration of English popular fiction, Aspects of English History (1957), The Devil's Decade (1973), his history of the 1930s, and Union Power (1976).<br /><br /> His first volume of memoirs was published as In Time of Trouble (1956) in the UK and as A Discord of Trumpets in the U.S.. This was followed by Crossing the Line (1958), and A View from the West (1961). 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. Read Less