The radical journalist behind one notorious headline

In Believe Nothing Until It is Officially Denied, Patrick Cockburn tells the pacy life of his father Claud, a pioneering hack who dodged MI5

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Claud Cockburn, a veritable soldier of fortune, was a journalist who waged “a ceaseless campaign against the powerful on behalf of the powerless” – or so says his adoring son, and now biographer, Patrick. The elder Cockburn witnessed Nazi savagery first-hand, and predicted, against the fashion of the time, that the behaviour and mentality of Hitler and Mussolini would make a Second World War inevitable. As he arrived in New York, Wall Street collapsed, leading to “frantic political turmoil”. The day he set foot in Spain, Franco entered Madrid, intent on spreading terror by “mass executions, torture and rape”.
Cockburn Sr might seem, therefore, to have been a harbinger of bad news. Cockburn Jr, nevertheless, while never playing down the “high personal drama and danger” involved in anyone’s knowing his father, is also at pains in Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied to emphasise his subject’s “charm, likeability and talkativeness”, “air of gaiety” and “sense of mischief”, all of which were most in evidence when the man had a large glass of Irish whiskey in his fist.
The son of a diplomat based in the Far East, Cockburn was born in Peking in 1904. He was raised in Scotland by a Chinese nanny, who was frightened that she and her charge would be attacked by tigers if they went for a walk in the Grampians. He was educated at Berkhamsted, where the headmaster was the father of Graham Greene, and at Keble College, Oxford, where he caroused with Evelyn Waugh. (“We enjoyed not only drink,” Waugh recalled, “but drunkenness.”) Waugh was Cockburn’s cousin: their mutual great-grandfather was Lord Henry Cockburn, solicitor general for Scotland in the 1830s. 
With his father posted to Hungary, from 1922 onwards Cockburn spent his vacations in Central Europe, where he felt “sympathetic to people from the defeated powers” – until he saw how the disgruntled populations were gravitating towards nationalism, xenophobia and fascism. Germany, in particular, after the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles, was ripe for resurgence under a militarised far-Right regime. 
Cockburn found work as a stringer for London newspapers, sending off articles about floods and disasters in Bavaria. As part of a game with sub-editors, he came up with the notorious headline “Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead”, a masterpiece of bathos. A running theme in this book is the hand-to-mouth indigence of the freelancer, who’s “seldom paid much or on time”; such were Cockburn’s money troubles that in Vienna he dined off dog food. When in New York, it would seem that he joined the local bums, going through the kitchen waste of grand hotels.
In America, he compiled articles about Hemingway, air conditioning, horses and the mystique of the stock market, which had promptly “surrendered to blind relentless fear”. The more bankers and politicians played down the chaos, the more suspicious Cockburn grew, leading him to coin the aperçu that gives this book its title. Mortgages were foreclosing at the rate of a thousand a day. There were soon 12 million Americans unemployed.
Like Orwell, Cockburn fought in the Spanish Civil War, where he saw WH Auden be kicked by a mule. Failing to see eye-to-eye with official newspapers and magazines, who found his copy too revolutionary, Cockburn produced his own broadsheet, “printed in messy brown ink and sent in sealed brown envelopes”, which he named The Week. Henceforward, he would be monitored by MI5, who would intercept his mail, eavesdrop on his telephone calls, obtain copies of his telegrams, and follow him around from bar to bar.
Cockburn’s problem – what he was up against – was that the policy of the 1920s and 1930s was appeasement. The British and American view was that Hitler would “water down his fanaticism” once he’d settled in office and stopped killing his opponents. Journalists in the mainstream press were “under strong pressure” not to tell the truth about the German, Spanish or Italian leadership. Dispatches, Patrick Cockburn writes, were “routinely censored or toned down”. It wasn’t until 1941, when Britain formed a military alliance with the Soviet Union and was fighting fascism on all fronts, that everything for which Cockburn had campaigned at last became official government policy, even if – another aperçu coming up – “every government will do as much harm as it can and as much good as it must”. 
And here, Patrick effectively ends his story. I got little sense of what his father did during the Second World War: next thing we know, he’s living in a dilapidated house in County Cork, where the main visitors are bailiffs. I longed to know more (much more) about Beat the Devil, the 1951 novel Cockburn wrote that became a John Huston and Humphrey Bogart film, and about his work for Private Eye, where he was highly regarded as a reporter by Richard Ingrams. The personal life sounds colourful, but is kept at a distance too. For instance, Cockburn had an intense affair with Jean Ross, the original of Isherwood’s Sally Bowles, who translated film scripts from German into English. He later married Patricia Arbuthnot, who’d explored the Congo, drawing maps.
Wishing to establish Cockburn as a “much more serious” and “far tougher” person than has hitherto been supposed – but by whom? – Patrick cannot be faulted for this biography’s earnestness. I was intrigued by the conclusion that his father “rather gloried in the sheer unpredictability of human affairs”: in the end, this is what made Claud Cockburn non-partisan and non-programmatic, a free agent, drawn, like Orwell or Christopher Hitchens, to battlefields and conflicts – the writer as man-of-action.
Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied is published by Verso at £30. To order your copy for £25, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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