Claude
Cockburn,
the son of a diplomat, was
born in China in 1904. After obtaining a degree from Oxford
University he became a journalist with The
Times. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Germany
and the United States before resigning in 1933
to start up his own journal, The Week.
Using the name Frank Pitcairn,
Cockburn also contributed to the Daily Worker.
In 1936 Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary
of the Communist Party, asked him to
cover the Spanish
Civil War for the newspaper. When he arrived in Spain he joined
the Fifth Regiment so that he could report
the war as an ordinary soldier. While in Spain he published Reporter
in Spain.
Cockburn
was attacked by George
Orwell
in his book Homage
to Catalonia (1938). In the
book he accused Cockburn of being under the control of the Communist
Party. Orwell was particularly critical of the way Cockburn reported
the May
Riots in Barcelona.
Cockburn was a strong opponent
of appeasement and during the Second
World War the government banned The
Week. The journal ceased publication shortly after
the war.
In 1947 Cockburn moved
to Ireland but continued to contribute to
various newspapers and journals. This included a weekly column for
the Irish Times. He also published
several books including Aspects of English
History (1957), The Devil's Decade
(1973), Union Power (1976) and
Cockburn Sums Up (1981).
Cockburn also published
three volumes of autobiography, In Time of
Trouble (1956), Crossing the Line
(1958) and View From the West (1967).
Claude
Cockburn died
in December 1981.
(1)
Claude Cockburn, In Time of Trouble (1956)
It was at about this time
(September 1934) that Mr Pollitt, Secretary of the Communist Party
of Great Britain, whom I had never met, was suddenly announced on
the telephone - would I, he asked, take the next train, in twenty
minutes or half an hour, and report a mine disaster at Gresford, North
Wales. Why? Because he had a feeling that there was a lot more in
it than met the eye. But why I in particular? Well, because, it seemed,
Mr Pollitt - who was worrying at the time about what he believed to
be a lack of'reader appeal' in the Daily Worker - had been
reading The Week and thought I might do a good job.
(2)
Claude
Cockburn, Reporter
in Spain (1936)
On 12th July 1936 gunmen
in a touring car nosed slowly through sparse traffic under the arc
lamps of a Madrid street, opened fire with a sub-machine-gun at the
defenceless back of a man standing chatting on his doorstep, and roared
off among the tram-lines, leaving him dying in a puddle of his young
blood on the pavement.
That in a manner of speaking
was the Sarajevo of the Spanish war. The young man they killed was
Jose Castillo, Lieutenant of Assault Guards. I never saw Castillo,
but afterwards I heard all sorts of people speak of him with a kind
of urgency and heartbreak, as though it were impossible that you too
should not have known, and therefore loved, so fine a young man.
In a corps which in the
five years of its existence had already acquired a high military reputation,
Castillo was already
distinguished, and already loved, by men who are not very easy pleased
nor easy fooled.
In the working-class districts
of Madrid he was equally well known and liked. He was declared a gallant
and patriotic young officer, as dauntless a defender of the Republic
as you could wish to see, and a man - as a Madrid workman said to
me afterwards - "who made the culture and the progress we were
after seem more real to us".
(3)
Claude Cockburn,
The
Daily Worker (21st November, 1936)
From
the main streets you could already hear quite clearly the machine-gun
and rifle fire at the front.
Already shells began to
drop within the city itself. Already you could see that Madrid was
after all going to be the first of the dozen or so big European capitals
to learn that "the menace of Fascism and war" is not a phrase
or a far-off threat, but a peril
so near that you turn the corner of your own street and see the
gaping bodies of a dozen innocent women lying among scattered
milk cans and bits of Fascist bombs, turning the familiar
pavement red with their gushing blood.
There were others besides
the defenders of Madrid who realised
that, too.
Men in Warsaw, in London,
in Brussels, Belgrade, Berne, Paris, Lyons, Budapest, Bucharest, Amsterdam,
Copenhagen. All over Europe men who understood that "the house
next door is already on fire" were already on the way to put
their experience of war, their enthusiasm and their understandings
at the disposal of the Spanish people who themselves in the months
and years before the Fascist attack had so often thrown all their
energies into the cause of international solidarity on behalf of the
oppressed and the prisoners of the Fascist dictatorships in Germany,
Hungary and Yugoslavia.
It was no mere "gesture
of solidarity" that these men - the future members of the International
Brigade - were being called upon to carry out.
The position of the armies
on the Madrid fronts was such that it was obvious that the hopes of
victory must to a large extent depend first on the amount of material
that could be got to the front before the German and Italian war machines
smashed their way through, and secondly, on the speed with which the
defending force of the People's Army could be raised to the level
of a modern infantry force, capable of fighting in the modern manner.
(4)
Claude Cockburn,
The
Daily Worker (8th February, 1937)
When
the church bells ring in Malaga that means the Italian and German
aeroplanes are coming over. While I was there they came twice and
three times a day. The horror of the civilian bombing is even worse
in Malaga than in Madrid. The place is so small and so terribly exposed.
When the bells begin ringing
and you see people who have been working in the harbour or in the
market place, or elsewhere in the open, run in crowds, you know that
they are literally running a race against death.
But the houses in Malaga
are mostly low and rather flimsy, and without cellars. Where the cliffs
come down to the edge of the town, the people make for the rocks and
caves in which those who can reach them take refuge. Others rush bounding
up the hillside above the town.
Those in the town, with
an air of infinite weariness, wait behind the piles of sandbags which
have been set up in front of
the doorways of the apartment blocks. Though they are not safe from
bombs falling on the houses, they are relatively protected from an
explosion in the street and from the bullets of the machine-guns.
Sometimes you can see
the aeroplane machine-gunner working the gun as the plane swoops along
above the street.
If you were to imagine,
however, that this terribly hammered town is in a state of panic you
would be wrong. Nothing I have seen in this war has impressed me more
than the power of the Spanish people's resistance to attack than the
attitude of the people as seen in Malaga.
(5)
Claude
Cockburn,
The
Daily Worker (18th February, 1937)
"That
is the stage on which the first act of the world war drama is being
played," said a doctor of the militia to me today,
pointing down to the Valley of the Jarama as we lay on a hill in long,
thyme-scented grass.
I had driven out from
Madrid along the Valencia road, turning off along a mule track about
ten miles from the city. The track carried us into the heart of the
hills, along whose seemingly deserted slopes reverberated the booming
of guns.
At last we came to a little
hollow in whose shelter stood two ambulance cars.
"This is the place,"
said the army doctor with me, and getting out he told us to follow.
Imitating my guide, I crawled up the slope to the summit and there
we lay prone with our nostrils buried in the thyme and our eyes fixed
on the field of battle.
This was Valley of the
Jarama, that stream whose name, beside
that of the Manzanares, is now being written with letters of
blood in imperishable annals of humanity's fight for liberty. Beyond
the stream were our lines facing the long forbidding ridge
of Redondo, now held by enemy.
A week ago, in the most
powerful drive since the battle for Madrid began, the rebels advanced
along the ridge, and now from the bluff at the northern end their
fire commands the Valencia road and compels the convoys of lorries
carrying precious food to Madrid to
make a detour to the north.
But the mercenary troops
of international Fascism, despite repeated
attempts, have not yet set their feet on the road; between
them and their goal stand the men of the young Republican
Army, determined that just as the Manzanares defied
Franco when he tried to storm Madrid, so shall the Jarama
defy him as he tries to starve it.
Through field-glasses
we could see bands of rebel troops move
along the ridge.
"This morning we
saw a priest among them," said the doctor. "He
was carrying a machine-gun, but as soon as our men opened fire
he scurried off and took cover behind a boulder. Most of his companions
over there seem to be Moors.
"At night the Moors
steal down the hillside and crawl towards our lines. Then, when they
are quite near, they jump up, and uttering fiendish cries to frighten
our men, rush forward. But our lads are not frightened, and in many
cases those wild cries of the Moors have been their last."
A mule with two stretchers
strapped to its saddle was grazing in the hollow. "That's how
we bring in our wounded," the doctor explained. "Two men
at a time. They have to be carried across the bridge which spans the
Jarama and up this side of the valley to where we are, all under enemy
fire. Today we have brought in between sixty and seventy. Ten were
dead."
Seriously wounded men,
if they survive that nightmare ride on the
mule across the valley of death, are treated in one of the ambulances
which are equipped with an operating-table.
(6)
Claude
Cockburn,
The
Daily Worker (11th May, 1937)
Thousands
of loudspeakers, set up in every public place in the towns and villages
of Republican Spain, in the trenches all along the battlefront of
the Republic, brought the message of the Communist Party at this fateful
hour, straight to the soldiers and the struggling people of this hard-pressed
hard-fighting Republic.
The speakers were Valdes,
former Councillor of Public Works in the Catalan government, Uribe,
Minister of Agriculture in the government of Spain, Diaz, Secretary
of the Communist Party of Spain, Pasionaria, and Hemandez, Minister
of Education.
Then, as now, in the forefront
of everything stand the Fascist menace to Bilbao and Catalonia.
There is a specially dangerous
feature about the situation in Catalonia. We know now that the German
and Italian agents, who poured into Barcelona ostensibly in order
to "prepare" the notorious 'Congress of the Fourth International',
had one big task. It was this:
They were - in co-operation
with the local Trotskyists - to prepare a situation of disorder and
bloodshed, in which it would be possible for the Germans and Italians
to declare that they were "unable to exercise naval control on
the Catalan coasts effectively" because of "the disorder
prevailing in Barcelona", and were, therefore, "unable to
do otherwise" than land forces in Barcelona.
In other words, what was
being prepared was a situation in which the Italian and German governments
could land troops or marines quite openly on the Catalan coasts, declaring
that they were doing
so "in order to preserve order".
That was the aim. Probably
that is still the aim. The instrument
for all this lay ready to hand for the Germans and Italians
in the shape of the Trotskyist organisation known as the POUM.
The POUM, acting in cooperation
with well-known criminal elements,
and with certain other deluded persons in the anarchist organisations,
planned, organised and led the attack in the rearguard,
accurately timed to coincide with the attack on the front
at Bilbao.
In the past, the leaders
of the POUM have frequently sought to
deny their complicity as agents of a Fascist cause against the People's
Front. This time they are convicted out of their own mouths
as clearly as their allies, operating in the Soviet Union, who
confessed to the crimes of espionage, sabotage, and attempted
murder against the government of the Soviet Union.
Copies of La Batalla,
issued on and after 2 May, and the leaflets
issued by the POUM before and during the killings in Barcelona,
set down the position in cold print.
In the plainest terms
the POUM declares it is the enemy of the People's
Government. In the plainest terms it calls upon its followers
to turn their arms in the same direction as the Fascists, namely,
against the government of the People's Front and the anti-fascist
fighters.
900 dead and 2,500 wounded
is the figure officially given by Diaz
as the total in terms of human slaughter of the POUM attack
in Barcelona.
It was not, by any means,
Diaz pointed out, the first of such attacks. Why was it, for instance,
that at the moment of the big Italian drive at Guadalajara, the Trotskyists
and their deluded anarchist friends attempted a similar rising in
another district? Why was it that the same thing happened two months
before at the time of the heavy Fascist attack at Jarama, when, while
Spaniards and Englishmen, and honest anti-fascists of every nation
in Europe, were being killed holding Arganda Bridge the Trotskyist
swine suddenly produced their arms 200 kilometres from the front,
and attacked in the rear?
(7)
Claude
Cockburn,
The
Daily Worker (17th May, 1937)
Tomorrow
the antifascist forces of the Republic will start rounding up all
those scores of concealed weapons which ought to be at the front and
are not.
The decree ordering this
action affects the whole of the Republic. It is, however, in Catalonia
that its effects are likely to
be the most interesting and important.
With it, the struggle
to "put Catalonia on a war footing", which has been going
on for months and was resisted with open
violence by the POUM and its friends in the first week of May, enters
a new phase.
This weekend may well
be a turning-point. If the decree is successfully carried out it means:
First: That the groups
led by the POUM who rose against the government last week will lose
their main source of strength, namely, their arms.
Second: That, as a result
of this, their ability to hamper by terrorism the efforts of the antifascist
workers to get the war
factories on to a satisfactory basis will be sharply reduced.
Third: That the arms at
present hidden will be available for use on the front, where they
are badly needed.
Fourth: That in future
those who steal arms from the front or steal arms in transit to the
front will be liable to immediate arrest and trial as ally of the
fascist enemy.
Included in the weapons
which have to be turned in are rifles, carbines, machine-guns, machine-pistols,
trench mortars, field guns, armoured cars, hand-grenades, and all
other sorts of bombs.
The list gives you an
idea of the sort of armaments accumulated by the Fascist conspirators
and brought into the
open for the first time last week.
(8)
George
Orwell,
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
A tremendous dust was
kicked up in the foreign antifascist press, but, as usual only one
side of the case has had anything like a hearing. As a result the
Barcelona fighting has been represented as an insurrection by disloyal
Anarchists and Trotskyists who were "stabbing the Spanish Government
in the back" and so forth. The issue was not quite so simple
as that. Undoubtedly when you are at war with a deadly enemy it is
better not to begin fighting among yourselves - but it is worth remembering
that it takes two to make a quarrel and that people do not begin building
barricades unless they have received samething that they regard as
a provocation.
In the Communist and pro-Communist
press the entire blame for the Barcelona fighting was laid upon the
P.O.U.M. The affair was represented not as a spontaneous outbreak,
but as a deliberate, planned insurrection against the Government,
engineered solely by the P.O.U.M. with the aid of a few misguided
'uncontrollables'. More than this, it was definitely a Fascist plot,
carried out under Fascist orders with the idea of starting civil war
in the rear and thus paralysing the Government. The P.O.U.M. was 'Franco's
Fifth Column' - a 'Trotskyist' organization working in league with
the Fascists.
(9)
Jessica
Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict
(1977)
in the early thirties
Claud Cockburn founded and wrote a mimeographed political muckraking
journal called The Week which, in the period immediately preceding
the war, had become extraordinarily influential. The Week was packed
with
riveting inside stories garnered from undercover sources throughout
Europe - at one time, Claud's principal informant in Berlin (his Deep
Throat, so to speak) was secretary to Herr von Papen, a member of
Hitler's cabinet. Claud had coined the phrase 'Cliveden Set' to describe
the powerful clique of Nazi appeasers whose frequent meeting place
was Cliveden, Lady Astor's house, a sobriquet that first appeared
in The Week and subsequently became a catchword used in the
English and American press from the Daily Express to Time
magazine.
(10)
Graham
Greene wrote about Claude
Cockburn on his death in 1981.
If I were asked who are
the two greatest journalists of the twentieth century, my answer would
be G.K. Chesterton and Claud Cockbum. Both are more than journalists:
both produced at least one novel which will be rediscovered with delight,
I believe, in every generation - The Man who was Thursday and Ballantyne's
Folly. Both are manic characters, writing with what some sad fellows
may find even an excess of high spirits. Perhaps Claud Cockbum will
prove to have been more influential, for he discovered the influence
that can be wielded by
a mimeographed news-sheet.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
