Before Claud Cockburn first entered the Times of London premises in 1929, he had contributed to its Berlin bureau, which gave him some idea of what to expect. But even so, he thought it rather much that the first conversation he overheard was one editor translating Plato’s Phaedo into Chinese, while his colleague recited the relevant passages in Greek from memory. Times editors, he recalled, were typically ensconced behind fat bookstacks, “engaged in writing historical works of their own.”
It was at the desks of Britain’s paper of record that C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated Proust, with the rest of the staff leaving their typewriters to help him find the right phrases — I guess it beat thumping out notices on municipal matters in, say, Cornwall. That’s to say, the Times’ editors were rather more interesting than their typical readers, who, like Ian Fleming’s James Bond, were so soundly conformist they wouldn’t read other papers but the Times.
The best oppositional writers have often started their careers in establishment strongholds. As the legendary Times correspondent Willmott Lewis once told Claud, “Every government will do as much harm as it can and as much good as it must.” That saying became one of Claud’s mantras. It captured both his unsentimental view of politics and his sense of ironic humour — it’s that combination that makes him, one of Britian’s finest investigative reporters, worth revisiting a century later.
Cockburn was no cynic. He believed that the press, if it were tough enough, could force the government to correct course. The seasoned foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn writes in his biography of his father, Claud, Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied, that he believed political leaders without “fixity of purpose” were “sensitive to pinprick criticism,” so that with the right kind of pressure, they’d “prove more malleable than they pretended.”
Surveying the field…
Auteur: Gustav Jönsson
