Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings
Loading
CC![]()
author
Claud Cockburn
Francis Claud Cockburn (12 April 1904 - 15 December 1981) was an Anglo-Scots journalist.
Born in Peking (present-day Beijing), China in 1904, the son of Henry Cockburn, a British ...view moreFrancis Claud Cockburn (12 April 1904 - 15 December 1981) was an Anglo-Scots journalist.
Born in Peking (present-day Beijing), China in 1904, the son of Henry Cockburn, a British Consul General and Irish Minister to Korea, and wife Elizabeth Gordon (née Stevenson), he was educated at Berkhamsted School in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and Keble College, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. He became a journalist with The Times and worked as a foreign correspondent in Germany and the United States before resigning in 1933 to start his own newsletter, The Week, which ran until just shortly before the start of WWII.
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 1947, Cockburn moved to Ireland and lived at Ardmore, County Waterford. He continued to contribute to newspapers and journals, including a weekly column for The Irish Times.
Among his novels were Beat the Devil, published in 1951 (originally under the pseudonym James Helvick), The Horses (1961), Ballantyne’s Folly (1970), and Jericho Road (1974). Beat the Devil was made into a 1953 film by director John Huston, and the title was later used by Cockburn’s son Alexander for his regular column in The Nation.
Cockburn is also the author of Bestseller (1972), 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).
Claud Cockburn was married three times: all three of his wives were also journalists. His granddaughters include RadioNation host Laura Flanders, ex-BBC Economics editor Stephanie Flanders, and actress Olivia Wilde.
He died in 1981 at the age of 77.view less