I Am Spain

When writing a book there's always material that has to be cut - sometimes that's a good thing: it just might not be right for the place you want it to go; or it might just be self-indulgent, and you know it ought to go. I wanted to include the following as an opening scene-setter for my 2012 book, I Am Spain. It is almost entirely taken from Claud Cockburn's 1936 book, Reporter in Spain (written under the pseudonym Frank Pitcairn). This blog seems like a good place to publish it. The accompanying photo of Cockburn with Fred Copeman of the British Battalion of the International Brigades was taken at the battle of Brunete in the summer of 1937 by Gerda Taro, very shortly before her death. For a while she was the lover of Robert Capa, and in my opinion was (or could have been) the greater war reporter.

Early on a warm July morning in 1936 a young British reporter sat down for breakfast in the station café at Cerbère. Nestling on the coastline where the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean, this was the last railway stop in southern France before the Spanish border.

Claud Cockburn was no ordinary journalist. Though he possessed a lax attitude to facts, his old school friend the novelist Graham Greene would call him one of the greatest journalists of the twentieth century. Perhaps more accurately, the British secret service considered him a ‘professional mischief maker’ whose ‘intelligence’, ‘capability’ and ‘unscrupulous nature’ made him ‘a formidable factor with which to reckon’. Born in Peking in 1904, Cockburn had been educated at public school and Oxford. A heavy drinker and smoker, he was ever in a hurry (his wife would describe him as being like a rag-doll, his elongated arms and dangling legs ever in vigorous motion).

In the late 1920s he had worked for that most establishment of British newspapers, The Times – first in Berlin, then in America. Arriving in New York City in 1929 it had soon become apparent that what was happening on Wall Street was everything. ‘You could talk about prohibition, or Hemingway, or air conditioning, or music, or horses,’ he later wrote, ‘but in the end you had to talk about the stock market, and that was where the conversation became serious.’ If the Great War had been the first global disaster of the twentieth century, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was the second. After the Crash, the Depression descended upon the world (to use George Orwell’s apt phrase) ‘like an ice age’. It was no exaggeration to say that many liberal thinkers saw Western civilization as on the brink of collapse.

Claud Cockburn and Fred Copeman, Brunete, July 1937.

Having read Karl Marx in Germany, Cockburn was already a convinced Communist, believing that ‘the Party’ was the one organization that could combat the rising tide of Fascism, and that the communists alone could save the disposed from capitalist oppression. Quitting The Times in 1932, Cockburn had launched his own political paper, The Week. Sources were plentiful, for ‘under the frightful overhanging menace of Hitlerism,’ he observed, ‘there roamed through the capitals of Western Europe people who were half saint and half bandit – the sort of people who would commit a murder for twenty pounds and suicide for a good idea.’ Relying on a network of sometimes brave, sometimes unscrupulous fellow journalists, inside informers, disaffected civil servants, tip-off merchants and whistle-blowers, on three pages of foolscap Cockburn published stories of international rumour, supposed plots, libellous gossip, plausible intrigues and assertive opinions (largely his own). He would later boast that readers of his scurrilous periodical included the foreign ministers of eleven nations, the staff of all the embassies in London, a dozen US Senators, fifty MPs, the King of England and the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

As if The Week was not enough work for one man, Cockburn

was also a special correspondent for The Daily Worker. It was on behalf of this Communist Party newspaper that he found himself in Cerbère that July in 1936, en route to Catalonia to report on the Workers’ Olympiad that was due to open in Barcelona in a few days’ time.

When the sea air smelt suddenly of violets, Cockburn looked up and watched as a tall, fattish gentleman in expensive clothes and carrying a perfumed handkerchief walked in. Two men followed him – dressed in tight-cut Palm Beach suits like prohibition-era gangsters, they hardly bothered to conceal the pistols at their hips.

            When the noise came of a train rolling through the tunnel from Spain the fat man and his bodyguards rose from their chairs and left.

            ‘Somebody in particular? Cockburn asked the waiter.

            ‘They say so.’

            ‘Well, and …?’

            ‘A Colonel or something or other from Madrid’, said the waiter. ‘Big shot. Has an aeroplane up in Perpignan. Colonel of aviation I think. Lives at the Grand Hotel. Very swell.’

            ‘So what?’

            ‘So nothing. Except that they say – I’m just telling you what they say – that he isn’t there for nothing, so to speak. Possibly you understand something of the situation in Spain.’

            ‘Well?’

            ‘Well a fortnight ago this fellow comes hell for leather over the frontier at Le Perthus, by car of course, and goes up to Perpignan at the Grand Hotel. He was mixed up some way in killing the miners in Asturias last year and the year before or whenever it was. That’s why he had to beat it after the elections. They say he has a mission.’

            ‘Such as?’

            ‘How should I know? I suppose you and I think the rich are going to sit quiet and – what’s the phrase? – “accept the verdict of the pee-pull?” Like hell they are.’

            ‘This is the twelfth of July. Five months after the elections.’

            ‘All the longer to get ready.’

            ‘So the Colonel, what is he doing down here on the frontier?’

            ‘Well, I should say, and our Spanish comrades here say that he is, so to speak, listening for something.’

            ‘Listening?’

            The waiter made a gesture, indicating a man putting his ear to the ground.

            ‘You think he’ll hear something soon?’

            The waiter grimaced. Cockburn stood up – it was time to catch the Barcelona train.

From his carriage Cockburn watched the fascist Colonel standing on the opposite platform, expensive and perfumed with his sleek bodyguards, listening for news of a steadily thickening plot against his country. It would not be long now.

            And it occurred to Cockburn that if you wanted 1936’s equivalent for those symbolic figures of Death that appear in medieval wall paintings – well, that Spanish Colonel … he would do.