1. Claud Cockburn's saying "believe nothing until it has been officially denied" is widely quoted in journalistic studies, but he did not claim credit for originating it.
18 Facts About Claud Cockburn
1. 2.
Claud Cockburn was the second cousin, once removed, of the novelists Alec Waugh and Evelyn Waugh.
3.
Claud Cockburn lived at Brook Lodge, Youghal, County Cork, Ireland.
4.
Claud Cockburn was born in Peking, China, on 12 April 1904, the son of Henry Claud Cockburn, a British consul general, and wife Elizabeth Gordon.
5.
Claud Cockburn was educated at Berkhamsted School, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and Keble College, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts.
6.
Claud Cockburn became a journalist with The Times and worked as a foreign correspondent in Germany and the United States before he resigned in 1933 to start his own newsletter, The Week.
7.
Under the alias Frank Pitcairn, Claud Cockburn contributed to the British communist newspaper, the Daily Worker.
8.
Claud Cockburn joined the Fifth Regiment to report the war as a soldier.
9.
Claud Cockburn's reporting in Spain, as "Frank Pitcairn", was heavily criticised by George Orwell in his 1938 memoir Homage to Catalonia.
10.
In one instance, Claud Cockburn claimed to have been an eyewitness to a battle that he totally invented.
11.
Claud Cockburn said in the 1960s that much of the information in The Week had been leaked to him by Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.
12.
However, a 1940 Security Service file on Cockburn was later made public, and Claud's son Patrick Cockburn applied for his MI5 files and received 24 volumes of them.
13.
In 1947, Claud Cockburn moved to Ireland and lived at Ardmore, County Waterford.
14.
Claud Cockburn continued to contribute to newspapers and journals, including a weekly column for The Irish Times.
15.
Claud Cockburn collaborated with Huston on the early drafts of the script, but the credit went to Truman Capote.
16.
Claud Cockburn published Bestseller, an exploration of English popular fiction, Aspects of English History, The Devil's Decade, his history of the 1930s and Union Power.
17.
Claud Cockburn married twice, and all of his wives and partners were journalists.
18.
Claud Cockburn's granddaughters include RadioNation host Laura Flanders, ex-BBC Economics editor Stephanie Flanders, and actress Olivia Wilde.