NOTES & TOPICS Those Were the Weeks that Were Claud Cockburn's Noises Off-—By DONALD CAMERON WATT HAVE already concerned These critical views would have been judged too subversive of myself in a previous art- public morale to gain airing in the "quality press", and too I icle in ENCOUNTER with sophisticated and elitist to bear more than passing mention in the mythology surrounding the pages of Beaverbrook's populist anti-Establishment- The Week. Readers (of the arian crusading press. The Week printed them all. Curiously, issue of May 1972) will re- neither Claud Cockburn's various memoirs nor Patricia member the weekly hecto- Cockburn's account of The Years of the Week do more than graphed newsletter with which touch on this period in The Week's activities. It is, one must the late Claud Cockburn, aka presume, difficult to square with the image Claud Cockburn •" Frank Pitcairn, established be- sedulously strove to propagate in the 1950s and '60s of a tween 1933 and 1943 a thoroughly undeserved yet world-wide journal that was anti-Fascist and populist when the powers- reputation for purveying the "real inside story", belying the that-were were purblind and corrupt. The Week was, in fact, world press, and •"telling the truth" as it was rather than as always elitist rather than populist, and agin government as a our-lords-and-masters wished us to believe it to be. The Week matter of principle. As such it deserves some respect for its did its share, probably more than its fair share, in that ro- undoubted qualities. But normally well-informed it was not. coco ornamentation of the believed history of the 1930s, with Mrs Cockburn in this shows a lot more astuteness than her the myths of conspiracy and collaboration between Right- late husband when she cites (p. 263) a friendly critic of The wing democrats and Right-wing anti-democrats. The task Week\ coverage of the events of 1939 as saying "'The Week was aided by the various pseudonymous writers for Victor has achieved the remarkable feat of being 70 per cent right Gollancz's Left Book Club and the Beaverbrook-inspired and 100 per cent wrong." Gollancz-published Guilty Man series of the early 1940s. Nor, must it be said, whatever happened in 1933, was The Since the mid-1950s historians have been preoccupied (this Week long an especial target for MI5 or an especial worry to writer included) with the task of demythologisation. The those Establishment mandarins whom Hilaire Belloc (long reappearance of the memoirs of his wife and helper, Patricia 1 before Claud Cockburn) epitomised as inhabiting what in Cockburn, with an introduction by the editor of London's Imperial China would have been entitled "The Ministry of Private Eye, as a reminder of Cockburn's comeback as part of Things that Should Not Be Known." That status was reserved the neo-nihilist attack on the Macmillan establishment in the for another private newsletter, The Whitehall Letter, edited early 1960s, provides a good reason to take another look both by the diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, at The Week and at the school of its later demythologisers. Victor Gordon-Lennox; he was regularly supplied (by Sir Let me begin by pointing out what The Week was not. Robert Vansittart and other Foreign Office opponents of the It was not, usually, for example, particularly well-informed. more acute forms of appeasement) with leaked information in An exception to this judgment must be the period of its breach of the Official Secrets Act.2 revival after its suppression in 1941, when (as one ex-civil ser- vant recalled from those days) anyone with specific inside knowledge could virtually name the source of each report it IF THE WEEK was inaccurate, ill-informed, heavily in- printed. The years 1942-43 were years within Whitehall of fluenced from time to time by its editors' political views and great internal opposition to the Churchill administration. loyalties, and less important as a goad to authority than its editor believed—and if its version of events has been largely rejected by historians (save for those writing from the Soviet 1 The Years of the Week. By PATRICIA COCKBURN. With an Union)—why should one waste any more time on it, save as a introduction by RICHARD [NGRAMS. Comedia. £6.95. See also her curiosity like "Piltdown Man" in a study of historical fakes autobiographical memoir. Figure of Eight. Chatto & Windus, £10.95. 2 and forgeries? Are not historians, having on the whole I have this information from the late Kenneth Younger, who successfully demythologised the 1930s, correct to dismiss it? before embarking on the political career which led him to become Minister of State under Bevin and Morrison, worked in the late 1930s No, they are not, for they have evidently forgotten the for M15. significance of noise. 38 PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Notes & Topics 39 "Noise" in this sense is a term given by Intelligence to the were manufactured in Willi Muenzenberg's paper-mills in mass of conflicting reports, rumours, allegations, accusations Paris, those same mills that produced the story of Goering's and plain downright untruths out of which the analyst is involvement in setting fire to the Reichstag or the stories expected to pick those few accurate reports which foreshadow of German and/Italian inspiration for the Spanish army's the kind of event the analyst is supposed to apprehend and abortive pronun'ciamento out of which came the Civil War in forewarn his bosses against—the remilitarisation of the Spain. (Intelligence Digest, a kind of Far Right mirror-image Rhineland; the decision to station missiles in Cuba; the of The Week, curiously seems to have drawn much of its anti- erection of the Berlin Wall, or whatever. It is a phenomenon Soviet conspiratorial reports also from Paris, from the which contemporary historians have so far largely ignored. paper-mills of the White Russian emigration that was later Their main endeavour has been to play the game of the to produce the Litvinov Diaries and the alleged memoirs of analyst and screen it out, devising what are hoped to be ever Stalin's nephew. .) But there were others, less obvious more sophisticated ways of recognising it for what it is— generators of noise than these. "mere noise." Indeed historians are in danger of eliminating Consider for example the following noisy stories which it entirely. Yet the role of such noise in the 1930s (if not in still surface from time to time in what might be called the every period) is a fascinating one—especially if two kinds of neo-Bourbon schools of historiography (learning nothing, questions are asked: who generated it? and why was it forgetting nothing). When Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland believed or listened to? For the noises which filled the 1930s in March 1936 the German troops which marched into the were an essential part of the intellectual and social en- Rhineland did so "with orders to withdraw again if any vironment in which politics and political decisions existed French military reaction was encountered." Thus it follows and functioned. They were (and are) an essential part of the that British and French military action to cause Hitler's contemporary atmosphere; and Cockburn himself under- withdrawal would have probably prevented the outbreak of stood this. World War II! This story is quite contrary to the truth. The Reichswehr was under orders to treat any intrusion of French "The special impact of the paper [writes Mrs Cockburn] troops into German territory as an act of war. was in part due to the fact that it was saying in public Here is another from 1936. When the Spanish Civil War what a great many people were saying or thinking in broke out, the French Popular Front government of Leon private. Claud took the view that there are many Blum "wanted to supply arms to the Republican government occasions when the existence of a particular rumour is as but desisted after British pressure had been applied to Blum significant and worthy of mention as a proven fact. on his visit to London." Instead he adopted the policy of non- Regarding this as a vital principle of journalism, he was intervention pressed upon him in London. Untrue as often attacked by people who supposed, or pretended to stated. Blum preferred non-intervention in Spain because he suppose, that he made no distinction between fact and feared the Civil War would spread to France. rumour. This was nonsense. But he did believe that the More interesting (because less known) is the flood of speculations, and even the gossip of informed people contemporary reportage coming out of Berlin in the winter of ought to be reported too." 1936-37 about the "dominant" role played within Hitler's Germany by the German military leadership and the degree of "closeness" they had re-established with their opposite numbers in the Soviet High Command. Again, quite untrue. HE "NOISE; FACTOR" in the 1930s is an essential factor Relations were so bad that the Reichskriegsministerium sent to a proper understanding of how and why people a senior officer who had been involved in the pre-1933 T acted as they did. Cockburn's pages—like those of the German-Soviet cooperation to sound out the more friendly of less inhibited or carefully edited American press, the mem- his former acquaintances among the Bolshevik military oirs of the foreign correspondents, the diaries of the political hierarchy on what could be done to improve them. He found Creeveys and diplomatic Pepyses of the era—are an essential no one willing to talk with him.