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For 35 years, from 1946 until his death in 1981, Youghal’s most colourful character was the writer Claud Cockburn. Born in China in 1904 of Scottish parents, at the age of four he –together with his Chinese nanny - was sent back to Scotland to be reared by his grandparents. At boarding-school in England he became a great friend of the future novelist Graham Greene, with whom he shared a love of mischief-making and adventure stories. At Oxford they both joined the Communist Party as a joke, but whereas Greene’s future lay as a convert to the Catholic Church Cockburn became more and more attracted to Marxism.
In 1929 he joined the staff of The Times, which became the setting for some of his best stories, such as a competition to see who could write the most boring headline. (Cockburn won with the entry: “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.”) While working as the Times correspondent in New York he was given the excellent advice:
I think it well to remember that when writing for the newspapers we are writing for an elderly lady in Hastings who has two cats of whom she is passionately fond. Unless our stuff can successfully compete for her interest with those cats, it is no good.
Returning to England, he gave up work for The Times and founded the Communist news-sheet The Week. It was run off on a gestetner machine and he wrote it all himself, making up half the stories. (He wouldn’t even have needed to hack anyone’s phones!) So brilliant was his work that The Week proved a great success.
In the 1930s he reported on the Spanish Civil War for The Daily Worker, but in 1939 the government suppressed both the Worker and The Week, and by the time the ban had lifted he had become disillusioned with communism.
In 1940 he married the dynamic Youghal lady Patricia Arbuthnot, and in 1946 they came to live permanently in Youghal. Here he continued to write till the end of his days. His widow then moved to Ardmore, where she became one of an indomitable and perpetually feuding set of formidable old ladies.
A lifelong atheist and a master of irony, Claud Cockburn would have appreciated his full-blown Requiem Mass concelebrated by five priests.
He died thirty years ago – on this day.
