February 1982

Claud Cockburn John Wells

Meeting Claud Cockburn in the early Sixties, at a time when I was trying very tentatively to contribute jokes to Private Eye, was like meeting the authentic past. The hat cocked on the back of his head as he sat in the pub in Greek Street hadn't actually got a tieket in it saying 'Press', but it looked battered enough to have been through the Spanish Civil War; the flickering eyebrows, bobbing cigarette and amazingly long and tapering fingers - they always reminded me, for some reason, that Claud had been born in China - the hacking cough and unique style and timing of his story-telling, all seemed to me to be the Real Thing: the creator of The Week, the survivor of Berlin in the Thirties, the lover of Sally Bowles, the noble communist who had had The Daily Worker shot from under him by the Hitler-Stalin pact and had retired hurt to Ireland, now triumphantly to re-emerge.

Soon after that we began to collaborate on a political farce commissioned by John Neville for the new Nottingham Playhouse, an adaptation of The Knights by Aristophanes, finally called Listen to the Knockingbird. I soon realised that Claud was not, in any sense of the word, a collaborator. He had rented what he described a 'very commodious apartment' in Cornwall Gardens, and I turned up every morning to be entertained by a wonderful flood of anecdotes, his wife Patricia chainsmoking away in the background, a permanently comforting presence providing coffee and the occasional prompt, and went away every evening agreeing we really must get something down on paper. We did occasionally discuss the shape of the play: a collapsible set designed by one of Sean Kenny's assistants to represent Great Britain as a semi-derelict brothel run by Britannia, with two dishonest commercial travellers living in the attic. Since the Lord Chamberlain still imposed theatrical censorship in those days, they had to be called something else, but they closely resembled Harold Wilson and Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

The most interesting moment in our discussions came when we reached the 'constructive' moment at the end, where Britannia was to be rescued. Who were the heroes to be? The Working Class?

That was, in fact, the solution I rather naively came to. Claud, on the other hand, smoked a lot of cigarettes, narrowed his eyes, coughed a bit, traced a few patterns in the air with his fingers, and said he thought it ought to be 'er . . . ordinary chaps called out in the middle of the night in their dressing-gowns to deal with something like a fire.' Meanwhile the actors were waiting for the script. Claud did complete one very good monologue for Alec Home talking about a machine for regulating the economy, but the rest I had to knock together in a scandalously short time, typing Act Two in a boarding house in Nottingham while the cast started on Act One, and the result was not by any means as good as it should have been.

Nevertheless it was typical of the effect Claud had on people that John Neville, interviewed on the radio when he left Nottingham years later, said that the best moment he could remember was sitting in the Playhouse with Claud when he came up to look at the final rehearsals.

There was also a night of farce at the theatrical lodging house. Claud had obviously stopped for a few drinks with the actors on the way home, and the landlady, Mrs Parson, gave me a very beady look when I got down to breakfast. 'A very strange man, your friend.' I asked her what she meant.

Arrived at the front door, I showed him to his room, asked him whether there was anything he wanted, a cup of hot milk or Bournvita, and he said no, all he'd like was something to read, it would help him to go to sleep. So I went and fetched him a copy of Argosy and when I came back the door was still open, and there he was, fast asleep, face downwards on the bed, with all his clothes off. He had, I discovered later, subsequently woken up somewhat disorientated, and while looking for the lavatory had trodden on Mrs Parson's Siamese cat and thrown open the door of Alastair Sim's bedroom, who had sat bolt upright in bed saying 'Ah, good morning Mrs Parson', thinking it was breakfast time. I saw Mrs Parson years later when she had read Claud's work. 'Think of it', she said, 'entertaining angels unawares!'

Claud's lone endeavour at the typewriter was awe-inspiring. What he called 'ertap tap'. He began early in the morning'Ideally at seven. God gets up at half past nine and starts buggering you about, so that gives you two and a half hours' either in the little downstairs room at Youghal, among a litter of browning papers, or on any flat surface he could clear in the flat in London. He wrote his column for the Irish Times the week he died, and scribbled a note to Private Eye almost immediately after he had a stroke some months earlier - 'teaching myself to type with the other hand.'

Not that he didn't occasionally dodge a deadline. The first editor of the Sunday Telegraph received such graphic descriptions on the telephone from Claud in Ireland of the storms and tornadoes that had prevented his copy getting through that he was heard gravely dissuading other members of the staff from taking holidays there; and the creative input that went into the excuses was certainly as great as that required to write a piece. lngrams and I were waiting for his column one afternoon when he rang to say he was having trouble finding a taxi. lngrams urged him to get a move on. An hour or so later the telephone rang again. 'Er . . . bit of bad luck. Running for a taxi, knocked down by a car. Er . . . fortunately very charming Indian doctor on hand, brought me back here, plying me with drink, seems churlish to refuse, so may be er . . . a bit late.' Again lngrams expressed mild impatience. The third call came towards the end of the afternoon. 'Er . . . extraordinary piece of luck, Indian doctor friend has an invitation for tea at Downing Street, asked me to go along er . . . good copy . . .'At this point lngrams, uncharacteristically, said 'Shit'.'With you in ten minutes.'

There were endless stories about his drinking. He was staying with me once, and I went out in the morning leaving a fairly well stocked drinks cupboard. When I got back in the evening, Claud said there had been a telephone call for me. 'Friend of yours, Michael Hill. Wanted to ask him round for a drink, but er . . . no drink!' Similarly with money. He surprised Peter Cook on one occasion with a sudden request for a loan and Peter asked him