| | | Journalist trained by The Times during the days of Geoffrey Dawson, managing editor and key member of the fraternity later called, by Cockburn himself, "The Cliveden Set". Cockburn initially worked for the paper informally in Germany from the mid-1920s just as extreme nationalist movements were growing in power, proving his worth with a notable exposé of Alfred Hugenberg, a media magnate and extreme right-winger who later played a key part in Hitler's accession to power. Cockburn was recalled to London and was then transferred to New York in 1929, where he happened to be interviewing TW Lamont, head of the JP Morgan firm on the very day of the great crash in October.
After leaving The Times in late 1932 Cockburn was in Germany again to meet some of the most influential players at the end of the Weimar Republic and to witness Hitler's accession to power.
On returning to London he decided to become founder and editor of a cheaply produced journal called The Week. Hearing of his plans to publish the rumours and only half-understood theses of skullduggery that mainstream newspapers left out the historian John Wheeler Bennett, a leading figure at Chatham House, said to Cockburn that soon he would be "either quite famous or in gaol." It turned out to be the former. The Week was the journal that made "The Cliveden Set" famous - and all the Conspiracy Theories that then went with it - a phrase which became such common currency on both sides of the Atlantic that even President Roosevelt was soon using it to his own advantage, as described in the history book of the same name.
Cockburn's operation was closed down by the UK government under Winston Churchill during the War but he worked with Malcolm Muggeridge at Punch after the War and made a seminal contribution to the development of Private Eye in 1963.
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