Born
in London, England in 1910, and winning a scholarship to Chigwell School as a child, during his lifetime the British
journalist and novelist Alan Winnington would travel the world.
As
a young man, following a chance meeting with Harry Pollitt in a pub
in 1934, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, and he soon
became a branch secretary. His career in journalism began when
he landed a job with a photo agency, and soon he was writing for
socialist newspapers like the Daily Worker (as the Morning
Star was known at the time)
which he continued to write for
from the 1940s up until the 1960s. For the first few years after WW2
he became “our man in Beijing”, when he reported on the early
years of the newly independent People’s Republic of China for the
Daily Worker, while also working as an advisor to the new
Xinhua (New China) news agency.
Uncomfortable
Truths
His
location in Asia meant he was ideally placed to report on the Korean
war when it broke out in June 1950, and he would anger his own
government by reporting on both the Korean and later the Vietnam wars
from the communist side. Along with his colleague, the Australian
journalist Wilfred Burchett (who was equally ostracized for his
reporting by his own birth country), Winnington would expose the use of
biological weapons against Koreans by the USA.
For
this brave reporting both men had their passports removed for many
years.
From
China to Germany
By
1960 Winnington had learned to speak Chinese fluently, but had
already become skeptical of Mao’s approach to building socialism at
least two years earlier because of the "Great Leap Forward"
and other campaigns, which he described as “stupidities.” He left
China with his Sino-British wife Esther and their two children,
settling in East Berlin while they attempted to negotiate the return
of his British passport with the help of Lance Samson, a German Jew
who also worked for the Star.
The
British government were still considering a charge of treason or
espionage, possibly with a death sentence, as punishment for his
reporting during the Korean war, so even after the restoration of his
passport he did not return permanently to his country of birth,
choosing instead to remain in Berlin. Sadly, his wife wanted to
return to Britain, and their marriage broke down when she decided to
move with their two children back to Britain, where she married
Samson with whom she had a third child. Their daughter Polly would
subsequently grow up to become an author in her own right.
After
making the decision to remain in the east, Winnington began a new
family with a lady named Ursula Wittbrodt, who he had met in 1963 and
who would become Ursula Winnington when they married in 1967. He did
not receive his British passport until a year later. (Burchett had to
wait until Gough Whitlam’s Labour government came to power in
1972 before his birthright was restored.)
Winnington
continued to work as a correspondent for the Morning Star from
his new home in the GDR, and also served at times as an Asia advisor
to the East German government. During the Vietnam War he repeatedly
had the opportunity to travel to the Far East where he reported from
both China and Vietnam.
From
Journalism to Crime Writing
Alongside
his journalistic work however, Winnington was increasingly beginning
to develop a career as a novelist and author of crime fiction, among
them novels in German like Heart failure, Inspector
Gullet and The Death Curve,
The Presumed Dead Man
and Angler's Alibi. He also wrote children's books,
such as a fantasy novel in two volumes about a robot horse called
"Silver hoof", which was set in the Himalayas. During his
time in China, he had developed a considerable love and admiration
for the people of Tibet, writing Tibet: Record of a Journey
(1957), which these stories reflected.
He
even had a very brief foray into acting, appearing in a small film
role as a Chief of Intelligence Service in the 1967 East German film
Die Gefrorenen Blitze (Frozen Flashes), although
he seems
to have enjoyed more success
with writing. His crime novel
Police Alibi was made
into a
film for
East German television in
1971 (Tod in der Kurve),
while Milliony Ferfaksa (Fairfax’s Millions)
was turned into a feature film in 1980 by the Russian Dovzhenko Film
Studios.
His
autobiography Breakfast with Mao was first published in a
small German print run, as he had still been writing it when he died
on 26th November 1983. Described by the historian Edwin
Moise in the London Review of Books as “marvellously
readable” it only appeared in English in 1986 when Lawrence and
Wishart published it as From London to Beijing: Memoirs
of a Foreign Correspondent 1914 to 1960.
Nine
short novels, six of which belong to the crime and detective genre,
the aforementioned two children's books and four travel books about
China and Asia have also been published in English at some time or
another. Yet despite this diverse oeuvre it appears that Slaves of
the Cool Mountains remains the only one of his books currently
still in print in the English language, and he currently has no
English language Wikipedia entry.
Today
Ursula Winnington is mainly known in Germany as an author of
cookbooks, where she has been called the “Chef Queen of the East”,
with some of her books reaching a total circulation of over one
million copies, including her
Kleines
Kochbuch für Kinder (Small Cookbook
for Children) (1977). Since 1992, Klatschmohn Verlag has reissued
three of her most popular books, and in 2008 she published another
book Liebe, Lust und Leckereien (Love, Lust and Treats).
In 1995, long after Winnington’s death in 1983 and the
reunification of Germany in 1990, she opened The Gecko in Berlin, a
shop for exotic furniture and gifts from all over the world, and
continues to make her home in Berlin.
Revival of Interest from Korea
Alan Winnington
remains almost unknown in the country of his birth, and the English
speaking world more broadly. Unlike Burchett, who is mainly
remembered for his Daily Express article of 1945 which exposed
the reality of nuclear radiation sickness following the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Winnington does not even have an
English language Wikipedia entry. He is remembered, it seems, only in
Germany.
With this in mind
it is therefore quite noteworthy that recently the media organisation
Ahim and South Korean journalist Im Hyoin have been bringing
Winnington’s revelations about US atrocities in Korea to light once
more, if only in South Korea, among them Winnington’s work exposing the notoriously
under-reported Sincheon massacre. This atrocity even inspired a
painting by Picasso which sits in the Picasso Museum in Paris. It is
a painting as stark and brutal as his earlier painting Guernica inspired by fascist atrocities in the Spanish Civil War but which still remains far less well known.
This should give us pause to reflect
upon how, thirty years after the Cold War ended, its logic continues to distort our own historical
memory.
Notes:
