Chapman Pincher

At 100 years old, Chapman Pincher physical status not available right now. We will update Chapman Pincher's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

His first teaching job as a physics master was at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys where he took pride in writing agricultural journals. When World War II began, Pincher decided to join the Royal Armoured Corps to serve his country, mainly because he felt that was the right thing to do, and because his father was no longer in the Army by this point. Pincher was a Staff Officer in the Corps, which he grew to very much enjoy during his time in the military. He took a keen interest in the trade of weaponry and learned as much as he possibly could. Pincher eventually became a tank gunner. Pincher also grew interested in intelligence and how it related to military purposes. He learned quickly that there was a lot of lying going on that he believed he could get to the bottom of if someone would give him the chance in the first place. Pincher was contacted by the Daily Express for information about a new explosive that had been developed while he was researching rockets during his time in the Royal Armoured Corps. Pincher reported news of the development of RDX and would continually supply information of this sort, specifically about "V-1 flying bomb, the V-2 rocket and the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima." The Daily Express could see the potential in the pieces which he sent in and when he finished his time in the Army, he was recruited by that newspaper. Pincher believed it was his job to keep the media informed on decisions the military took every day, and took joy in finding angles that nobody else could find.

Career

As a defense correspondent for the Daily Express, Pincher developed his own style of investigative journalism, actively seeking out high-level contacts to obtain secret information. Assigned to cover the stories of physicists Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs, who in the early post-war years were unmasked as Soviet spies, espionage became a particular interest of Pincher's.

Pincher's career as a journalist thereon mainly involved uncovering Cold War secrets in London for the Daily Express. During his career, he had contacts within the British Government that suggested MI5 and MI6 could possibly be providing housing unwittingly for Soviet agents. Pincher always went "above and beyond" for his investigative reporting style, including checking people's personal phone calls and relentlessly importuning important people, such as Prime Minister Harold Wilson, for answers to questions that Pincher thought were being concealed from the public. He regularly provided exclusives that other journalists had missed, which led to his employers calling him "the lone wolf of Fleet Street". He made both friends and enemies in high places. In 1959, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan wrote to his Minister of Defence: "Can nothing be done to suppress or get rid of Chapman Pincher?" Pincher obtained the title "spy catcher" after he exposed several people as spies, including George Blake, an MI6 member who let close to one hundred Soviet spies get jobs at the embassy in London.

According to the historian E.P. Thompson, "The columns of the Daily Express are a kind of official urinal where high officials of MI5 and MI6 stand side-by-side patiently leaking... . Mr. Pincher is too self- important and light- witted to realize how often he is being used". In reply, Pincher said "If someone wants to come and tell me some news that nobody else knows and I make a lovely scoop of it, come on, use me!".

He won awards as Journalist of the Year in 1964, and Reporter of the Decade in 1966.

Source