Journalist Hollingworth — a life well lived
I think it must have been in late 1972 that I first met the redoubtable Clare Hollingworth, the doyenne of all war correspondents whose fame spread far beyond her initial scoop of reporting Germany’s plans to invade Poland in 1939, triggering World War II.
Back in those pre-digital days, correspondents in far-flung places had to rely on telex and friendly pilots to get their stories out to a waiting world. Reuters, the global news agency for whom I was a very green correspondent assigned to cover the American War in Vietnam, had a special arrangement that allowed British newspaper correspondents to use our telex system.
The door opened in our office on Han Thuyen Street, just next to the presidential palace in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and in marched the unmistakable figure of Donald Wise of the Daily Mirror — already a legend
This Day, That Year
among us greenhorns — followed by a diminutive figure dressed in a tailored combat jacket of the WWII era.
“Who,” I whispered to a colleague, “is the little old lady?”
“Ah, that’s Clare Hollingworth of The Daily Telegraph. She’s something else.”
And something else she was. Reuters was supposed to offer only telex facilities to visiting correspondents, yet here was Pham Ngoc Dinh, our office manager, falling over backward to help this petite lady in her 60s with accreditation and anything else she needed.
After she swept out of the office, Dinh looked up, grinned, and said, “She 100 percent tiger lady.”
And that was Hollingworth. If she needed something, she got it. I bumped into her a few times later in the war — once peeping from behind a South Vietnamese armored personnel carrier on Highway One during an ambush.
The conflicts she covered read like a history book. WWII, Algeria, Vietnam and India among many. Remember, this was a woman who would sleep on the floor in her bedroom once a month just to toughen herself up.
She went on to become the first permanent correspondent for The Daily Telegraph to be based in Beijing, and from that flowed the familiar, well-informed Hollingworth copy, in books and articles, at a time when “China-watching” was an art form for Western correspondents mainly based in Hong Kong.
She met the charismatic Zhou Enlai, as well as other members of the government, although as far as I know she never met Mao Zedong. She wrote a well-received biography of Mao, which sits on my bookshelf to this day.
Her scoops were legendary — she’d only been a journalist for a week when she stumbled on massed German panzer tanks lined up on the border with Poland. Presumably, German sentries didn’t think it worth challenging a petite woman driving a car and flying the British Union Jack.
Back in Warsaw, she rang the embassy straightaway, filed her story and then watched the tanks roll in.
After that, the scoops flowed — she broke the story about Kim Philby, a British diplomat who became a Soviet spy; and bravely entered the casbah in Algiers to meet rebel contacts when others hovered on the outskirts.
I met up with her again when I was posted to Hong Kong for Reuters in 1988, and spent many happy hours listening to her flow of memories.
Perhaps the fondest memory I have is of dining with her in the late 1980s at the home of David Bell, then the external affairs manager of Cathay Pacific Airways in Hong Kong. Also there was another dear friend, travel writer and longtime foreign correspondent Gavin Young, of the Observer.
It was one of those occasions where you just sat back and let the stories flow — and at the end, Hollingworth leaned across the table and said, “You know, we were very privileged to do what we did.”
Hollingworth died in Hong Kong on Jan 10. She was 105.
Contact the writer at chris @mail.chinadailyuk.com