Clare Hollingworth: Feisty foreign correspondent who broke news of World War 2
1911-2017
CLARE Hollingworth, who has died at the age of 105, was one of the most celebrated war correspondents of her time, universally admired for her indomitable courage and integrity.
She witnessed the outbreak of World War 2 on September 1 1939 when, as a novice Daily Telegraph stringer, she was woken at her hotel in the Polish town of Katowice by the sound of anti-aircraft fire aimed at German bombers.
Because talks were still going on, the story “from our special correspondent in Katowice” was not very big when it appeared on the paper’s front page, and when her driver told her she had heard an air raid practice she feared she might have made the gaffe of a lifetime, reporting a non-existent war.
Hollingworth’s fascination with military action, devious diplomacy and political chicanery took her to front lines all over the world — Israel, Lebanon, India, Pakistan, Algeria and Vietnam.
In Fleet Street she came to epitomise the tough woman reporter. Only 1.57m tall, she was implacable in pursuit of a story and relished danger.
The journalist Tom Pocock recalled going into battle with her, her eyes shining “like a deb’s at her coming-out ball”.
After the war Hollingworth married her second husband Geoffrey Hoare, an elegant writer with The Times. The couple headed for Jerusalem to cover the bloody birth of Israel, with Hollingworth stringing for the News of the World and The Economist.
Despite her earlier experiences she was shaken by the violence. She recalled the day of the bombing of the King David Hotel by the Stern Gang as one of the few when she had felt fear, pondering the contrast between the Jewish perpetrators and the refugees she had aided before the war.
In India, during the bloody war with Pakistan in 1965, Indira Gandhi, then information minister, refused to allow reporters through to cover the action. Hollingworth made such a nuisance of herself that she alone achieved access.
Again and again she outstripped her male competitors in the field. Asked whether she had ever encountered prejudice, she replied: “Never from first-class men. It is only second-raters who are scared of being outclassed by a woman.”
In 1963, while working for the Guardian, she received a tip-off about Soviet spy Kim Philby’s disappearance from Beirut in a Soviet ship. Although Philby knew Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, who had escaped to Russia 12 years earlier, he had been officially cleared of being “the third man” linked to them. Fearful of libel action, however, the paper sat on the story for two months until it leaked in the Beirut press.
In 1965, while in Saigon, she suffered a tragedy when Hoare wrote from Paris to say that he was going to London for a check-up. She flew home on the next flight. Hoare died three weeks later.
It was in Saigon that she obtained another major scoop after a North Vietnamese government emissary gave her the details of arrangements for the first meetings between US and Hanoi diplomats in Paris, which led to the eventual withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam in 1975.
In 1972 Hollingworth took on what was perhaps her toughest assignment as The Telegraph’s first resident correspondent in China since the “bamboo curtain” descended in 1949. She lived alone in a hotel and her interpreter was forbidden to eat with her for fear of being infected with Western ideas.
Although age gradually took its toll as her eyesight and hearing declined, she continued to sleep at night with her shoes by her bed and passport in the dresser in case the foreign editor rang with an assignment. —
Only second-rate men are scared of being outclassed by a woman