Journalist hailed for the “scoop of the century”
Clare Hollingworth, who has died aged 105, was only three days into her first job in journalism when she scooped
the biggest news story of the century: the outbreak of the Second World War. Sent to Poland by The Daily Telegraph in late August 1939, Hollingworth – a petite but intrepid 27-year-old – had borrowed the British consul’s car in order to drive across the German frontier (which was otherwise closed to traffic). On the way back, she noticed that a hessian screen had been erected along the road; and when a gust of wind lifted it, she saw what it was hiding in the valley below – a phalanx of German tanks. Immediately appreciating their significance, she rushed back to file her story: “1,000 tanks massed on Polish border. Ten divisions reported ready for swift stroke”, read The Telegraph front-page headline on 29 August.
Two days later, on 1 September, she woke to the sound of gunfire. She rang a friend at the British consulate, Robin Hankey, who was sceptical – until she held the phone out of her window, so that he could hear the tanks rolling in. She then phoned Hugh Carleton Greene, her boss at The Telegraph, who called up the foreign ministry in Warsaw. The Nazis couldn’t have invaded, he was told: “We are still negotiating”. Nevertheless, The Telegraph ran her story. It was uncredited, but Hollingworth went on to become one of Britain’s most admired war reporters. “I’m not brave,” she said years later. “I just enjoy action.”
Clare Hollingworth was born in Knighton, Leicestershire, in 1911, and as a child loved touring historic battlefields with her father, a shoe manufacturer. In the 1930s, she studied at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, and then at the University of Zagreb. In 1938, she went to Warsaw to help the refugees pouring in from Sudetenland, which had recently been annexed by the Nazis. Honing the powers of persuasion that would become her stock in trade, she managed to obtain visas for hundreds of Czechs to come to Britain. On returning to London, she was hired by The Telegraph, which sent her back to Poland, to Katowice, close to the German border. The events of September 1939 left her with a taste for cordite: she resolved to spend the rest of her life covering wars – and that is what she did, said The Times. A Miss Marple-like figure, she spent decades travelling from conflict zone to conflict zone, for various newspapers, armed with what she called her “t and t”– “toothbrush and typewriter”.
In late 1940, she was in Bucharest, where she narrowly avoided being arrested for breaching strict censorship laws by taking off her clothes as members of the fascist Iron Guard clattered up the stairs to her apartment to take her away. “Will you not give a lady time to dress,” she demanded after they broke down the door. The guards retreated, giving her vital seconds in which to call Hankey at the British legation. Later, she went to report on the North Africa campaign; General Montgomery, who had no truck with women on the front line, ordered her to leave – so she joined one of General Eisenhower’s units instead. She and her husband, The Times’ Middle Eastern correspondent Geoffrey Hoare, were yards from the King David Hotel in Jerusalem when it was bombed in 1946. She reported from Algeria in the 1950s. Then, in 1963, came her second major scoop: on learning that Kim Philby had gone missing, she immediately suspected that he had defected to Russia. Her editors at The Guardian weren’t convinced, and sat on the story for three months – but when finally published, it caused a sensation. In 1966, she was on a foreign assignment when her husband suffered a fatal heart attack; for the only time in her life, she asked for immediate personal leave. She did not marry again.
Hollingworth returned to The Telegraph in 1967, and finally retired in 1981, when she moved to Hong Kong. There, she became a stalwart of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, regaling visitors with her tales of derring-do – always delivered in the most matter-of-fact tones. Until well into her 90s, she would sleep on the floor from time to time, to stop herself “going soft”, and she always kept a bag packed, just in case the call came.