Female reporter broke the news of World War II
CLARE HOLLINGWORTH, 1911 - 2016
HONG KONG — Clare Hollingworth, a British war correspondent who was the first to report the Nazi invasion of Poland that marked the start of World War II, died in Hong Kong on Tuesday. She was 105.
The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong announced her death, calling her a beloved member with a remarkable career, including “the scoop of the century.”
A determined journalist who defied gender barriers and narrowly escaped death several times, Hollingworth spent much of her career on the front lines of major conflicts, including in the Middle East, North Africa and Vietnam, working for British newspapers. She lived her final four decades in Hong Kong after being one of the few Western journalists stationed in China in the 1970s.
She won major British journalism awards, including a “What the Papers Say” lifetime achievement award, and was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. Former British Prime Minister Ted Heath and former Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten were fans of Hollingworth, and various British generals wrote about her fondly.
The scoop that launched her career came in late August 1939, when she was a 27-year-old rookie reporter in southern Poland, barely a week into her job with Britain’s Daily Telegraph.
The border was closed to all but diplomatic vehicles, so she borrowed a British consulate official’s car to drive into German-occupied territory. She saw tanks, armored cars and artillery massing.
She recounted in her autobiography that burlap screens beside the road, “constructed to hide the military vehicles, blew in the wind, thus I saw the battle deployment.”
She scored another scoop when the Nazis launched their invasion three days later on Sept. 1.
Hollingworth was born Oct. 10, 1911, to a middle-class family in the village of Knighton in Leicestershire, England. Her father ran a boot factory founded by her grandfather. She worked as a secretary and then at a British refugee charity in Poland while writing occasional articles about the looming war in Europe. Friends influenced her decision to focus on journalism rather than politics.
The Daily Telegraph’s editor gave her a job as a stringer and sent her to Poland, partly because of her work with refugees in that country, according to her great-nephew, Patrick Garrett.
During her five months with the charity, Hollingworth played an important role in helping an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 refugees flee from the Nazis to Britain by arranging visas for them, a fact that Garrett unearthed in research for his 2016 biography of his greataunt, “Of Fortunes and War.”
Hollingworth wrote for many publications in her career, including the Economist, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Express.