The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
The unlikely heroine of the Second World War
When journalist Clare Hollingworth broke the news of the start of the Second World War in the pages of this newspaper in 1939, it was the scoop of the century. So who was the woman who smuggled herself into Germany on the eve of hostilities on the pretenc
How Telegraph journalist Clare Hollingworth broke the news of the start of the war. By former editor Charles Moore
I heard Clare Hollingworth before I saw her. This was because she was very small and her voice was very carrying. In the Telegraph’s crowded newsroom at the paper’s old offices in Fleet
Street, she was invisible among the male journalists, but wholly audible.
By then – 1979 – Clare was back in Britain as the paper’s defence correspondent. Most people of her age – nearly 70 – would have welcomed a desk-bound job. For Clare, however, it was almost an imprisonment. Her life had been filled by war and diplomacy, the former being what happens when the latter breaks down. She understood both supremely well.
Clare is most famous for having got the scoop of the 20th century. Actually, it was two scoops.
In August 1939, she became assistant to Hugh Carleton Greene (later director-general of the BBC), the Telegraph correspondent in Warsaw. Suspecting the German invasion was imminent, she borrowed the British consul’s official car. Under the colours of the Union flag, she crossed the German border on the pretence of shopping.
Near Gleiwitz, she spotted, she later recalled, ‘hidden behind some hessian, rows and rows of German tanks’, of Von Rundstedt’s Army Group South. Clare’s story appeared in the paper the next day – 29 August 1939 – under the headline, ‘1,000 tanks massed on Polish frontier’. ‘I learn on reliable authority…’ it began. The reliable authority was her own eyes (which, by the way, always needed thick spectacles).
That was the first scoop. The second came three days later, back in Poland. Clare was woken by anti-aircraft guns. From her bedroom window in Katowice, she could see German warplanes flying over. She rang the sceptical British consul in Warsaw, and
In 1939, with the convinced him by holding the phone out
consul’s car she of the window so that he could hear the
took on her fateful noise himself. She filed the story. Clare
‘shopping trip’ nearly panicked when her driver told her later that the sounds had come from air-raid practice. But in fact she had been right. The Second World War had begun.
The rest of Clare’s career was equally remarkable. She was always determined to get to the action. In that male-dominated age, she knew that regular reporting jobs for women were almost unobtainable, so she charmed and chanced her way through. She also had strong humanitarian motives. Earlier in 1939, she had left her first husband to work for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (which Hitler had invaded earlier) in Poland. Soon she was the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ in the British papers. Her people-smuggling skills – which involved procuring visas and identity cards based on false identities to conceal that those fleeing were anti-nazi dissidents – probably saved about 2,000 refugees.
As the Germans invaded Poland, Clare escaped to Romania. Since the Telegraph already had a stringer (a freelance foreign correspondent contracted to a newspaper) in the post, she switched to the Daily Express. As the regime grew more pro-nazi, she was eventually arrested at home, but prevented the police from bundling her out of her house by stripping off. The officers, perplexed by how to dress her before they could take her away, backed off.
She went on to cover Bulgaria, Greece, Romania again, and then Egypt. She accompanied RAF bombing raids, joined the Anglorussian invasion of Persia, and there interviewed the young Shah, just installed by the British, forming a lifelong bond with him.
After the war, Clare covered the violent birth of the state of Israel, General de Gaulle’s dramatic visit to Algeria during its civil war, and the communist insurgencies against the
She prevented the pro-nazi police from bundling her out of her house by stripping off
British in Borneo and Malaya. She was also first with the story that the traitor Kim Philby had defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, but the Guardian – by then her employer – sat on it for fear of libel. Two months later, other sources published it. Clare was proved right again.
For the Telegraph, Clare reported the 1967 Six Day War in Israel and later the Vietnam War. She was the first to reveal secret plans for talks in Paris between the United States and North Vietnam. This was an example of her unusual ability to report not only fighting, but also the politics behind it. It was fitting, even though she knew no Mandarin, that she become the paper’s first correspondent in communist China, as the country began to open up a little in the last years of Chairman Mao. Somehow, she found out, in 1974, that Mao had had a stroke. She correctly predicted that the reformer Deng Xiaoping was the rising star.
In due time, I became Clare’s editor. Although she had nominally retired, we retained her because her sources were so good. With the British handover of Hong Kong to China looming, Clare went to live there. This was typical of her; most Westerners were more likely to move the other way.
I arrived in Hong Kong for the handover ceremonies in 1997. In my room at the Mandarin Hotel, I found a typed message: ‘Very old lady in reception for you.’ I knew at once who it was. I had a drink with Clare. As usual, she was dressed in an elegant safari suit, and I found no one better informed about the strange manoeuvring behind the scenes as the Chinese took control.
Clare was indeed very old, but she was to live a further 20 years in Hong Kong before she died, aged 105, in 2017. I can still hear the echo of that big voice: ‘I MUST speak to my editor,’ as she approached my office, even in her 80s, with the latest information.
See overleaf for more on the wartime Telegraph