'Magnificent' journalist who reported WWII outbreak Clare Hollingworth dies aged 105
- by Virginia Carter
- in World Media
- — Jan 11, 2017
The British journalist broke the news of the Nazi invasion of Poland that triggered the outbreak of the Second World War - and she spent much of her career reporting for United Kingdom newspapers on the world's major conflicts.
After borrowing a diplomat's vehicle she drove into German-held territory, where she saw tanks, artillery and armoured cars.
Working in Poland in 1939, she spotted German forces amassed on the Polish border.
When the Nazis launched their invasion in September she informed her newspaper and British diplomats, holding the telephone out of the window so they could hear it for themselves.
"If there is a war, and if the world wants, I would like to cover it", the journalist, still proud of her scoop, told AFP in a 2009 interview.
A later scoop, about the British spy Kim Philby, was spiked by The Guardian in 1963.
"I enjoy action, I enjoy being in a plane that's bombing something, or being on the ground in the desert when they're advancing", Hollingworth once said.
On that occasion, scores gathered to celebrate the former reporter, who has also been credited with saving the lives of thousands of Eastern European refugees by helping them flee Hitler's Nazi army.
Ms. Hollingworth was born in Knighton, England, on October 10, 1911.
Hollingworth was reporting in southern Poland for Britain's Daily Telegraph when she made a decision to investigate what was happening across the border.
Hollingworth's great nephew, Patrick Garrett, has published a book on his great aunt, Of Fortunes and War: Clare Hollingworth, First of the Female War Correspondents. Her road to reporting came via her work at a British refugee charity in Poland, where she sometimes wrote articles about the looming war in Europe.
The commander pushed her aside, grabbed another British journalist and dragged him out the front door of their hotel.
She was held up as a formidable role model by foreign correspondents who followed in her footsteps. "No battlefield was complete" without her, the British author and war correspondent Tom Pocock once remarked.
"We are sad to announce that after an illustrious career spanning a century of news, celebrated war correspondent Clare Hollingworth died this evening in Hong Kong", a spokesman for the Celebrating Clare Hollingworth group announced in a statement on Facebook on this afternoon. She had worked from Beijing in the 1970s. She had officially retired from The Daily Telegraph after years of failing eyesight and increasing memory problems.
Hollingworth was married twice and did not have any children.
