Clare Hollingworth

Clare Hollingworth (10 October 1911 – 10 January 2017) was an English journalist and author.

She was the first war correspondent to report the outbreak of World War II, described as "the scoop of the century".

Hollingworth was born in 1911 in Knighton, a southern suburb of Leicester, the daughter of Daisy and Albert Hollingworth.

During World War I, her father took over the running of his father's footwear factory, and the family moved to a farm near Shepshed.

She showed an early interest in becoming a writer, against opposition from her mother, and her interest in warfare was stimulated by visits to historical battlefield sites in Britain and France with her father.

After leaving school, she attended a domestic science college in Leicester, which she did not enjoy.

Hollingworth became engaged to the son of a local family known to her own, but instead of marriage, went to work as secretary to the League of Nations Union (LNU) Worcestershire organiser.

She then won a scholarship to the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, and later, a place at Zagreb University to study Croatian.

Hollingworth started to write articles on a freelance basis for the New Statesman.

Following the 1938 Munich Agreement, when the German speaking Sudetenland was incorporated into Germany, she went to Warsaw, working with Czech refugees.

As a rookie reporter for The Daily Telegraph in 1939, while travelling from Poland to Germany, she spotted and reported German forces massed on the Polish border; The Daily Telegraph headline read: "1,000 tanks massed on Polish border"; three days later she was the first to report the German invasion of Poland.

In June 1939, she was selected to fight the parliamentary seat of Melton for the Labour Party in the general election that was due to take place by the end of 1940, but the outbreak of war led to the suspension of elections and, by the 1945 election, a different Labour candidate had been chosen.

Between March and July 1939, she helped rescue thousands of people from Hitler's forces by arranging British visas.

The experience also led to her being hired by Arthur Watson, the editor of The Daily Telegraph, in August 1939.

Hollingworth had been working as a Telegraph journalist for less than a week when she was sent to Poland to report on worsening tensions in Europe.

She persuaded the British Consul-General in Katowice, John Anthony Thwaites, to lend her his chauffeured car for a fact-finding mission into Germany.

While driving along the German–Polish border on 28 August, Hollingworth observed a massive build-up of German troops, tanks and armoured cars facing Poland, after the camouflage screens concealing them were disturbed by wind.

Her report was the main story on The Daily Telegraph's front page on the following day.

Her report was headlined: "1,000 Tanks Massed on Polish Frontier; 10 Divisions Reported Ready For Swift Stroke; From Our Own Correspondent."

On 1 September, Hollingworth called the British Embassy in Warsaw to report the German invasion of Poland.

To convince doubtful Embassy officials, she held a telephone out of the window of her room to capture the sounds of German forces.

Hollingworth's eyewitness account was the first report the British Foreign Office received about the invasion of Poland.

She continued to report on the situation in Poland, and, in 1940, by then working for the Daily Express, went to Bucharest, where she reported on King Carol II's forced abdication and the ensuing unrest.

Her telephoned reports ignored censorship rules and she is reported to have once avoided arrest by stripping naked.

She amassed considerable expertise in military technology and – after pilot training during the 1940s – was particularly knowledgeable about aircraft.

Immediately after the war, she began working for The Economist and The Observer.

In 1941, she went to Egypt and subsequently reported from Turkey, Greece and Cairo.

Her efforts were hampered, because women war correspondents did not receive formal accreditation.

After General Bernard Montgomery took Tripoli in 1943, she was ordered to return to Cairo.

Wishing to remain at the front lines, however, she went on to cover General Dwight D. Eisenhower's forces in Algiers, writing for the Chicago Daily News.

She subsequently reported from Palestine, Iraq and Persia.

During this time, she became the first person to interview the Shah of Iran.

During the post-war decades, Hollingworth reported on conflicts in Palestine, Algeria, China, Aden and Vietnam.

The BBC stated that, although she was not the earliest woman war correspondent, "her depth of technical, tactical and strategic insight set her apart."

The New York Times described her as "the undisputed doyenne of war correspondents".

In 1946, she and her husband Geoffrey Hoare were at the scene of the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem, which killed 91 people.

She later was said to have refused to shake the hand of the Irgun leader Menachem Begin, who many years later became the Prime Minister of Israel, because of his role in ordering the event.

By 1950, she had moved from her base in Cairo to Paris, working for The Guardian.

Hollingworth was appointed OBE by Elizabeth II for "services to journalism" in 1982.

She died on 10 January 2017 at the age of 105.