War correspondent Clare Hollingworth wasn’t going to say goodbye easily
The journalist until recently still enjoyed the odd glass of wine at Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents Club, where she was once a fixture, and is the subject of a new biography. An August 2016 profile feature recalls an extraordinary woman
Every article about Clare Hollingworth begins with the same fact: she was the journalist who broke the news, in late August 1939, that German tanks were gathering on the Polish border.
The previous week, despite never having worked as a reporter, she’d been hired as a freelance stringer by The Daily Telegraph in London. She’d flown to Berlin, then Warsaw, then taken a train to the Polish border town of Katowice, where she’d borrowed the British consul general’s car. “You’re a funny old girl!” he’d laughed when she’d said she was crossing, alone, back into Germany. This wasn’t strictly accurate: she was 27.
The border was still open for diplomatic vehicles; the soldiers saluted the Union flag on the bonnet as she drove across. She did a little retail investigation. (“In a chemist’s shop where I tried to buy some soap,” she wrote later, “I was told they had to send the entire stock to Berlin.”) She drove on. In the 3km between the towns of Hindenburg and Gleiwitz, 65 dispatch riders on motorbikes overtook her.
A huge hessian screen had been erected to shield the valley below from prying eyes but as she was passing, a “great gust of wind” lifted it, and she saw what was about to be unleashed. The Daily Telegraph’s front-page headline on Tuesday, August 29, 1939 stated “1,000 Tanks Massed on Polish Frontier”. The byline, as was then the style, simply said: From Our Own Correspondent. Three days later, she was woken at 5am by Luftwaffe air raids on Katowice. She rang Hugh Carleton Greene, the Telegraph’s Warsaw correspondent (and brother of novelist Graham Greene), a call he later described as the most dramatic moment of his life.
“It’s begun,” she said.
Hollingworth would go on to report many more wars for other newspapers but that one – her first, the world’s second – would define her. In 2000, the BBC’s What The Papers Say gave her a lifetime achievement award. (She’d already been honoured by the programme, in 1963, for her coverage of the Algerian war.) She was, said the citation, “the doyenne of war correspondents” and her career read “like a history of conflict in the 20th century”.