Clare Hollingworth

Clare Hollingworth , OBE (born October 10, 1911 in Knighton , England ; † January 10, 2017 in Hong Kong ) was a British journalist and author who became the first female war correspondent to report the outbreak of World War II , which was known as the " Scoop of the Century" .

Childhood and youth

Clare Hollingworth was born in 1911 in Knighton, a southern suburb of Leicester . During the First World War , her father Albert took over the management of his father's shoe factory. The family moved to a farm near Shepshed. Hollingworth showed an early interest in writing, against her mother Daisy's wishes. Her interest in warfare stemmed from visits to historic battlefields in Britain and France with her father. After leaving school, she attended a home economics school in Leicester, which she disliked.

Before the war

Hollingworth became engaged to the son of a local family she knew. Instead of marrying him, she was hired as a secretary for the League of Nations Union office in Worcestershire. She won a scholarship to the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, and later to study at the University of Zagreb to Croatian to learn.

Hollingworth began writing articles for the New Statesman on a freelance basis . In June 1939 she was selected to run for the Labor Party in the Melton parliamentary constituency. However, the outbreak of war then led to the suspension of the elections, which should have taken place in late 1940.

After the Sudetenland was annexed to Germany in the Munich Agreement of 1938, she went to Warsaw to look after Czech refugees. Between March and July 1939 she helped thousands of refugees obtain British visas. Because of this experience, she was hired by Arthur Wilson, editor of The Daily Telegraph , in August 1939 .

In World War II

Less than a week after Hollingworth began working as a Telegraph journalist, she was sent to Poland to cover the mounting tensions in Europe. She convinced the British Consul General in Katowice , John Anthony Thwaites , to lend her his car and driver for an exploration trip across the German border. When she was driving along the German-Polish border on August 28, Hollingworth noticed countless German tanks and armored vehicles standing by because the tarpaulins hiding them had been lifted by the wind. Her report was the main cover story in the Daily Telegraph the following day .

On September 1 , Hollingworth called the British embassy in Warsaw to inform them of the German invasion of Poland . To convince doubting embassy employees, she held the phone out of the window. The noises of the German troops were audible. Hollingworth's eyewitness report was the first report the British Foreign Office received of the start of the war against Poland .

After the outbreak of war, Clare Hollingworth continued to report on the situation in Poland and went to Bucharest in 1940 . From there she reported for the Daily Express on the forced abdication of King Charles II and the unrest that followed. She disregarded censorship with her telephone reports. It is said that she once escaped arrest by stripping naked. In 1941 she traveled to Egypt and also reported from Turkey and Greece . Their work was made difficult by the fact that female war correspondents did not receive formal accreditation. After the capture of Tripoli by Bernard Montgomery on January 23, 1943, she was asked to return to Cairo during the following campaign in Tunisia . Hollingworth, on the other hand, wanted to stay directly on the front lines and subsequently reported on US troops in Algeria for the Chicago Daily News .

She then reported from Palestine , Persia and Iraq . At that time she was the first to interview Mohammed Reza Pahlavi , the Shah of Iran.

Later career

In the decades after the war, Hollingworth reported on conflicts in Palestine , Algeria , China , Aden and Vietnam . The BBC stated that while she was not the first war correspondent, "the depth of her technical, tactical and strategic expertise has set her apart". The New York Times called her "the undisputed old master of war correspondents". She acquired considerable knowledge of military technology; due to a pilot training in the 1940s, she knew a lot about combat aircraft.

Immediately after the war, she started working for The Economist and The Observer . In 1946, she and her future husband Geoffrey Hoare witnessed a bomb attack at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed 91 people. She later reportedly refused to shake hands with Irgun leader and later Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin because of his role in the attack. In 1950 she left Cairo and moved to Paris, where she worked for The Guardian . She traveled to Algeria several times and made contacts with the Algerian National Liberation Front . In the early 1960s she reported on the Algerian War .

When she traveled to Beirut for the Guardian in 1963 and was doing research on Kim Philby , an Observer correspondent, she discovered that he had left for Odessa on a Soviet ship . Guardian Editor Alastair Hetherington withheld the story of defected Philby for three months, fearing legal action. Her article appeared on April 27, 1963. Philby's defection was approved by the government. Hollingworth became the Guardian's first woman defense correspondent .

In 1967 she left the Guardian and began writing for the Telegraph again. Her ambition to work in war zones instead of pursuing foreign policy had contributed to this move. From Vietnam she reported on the Vietnam War . She was among the first to predict that the war would end in a stalemate. In her reports, she also valued the opinion of the Vietnamese civilian population.

In 1973 she became the China correspondent for the Telegraph , the first in the People's Republic of China after 1949. She met Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing . She was the one who last interviewed the Shah . Journalist John Simpson said that "she was the only person he wanted to talk to". In 1981 she retired and moved to Hong Kong, but also spent time in the UK, France and China. She watched the protests that led to the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 from a hotel balcony.

Personal

Hollingworth was married twice. She married Vandeleur Robinson , the regional League of Nations Union (LNU) representative in southeast England, in 1936 , but the marriage broke up during the war. They divorced in 1951. In the same year she married Geoffrey Hoare, the Times Middle East correspondent . He died in 1965.

In Hong Kong, she attended the Foreign Correspondents' Club almost every day, where she was an honorary goodwill ambassador . In 1990 she published her memoir under the title Front Line . In 2006, Hollingworth sued her treasurer, Thomas Edward Juson ( aka Ted Thomas), for $ 300,000 that he allegedly took from her bank account. Juson defended his actions as investments in projects but agreed to repay the money in 2007, which he did not fully do by the end of 2016.

In 2016, the biography of her great-nephew Patrick Garrett was published under the title Of Fortunes and War: Clare Hollingworth, First of the Female War Correspondents . On January 10, 2017, the 105-year-old was found unresponsive in her apartment in Central and shortly afterwards pronounced dead at Ruttonjee Hospital .

Awards

• 1962: Woman Journalist of the Year for her reports on the Algerian War (Hannen Swaffer Awards, UK).
• 1982: Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her journalistic services
• 1994: James Cameron Award for Journalism
• 1999: Lifetime Achievement Award from the television program What the Papers Say

Fonts

• The Three Weeks' War in Poland. Duckworth, London 1940.
• There's a German Just Behind Me. Secker and Warburg, London 1942.
• The Arabs and the West. Methuen, London 1952.
• Mao and the Men Against Him. Jonathan Cape, London 1984, ISBN 0-224-01760-8 .
• The Vietcong. Major protest movement of Indo-China. In: Rajeshwari Ghose (Ed.): Protest movements in South and Southeast Asia. Traditional and modern idioms of expression. Center of Asian Studies, Hong Kong 1987, pp. 171-180.
• Front line. (Memoirs), Jonathan Cape, London 1990, ISBN 0-224-02827-8 .

Web links

• Imperial War Museum, 2001 interview
• Clare Hollingworth interviewed in 1999 on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs

Individual evidence

1. ^ Clare Hollingworth: British was correspondent dies aged 105 . In: BBC News , January 10, 2017. 
2. ↑ Esther Addley: A foreign affair . In: The Guardian , January 16, 2004. 
3. ^ Anne Sebba: Clare Hollingworth obituary . In: The Guardian , January 10, 2017. Retrieved January 11, 2017. 
4. ^ Report of the Annual Conference of the Labor Party. 1939.
5. ↑ 105-year-old thanked by woman she rescued during WW2 . In: BBC News , October 10, 2016. Retrieved January 10, 2017. 
6. ^ Second World War 70th anniversary: ​​The Scoop . In: The Daily Telegraph , August 30, 2009. Archived from the original on November 16, 2012. 
7. ^ John Otis: Clare Hollingworth, reporter who broke news about the start of World War II, dies at 105 . In: The Washington Post . January 10, 2017.
8. ^ Peter Foster: Clare Hollingworth, the foreign correspondent who broke news of Second World War, turns 104 . In: Daily Telegraph , October 9, 2015. 
9. ↑ source?
10. ^ Obituary: Clare Hollingworth , BBC News. January 10, 2017. 
11. ^ Evening Briefing - Clare Hollingworth. In: The New York Times. January 10, 2017, accessed January 27, 2017 . 
12. ^ Neil Tweedie: Clare Hollingworth interview: 'I must admit I enjoy being in a war. I don't know why. I'm not brave ' . In: The Telegraph , October 9, 2011. Retrieved January 28, 2017. 
13. ^ Joy Lo Dico: The woman who broke the news of WW2 . In: London Evening Standard , October 9, 2015, p. 16. 
14. ↑ HK reporter famous for World War II scoop in legal spat . In: The Taipei Times , May 4, 2006, p. 5. 
15. ↑ Emma Hartley: Doyenne of war correspondents parted from life's savings . In: Daily Telegraph , October 22, 2009. Retrieved October 13, 2011. 
16. ↑ Called to Account . In: China Daily , October 12, 2011. Retrieved August 13, 2013. 
17. ↑ How to make it as a female war correspondent . December 10, 2016. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
18. ↑ Joyce Lau: Book review: the life of Clare Hollingworth, war correspondent . In: The South China Morning Post , August 26, 2016. 
19. ^ Clare Hollingworth, the journalist who broke the news of the second world, this in Hong Kong . In: South China Morning Post , January 11, 2017. Retrieved January 10, 2017. 
20. ^ Margalit Fox: Clare Hollingworth, Reporter Who Broke News of World War II, Dies at 105. In: The New York Times. January 10, 2017.
21. ^ Press Awards . Archived from the original on June 20, 2017. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 10, 2017. 
22. ^ London Gazette  (Supplement). No. 49008, HMSO, London, June 11, 1982, p. 10 ( PDF , English).