Clare Hollingworth (1911-2017)was the first war correspondent to report the outbreak of World War II, described as "the scoop of the century."
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Thanks to a simple gust of wind, today’s journalist pulled off one of the greatest scoops in modern history. Drawn to war zones, she dedicated her life to covering conflict. Even in her nineties, she often slept on the floor to keep from going soft, and always kept her passport nearby.
Let’s talk about Clare Hollingworth.
Clare Hollingworth was born on October 10, 1911, in Leicester, England. Young Clare often tagged along with her father, Albert, on tours of historical battlefields. It was there, amid the ruins scattered across England and France, that Clare’s interest in warfare was sparked.
At the insistence of her parents, especially her mother, Daisy, Clare attended domestic science school. These institutions were meant to raise the prestige of running a household -- if the home was a woman’s sphere, then she should be trained to run it efficiently, just as men were trained for careers.
Of her time there, Clare later wrote, “Although it is useful to be able to make an omelet, my domestic science training caused me to hate having anything to do with housework.”
While in school, Clare also became engaged to a man her family considered suitable. But the weight of societal expectations proved too heavy.
Clare broke off the engagement. Then she announced she was becoming a journalist. Her mother was appalled.
“She didn’t believe anything journalists wrote and thought they were only fit for the tradesmen’s entrance,” Clare said of her mother.
Unmarried, unattached, and relatively uneducated, Clare spent the 1930s at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies in London, and the University of Zagreb, in what was then Yugoslavia.
Clare then found work with the League of Nations Union, an organization that promoted international peace and security. She was sent to Warsaw, Poland.
In 1939, as Nazis gained power across Europe, Clare helped usher thousands of Czechoslovakian refugees to safety by organizing travel documents that let them come to Poland.
The Telegraph, a daily British newspaper, heard of Clare’s work. On August 25, 1939, they hired her as a correspondent, assigned to cover the impending war. She flew back to Warsaw from London the next day.
Two days later, on August 28th, Clare drove a car -- commandeered from the British consulate -- from Warsaw into Katowice, another Polish town. From there, she crossed the border into Germany.
While driving back to Katowice, a gust of wind lifted a tarp that had been constructed on the German side. Hidden in a valley, Clare saw hundreds of troops, tanks, armored cars and field guns. She knew what that meant.
Clare sped back across the border and called her editor. The Nazis were coming, and soon.
Her article was published on August 29th. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st. World War II had begun.
Less than a week into her career as a journalist, and Clare, at age 27, had pulled off what would become arguably the biggest scoop of the century.
But her explosive debut didn’t end there. Clare woke up on September 1st to German bombers overhead, with artillery flashing in the distance. She immediately called her contact at the British Embassy.
“The war has begun!” she yelled into the phone.
“Are you sure, old girl?” he said. Despite her world-exclusive article that had gone live two days prior, most believed a war was still weeks away. In response, Clare held the phone up to her window, so he could hear the German tanks for himself. She soon did the same for her editor.
Clare spent the next 40 years covering politics around the world.
She reported on World War II, traveling from Eastern Europe to North Africa; on clashes between Arab and Jewish communities in the final days of the British Mandate in Palestine; on the civil wars in Greece and Algeria; and on the Vietnam War, with bylines appearing in the Telegraph, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune and The Wall Street Journal.
Clare also went on to publish a number of books, including ‘There’s A German Just Behind Me,’ which hit shelves in 1942; ‘The Arabs and the West,’ in 1952; and ‘Mao and the Men Against Him,’ in 1985; along with a memoir, called ‘Front Lines.’
She was one of the first Western journalists to report from China, and in 1973 opened the Telegraph’s Beijing bureau. In the 1980s, Clare chose to make her home permanently -- whatever that meant for a roving journalist -- in Hong Kong.
Clare spent much of her career embedded, even before the word became common parlance in the industry. She slept in trucks, and in trenches. While reporting on British troops in Algeria, she spent two nights in the desert, buried up to her neck in sand for warmth. She often said she needed just three things while on the road: a toothbrush, a typewriter, and a revolver.
In 1951, Clare’s first husband, Vandeleur Robinson, filed for divorce. They’d been married for 15 years. Vandeleur claimed desertion.
“When I’m on a story, I’m a story,” Clare later said in an interview. “To hell with husband, family, anyone else.”
A few years later, Clare married again. This time, she picked another journalist, Geoffrey Hoare. They remained together until Geoffrey’s death in 1965.
Had Clare’s vision not begun to fade in her late 60s, she would have continued to work indefinitely in the field. Even as late as 1989, Clare was spotted shimmying up a lamppost in Tiananmen Square, for a better look at the now-infamous protests.
“I must admit that I enjoy being in a war,” she told The Telegraph in 2011, just shy of 100.
On January 10, 2017, Clare Hollingworth died. She was 105 years old. Her passport and a pair of shoes were still within reach.
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