On September, 1939 Telegraph journalist Clare Hollingworth becomes the first to report the outbreak of World War II. The veteran British journalist, who scooped the story of Hitler’s invasion of Poland on her third day on the job and later unmasked Soviet spy Kim Philby.
Any big journalistic scoop requires a combination of luck and hustle. It’s only natural that Clare Hollingworth had a lot of both when she scored one of the greatest scoops of the 20th century.
Hollingworth was born to a industrialist who took her to visit major historical battlefields as a girl. As a young woman, she showed a rebellious spark, breaking off an engagement and going to work for the League of Nations as a secretary. From there, she jumped to work for a British refugee organization that sent her to Poland after the Allies sanctioned Hitler’s seizure of the Sudetenland. Thanks to an old but still valid German visa she’d gotten for a ski vacation, she was able to enter Germany and shepherd refugees to Poland and then on to safety.
That work brought her a measure of fame—she arranged the evacuation of more than 3,500 Jews and dissidents, earning the moniker “the Scarlet Pimpernel,” after Baroness Orczy’s novel, according to Time—but she was abruptly sacked in July 1939, apparently because British intelligence felt she was granting visas to too many people who were either politically or ethnically “undesirable.” She returned to the U.K., got herself accredited by The Daily Telegraph, and went back to Poland.
Back in the field in August of that year, she borrowed a car from an ex-boyfriend in the British Foreign Service, surmising that the Union Jack on the vehicle would get her into Germany without trouble. She was right.
“The border guard was a bit surprised when they saw the Union flag flying on the car, but they let me in,” she told the Telegraph in 2011. “I stopped to buy aspirin and white wine and things you couldn’t get inside Poland. And then I was driving back along a valley and there was a hessian screen up so you couldn’t look down into the valley. Suddenly, there was a great gust of wind which blew the sacking from its moorings, and I looked into the valley and saw scores, if not hundreds, of tanks.”
She drove back to Poland and told her ex-boyfriend. He wired the government in London. Hollingworth, meanwhile, filed her dispatch to the Telegraph reporting Hitler’s invasion of Poland—breaking the news of the start of World War II. She was 27 years old and had been a working reporter for three days.
The story, which ran without a byline under the heading “From our own correspondent,” according to the newspaper custom of the day, is often described in the British press as “the scoop of the century.”
In 1946, Hollingworth and her husband, a Times of London Middle East reporter, were 300 yards away when members if the Irgun, an Israeli right-wing paramilitary group, bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was the offices of the British Mandatory government in Palestine, killing 91.
She also reported from Vietnam, India, and Pakistan, and was the first to interview Mohammad Reza Pahlavi when he became shah of Iran—and was among the last to interview him after he was deposed. She learned to fly and to jump out of planes.
Hollingworth went to Asia in the 1970s, covering Mao’s death and other stories in the region. She mostly lived in Hong Kong from the 1980s onward. When Hollingworth turned 100, her eyesight failing but her vigor unabated, she was asked what she would do if she were young.
“I should look through the papers and say, ‘Where’s the most dangerous place to go?’ because it always makes a good story,” she told the Telegraph. Nevertheless, she said: “I must admit that I enjoy being in a war... I’m not brave, I just enjoy it.”
If that statement was plainly ridiculous, Hollingworth could be forgiven one small liberty with the truth after a lifetime of unparalleled reporting. —The Atlantic
