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". 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.

Hollingworth was appointed OBE by Elizabeth II for "services to journalism" in 1982. She died on 10 January 2017 at the age of 105.

Early life 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. but the outbreak of war led to the suspension of elections and, by the 1945 election, a different Labour candidate had been chosen.

Following the 1938 Munich Agreement, when the German speaking Sudetenland was incorporated into Germany, she went to Warsaw, working with Czech refugees. The experience also led to her being hired by Arthur Watson, the editor of The Daily Telegraph, in August 1939. 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.

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. The New York Times described her as "the undisputed doyenne of war correspondents". She amassed considerable expertise in military technology and – after pilot training during the 1940s – was particularly knowledgeable about aircraft. 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. Hollingworth stayed in China for three years and moved to Hong Kong in the 1980s. In 1981, she retired and moved to British Hong Kong, also spending time in Britain, France and China. Juson defended his actions as investments but agreed to repay the money in 2007; by late 2016, however, he had not yet done so fully. Hollingworth's great-nephew Patrick Garrett published a biography of her in 2016, called Of Fortunes and War: Clare Hollingworth, First of the Female War Correspondents.

Hollingworth died at her home in Glenealy, Hong Kong on 10 January 2017, at the age of 105. In accordance with her wishes, her body was returned to England and buried in the churchyard of St Margaret of Antioch in Bygrave, Hertfordshire. She won the James Cameron Award for Journalism (1994). In 1999, she received a lifetime achievement award from the UK television programme What the Papers Say.

Charitable work Hollingworth, while reporting from Poland at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, also performed charitable work, helping and working with Czechoslovak refugees in Poland as part of her work with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC). It is estimated she helped two- to three-thousand people escape from the Nazis' clutches, as the takeover frightened many to seek shelter.