Abstract
Rivalry among British correspondents in 1960s Paris spiked sharply when Clare Hollingworth of The Guardian pulled a gun on Joan Harrison of the Daily Express to warn her off Geoffrey Hoare of the News Chronicle. Harrison denied sleeping with Geoffrey, Hollingworth's husband, but their colleagues around the Hotel Crillon bar never believed a story until it had been comprehensively denied. In any case, all involved had form.
Hollingworth's professional form demonstrated a couple of immutable laws of top-drawer reporting. One: be in the right place at the right time. Her celebrated example was the Polish-Germany frontier on the eve of the second world war. That debut as a foreign correspondent has never been equalled, even if the epochal scoop went un-bylined. The Daily Telegraph of 1939 didn't believe in such things. Two: who you know is more important than what you know. Hollingworth might not have known that Donald MacLean would defect to the Soviet Union, but she was a friend of the family and had the exclusive confidence of his abandoned wife, Melinda. From covering many of the same stories as Hollingworth in 1960s France and Algeria I can testify that she not only had better contacts than the rest of us, she had some the rest of us did not even know existed until she tapped them.
Another truth Hollingworth personified was that great reporting does not depend on great writing. Telegraph colleague Ronald Payne thought her copy often read like an official communique. “I can't do this dressing up stuff,” she grumbled. A buried lead would often have to be exhumed by chums like Payne, or Geoffrey — even if he did work for a rival title.
Patrick Garrett, Hollingworth's nephew, took care over wording the title of this niftily written account of her adventures. She was not the first female war correspondent by far. But she sure stood out from the rest. Garrett captures the whiff of Evelyn Waugh's accidental correspondent William Boot in the 1939 interview with the Telegraph editor Arthur Watson that got her started. In her late 20s, married to a fellow idealist, she had been working for a League of Nations organisation in Poland but she knew what she really wanted. Rather than offering a try-out on the women's page, Watson sent her straight off to Warsaw to string for Hugh Carleton Greene, the erstwhile Berlin correspondent expelled by the Nazis.
Within days diplomatic plates on a borrowed car let her drive into Germany where she chanced on the invasion force. “1,000 tanks massed on Polish border,” read her historic splash. “Ten divisions reported ready for swift stroke” (someone back at the Telegraph muttered later that there had only been nine).
The scoop became a legend of Fleet Street lunchtimes, but Garrett has come up with much no one would have guessed about the tough little loner who pulled it off. Her fondness for military hardware, for instance, that helped give Harrison such a fright. The list she kept of her lovers, including the British consul who lent her the car that got her across the frontier. Another axiom: if you've got it, use it.
Conscience took Hollingworth back to help with refugees from Poland and Czechoslovakia. But soon she was filing from Balkan flashpoints a step ahead of the German advance, scrambling off to Palestine and across to Cairo. She spent most of the war covering the North Africa campaign, the hapless first husband all but forgotten in London. “I'll have no women correspondents with my army,” fumed General Montgomery, who threatened to have her sent home. Hollingworth simply handed in her British accreditation and signed on again as an American correspondent for Time.
Peace was a let-down. Divorced and living in Paris with Geoffrey, she was restless. The Telegraph was fully manned but in the early 1960s The Guardian sent her to Algeria. Long months reporting the grim French colonial war and its consequences won acclaim. She became the defence correspondent, usually a job for retired generals. She was 51 and it was her first staff job. Until then she had been a stringer or freelance.
The wars kept coming. Beirut, Aden, Israel, India-Pakistan-Bangladesh. She covered most of them for The Guardian, her usual look of being dressed for gardening replaced by neat safari suits “with lots of pens”. In 1967, she went back to The Telegraph to cover Vietnam, where she won the hearts and minds of fellow correspondents by lecturing generals on why their strategy failed. Then it was Beijing for three years. After that she settled in Hong Kong where, at 105, she still listens to news bulletins — or was doing so when this was written. Garrett says she regards her Telegraph pension as a retainer and keeps her passport by the telephone just in case.