Clare Hollingworth, Journalist & war correspondent, Died at 104

  Centenarian

Clare Hollingworth was born in October 10, 1911, and died in 2015.

He was a British journalist and war correspondent.

Clare had been working as a journalist for less than a week for The Daily Telegraph, on August 31, 1939 she was sent to Poland to report on worsening tensions in Europe.

Hollingworth persuaded the British Consul-General in Katowice, John Anthony Thwaites, to lend her his chauffeured car for a fact-finding mission into Germany.

While she was driving along the German-Polish border, Hollingworth chanced upon a massive build-up of Nazi German troops, tanks and armoured cars facing Poland.

The following morning Clare called the British embassy in Warsaw to report the German invasion of Poland.

When she convinced the doubtful embassy officials, Hollingworth held a telephone out of her room window to capture the sounds of German forces.

Her eyewitness account was the first report the British Foreign Office had about the invasion of Poland.

In the same year, 1939, Clare was selected to fight the parliamentary seat of Melton for the Labour Party in the general election that was due to take place by 1940.

The election was postponed because the war had started, and by the 1945 election a different Labour candidate had been chosen.

Clare was among the survivors of the 1946 King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem that killed 91 people.

Hollingworth authored five books including; Poland’s Three Weeks’ War (1940), There’s a German Right Behind Me (1945), The Arabs and the West (1950), Mao (1985), and her memoirs, Front Line (1990, updated with Neri Tenorio in 2005).

During the following decades, Hollingworth reported on conflicts in Palestine, Algeria, China, Aden and Vietnam.

Her résumé includes the desert war in North Africa, civil war in Greece, terrorism in Jerusalem, and guerrilla warfare in Vietnam and the jungles of Borneo.

She was a near-daily visitor to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong, where she was an honorary goodwill ambassador.

Clare celebrated her 100th birthday there on 10 October 2011.

Since the early 1980s, Hollingworth has lived in Hong Kong.

Clare Hollingworth passed away at age 104 in 2015.