This badass journalist was only 27 when she broke the story of the century
Armed with nothing but a toothbrush, a typewriter, and a revolver, Clare Hollingworth became a pioneering war reporter
Twenty-seven year old Clare Hollingworth was not yet a week into her job as a reporter for Britain’s Daily Telegraph when she arguably broke the story of the century.
On August 28th, 1939, she was driving a short distance from the town of Gleiwitz, then in Germany, to Katowice, Poland, when a gust of wind blew a tarpaulin up, revealing that German troops had amassed on the border. She later wrote that she saw concealed there “large numbers of troops, literally hundreds of tanks, armored cars and field guns.” On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s army invaded Poland and began World War II.
Prior to her Daily Telegraph work, Hollingworth had been employed in Warsaw by a peace group called the League of Nations Union. She helped secure travel papers for refugees from the Sudetenland, enabling them to enter Poland and wrote about the experience for British publications, which was how she secured the job at the Daily Telegraph. But it was the fateful gust of wind, which The Guardian would call “probably the greatest scoop of modern times,” that launched the intrepid Hollingworth’s career as a journalist. She wrote two stories — one about the war approaching, and one just after it started. For the next nearly half century, she covered numerous conflicts from the Algerian civil war to the Vietnam war. Hollingworth loved conflict, intrigue, and espionage, and according to her obituary, was “was never so happy, she often said, as when she was roaming the world equipped with little more than a toothbrush, a typewriter and, if need be, a revolver.”
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