Pioneering Express reporter who broke news of the Second World War | History | News

Slam! Slam! The noise that woke Clare Hollingworth in the early hours of September 1, 1939, was like doors banging. But when she leapt out of bed she saw aircraft roaring overhead – curious smoke-rings bursting all around them. It wasn’t a noisy neighbour but the outbreak of the Second World War. Clare, my great-aunt, was in Poland, not far from the German border. She was 27 years old, still in the first week of her very first job as a journalist. She grabbed the telephone and rang her boss in Warsaw.

Hugh Carleton Greene, brother of the novelist Graham Greene and later director-general of the BBC, would describe that call as the “most dramatic moment” of his entire life. But before cabling her report to the editors in London, he called the Polish Foreign Ministry for an official comment. His contact claimed Claire was talking nonsense. “Negotiations are still going on,” he insisted. “It must be an air-raid practice.”

But before Greene had even put the phone down, sirens in the capital began to wail. Soon, every siren in Warsaw was shrieking. Clare was clearly right – and not only had she been the first correspondent to report the outbreak of the Second World War, she had also broken the news to the Polish government.

“War Correspondent” was not a typical job title for a woman in the 1930s. But Clare Hollingworth always enjoyed being the exception. Born in a Leicester suburb in October 1911, her earliest memories were of her parents Albert and Daisy discussing the latest grim news from the Somme and Western Front. She was only four when a German Zeppelin attacked nearby Loughborough. Her parents took her in a pony cart to see the aftermath. She also recalled singing Rule Britannia, aged seven, with her father at the piano as the church bells rang to mark the end of the Great War. Although her scoop at the outbreak of the Second World War was for the Daily Telegraph, Clare was soon hired by the Daily Express.

Her instinct now told her the Balkans would be the next hotspot so, in May 1940, she boarded the Orient Express in Paris and began a crisscross journey through Europe, giving Hitler’s ever-expanding Reich a wide berth. She was in Zagreb as Germany invaded westwards. She finally reached Bucharest in June. In Romania both the Allies and the Axis powers were now jockeying for position in Central Europe.

Clare found the bars and restaurants of Bucharest’s glamorous Athenee Palace Hotel perfect to mingle with a cosmopolitan cast of characters from both sides of the conflict. Diplomats. Spies. Shady politicians. Wealthy businessmen and traders. And a harem of local actresses, cabaret singers and ladies of the night, working to charm the men for their money and secrets.

For most Britons, the period following the fall of France was the darkest point of the war, but Clare found the scene in Romania scintillating – if a little surreal. Her position was precarious because, having arrived in the summer and been granted a visa for just a fortnight, the Romanians had refused to extend it. Curious journalists were not welcome. Things got trickier still when the Romanian monarch was deposed and Nazi-style Iron Guard thugs seized power.

Part of Romania’s strategic importance lay in its oil fields. For years a team of expat British engineers had supported operations. But soon after the coup the men were rounded up, beaten and tortured. The Express correspondent’s position without even a proper visa or press accreditation became dicey. Early one October morning, a few days after the arrest of the oilmen, Clare had two visitors at her apartment door – a uniformed member of the Iron Guard and a sinister fellow in plain clothes. They shouted through the letterbox that she must accompany them to the Prefecture of Police.

After what had just happened with the oilmen, she had no intention of complying. Her delaying tactic was novel to say the least. She threw off most of her clothes, put an urgent call through to the British Embassy to summon help and only then opened the door, boldly telling her unwanted visitors that, until she was properly attired, she would be quite unable to leave. As one of her colleagues later noted wryly: “While it may be possible to undress a woman against her wishes, it is utterly and incontrovertibly beyond masculine ability to dress a woman against her will.”

British diplomats arrived in time to prevent her arrest. Another story in the Daily Express that autumn described Clare’s work in Poland before the invasion, assisting anti-Nazi refugees to secure visas and safe passage to the UK. Some 2,000 to 3,000 souls owed her their survival. An Express report on her refugee work referred to her as the “Scarlet Pimpernel”.

My great-aunt’s uncompromising approach to reporting did not always win her friends in the British establishment. By 1940, her keen news-nose had sensed that Romania’s supposedly neutral status was slipping. She had already seen evidence of German troops arriving in the country disguised as civilians. Meanwhile, on a trip across the frontier into Bulgaria, she found signs of German military preparations.

The British Foreign Office was desperately trying to encourage both Balkan nations to remain neutral and so her reporting prompted an angry response from the UK government. Her reports were vigorously denied by Whitehall officials. They even leaned on the Express to suspend her.

It is possible the authorities simply did not know half as much as Clare did about what was really happening on the ground and genuinely believed that her reports were inaccurate. A folder in the UK’s National Archives in Kew still bears the angry comments of one official, scratched in black fountain pen: “Miss Hollingworth is a menace.” The saying goes, “all’s fair in love and war,” and at this stage Britain certainly had its back against the wall. Here’s another one: “In war, truth is usually the first casualty.”

But Clare’s suspension made little practical difference because within weeks her suspicions had been proved spot-on. Britain broke diplomatic relations with Romania soon afterwards and the UK diplomatic and expat community was evacuated.

Clare reluctantly joined that exodus, heading for Turkey. On arrival in Istanbul most of the British group found rooms in the Pera Palace Hotel – a favourite spot of crime writer Agatha Christie – up on a hillside overlooking the Turkish capital.

They were soon joined by another British exodus after diplomatic relations with Bulgaria were also terminated. (Clare had been proven right, again!) But, as the Bulgarian party arrived, there was an almighty explosion in the lobby. Nazi agents had somehow slipped a suitcase with a time-fused bomb into their luggage. Six people were killed and 25 injured.

As the Second World War hotted up in the Mediterranean, Clare wrangled herself a spot on a ship sailing to Alexandria. But the Express already had its star war correspondent Alan Moorhead reporting on Generals Montgomery and Rommel and their desert war. So Clare freelanced for other newspapers.However, she, Moorhead, and a colleague from the Telegraph often teamed up on reporting trips into the desert.

When the war ended in 1945 most reporters were relieved to return to “normal” duties. Not Clare Hollingworth. She spent the rest of her life following military stories. In the 1940s and 1950s she covered conflict in the Middle East. In the 1960s she was reporting from Algeria and Vietnam. By the 1970s she was working in China, observing the Cultural Revolution.

Back in Europe for a stint at the height of the Cold War she could be found touring nuclear submarines and flying on fast jets when most women her age were already drawing their pensions. Clare celebrated her 100th birthday in Hong Kong, where she had settled following its return to Chinese Sovereignty. Even then, frail and with failing eyesight, she still thought of herself as a working “hack”.

She never turned in at night without checking that her shoes were at her bedside, and her passport was within reach on the night stand just in case – as she’d always explain – “the editor calls and I have to fly off somewhere to report”. She died in January 2017, aged 105. I doubt we’ll see her like again.

• Patrick Garrett followed his great aunt into journalism, working in Russia and China for almost 30 years. His biography, Of Fortunes and War: Clare Hollingworth, first of the female war correspondents, is available in print, ebook and audio book