Janine Di-Giovanni

Arms and the woman

Reading Clare Hollingworth’s biography reminds Janine di Giovanni of Ann Leslie’s tips for frontline reportage: dress well, shake your bangles at the soldiers and pretend to be an airhead

In August 1939, Clare Hollingworth, a 28-year-old aid-worker, had been employed as a reporter for less than a week by the Daily Telegraph when she landed her first serious journalistic coup. Using feminine wiles and diplomatic skills extraordinaire, she convinced a friend in the Foreign Office to lend her his chauffeured car. Stocking up with supplies in soon to be starving Poland, and charming the border guards, she crossed into Germany with nothing but her gut instinct and her smarts — the most important of a reporter’s tools (together with ‘ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability’, in the words of the late Nicholas Tomalin).

She didn’t disappoint her editors. Her first story was a splash — ‘1,000 tanks massed on Polish border’ — and she described battalions ready to be deployed at a ‘swift stroke’. Hurriedly, she filed her copy and scurried back to Poland, spending the next few weeks as a eyewitness to the start of the war. She carried her typewriter with her everywhere.

Patrick Garrett, Hollingworth’s great nephew, discovered her papers in his parents’ home, prompting him to write this moving tribute. Which is lucky for us, because Hollingworth, now aged 105, has never been lauded in the way her colleague Martha Gellhorn was, whose life was perhaps more bling. The St Louis beauty wore handmade Belgian shoes to the front line and married Hemingway; but Hollingworth was a reporter’s reporter — the real thing.

Over the decades, she stayed close to the action, covering Algeria, Vietnam, China’s Cultural Revolution, and the unravelling of Kim Philby; and she interviewed the Shah of Iran. She was always, in the words of John Simpson, her BBC colleague, ‘in the right place at the right time’. But she insists she was not an adrenalin junkie.

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