32 Facts About Clare Hollingworth

Clare Hollingworth was an English journalist and author.

Clare Hollingworth was the first war correspondent to report the outbreak of World War II, described as "the scoop of the century".

Clare Hollingworth died on 10 January 2017 at the age of 105.

Clare Hollingworth was born in 1911 in Knighton, a southern suburb of Leicester, the daughter of Daisy and Albert Clare Hollingworth.

Clare Hollingworth showed an early interest in becoming a writer, against opposition from her mother, and her interest in warfare was stimulated by visits to historical battlefield sites in Britain and France with her father.

Clare Hollingworth became engaged to the son of a local family known to her own, but instead of marriage, went to work as secretary to the League of Nations Union Worcestershire organiser.

Clare Hollingworth then won a scholarship to the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, and later, a place at Zagreb University to study Croatian.

Clare Hollingworth started to write articles on a freelance basis for the New Statesman.

Clare Hollingworth had been working as a Telegraph journalist for less than a week when she was sent to Poland to report on worsening tensions in Europe.

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

Clare Hollingworth's report was the main story on The Daily Telegraph's front page on the following day.

Clare Hollingworth continued to report on the situation in Poland, and, in 1940, by then working for the Daily Express, went to Bucharest, where she reported on King Carol II's forced abdication and the ensuing unrest.

Clare Hollingworth's telephoned reports ignored censorship rules and she is reported to have once avoided arrest by stripping naked.

Clare Hollingworth's efforts were hampered, because women war correspondents did not receive formal accreditation.

Clare Hollingworth later was said to have refused to shake the hand of the Irgun leader Menachem Begin, who many years later became the Prime Minister of Israel, because of his role in ordering the event.

Clare Hollingworth started to visit Algeria and developed contacts with the Algerian National Liberation Front.

Clare Hollingworth reported on the Algerian War in the early 1960s.

Clare Hollingworth was appointed The Guardian's defence correspondent in 1963, the first woman in the role.

Clare Hollingworth was sent to Vietnam in 1967 to cover the Vietnam War.

Clare Hollingworth was one of the earliest commentators to predict that the war would end in stalemate and her reports were distinguished by her attention to the opinions of Vietnamese civilians.

Clare Hollingworth met Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing.

Clare Hollingworth was the last person to interview the Shah of Iran; the journalist John Simpson commented that "Clare Hollingworth was the only person he wanted to speak to".

Clare Hollingworth stayed in China for three years and moved to Hong Kong in the 1980s.

Clare Hollingworth observed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 from a hotel balcony.

Clare Hollingworth was married twice; in 1936 she married Vandeleur Robinson, the League of Nations Union regional organiser in south-east England but the marriage failed during the war.

Clare Hollingworth was a near-daily visitor to the Foreign Correspondents' Club, where she was an honorary goodwill ambassador.

In 2006, Clare Hollingworth sued her financial manager, fellow Correspondents' Club member Thomas Edward Juson, for the removal of nearly $300,000 from her bank account.

Clare Hollingworth had not yet done that fully by late 2016.

Clare Hollingworth died at her home in Glenealy, Hong Kong on 10 January 2017, at the age of 105.

In 1962, Clare Hollingworth won Woman Journalist of the Year for her reporting of the civil war in Algeria.

Clare Hollingworth won the James Cameron Award for Journalism.

Clare Hollingworth, while reporting from Poland at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, performed charitable work, helping and working with Czechoslovak refugees in Poland as part of her work with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovak.