Clare Hollingworth, legendary correspondent who first broke the news of the beginning of World War II, passed away on 10 January 2017 following a brief illness. She was 105.
She was famously known as the doyenne of war correspondents.
About Clare Hollingworth
• She was the first to report the invasion of Poland by German troops that triggered the outbreak of World War Two.
• Hollingworth's career took her to Palestine, Iraq and Iran, where she interviewed Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, who was overthrown by revolutionaries in February 1979.
• While working as a correspondent for the Economist and the Observer, Hollingworth went to Jerusalem in July 1946 when the King David hotel, where she was staying, was bombed by Zionist paramilitaries led by future Israeli prime minister Menachim Begin.
• She also covered the conflict in Vietnam where she scored a scoop that peace talks would shortly begin between Hanoi and Washington in 1968.
• She also reported the defection of British spy Kim Philby, but the story was largely buried by her editors out of the fears of a libel suit.
• In 1972, Hollingworth became the Telegraph's first Beijing correspondent since 1949.
• She reported from China during the Cultural Revolution, a decade of violence and civil war that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the death of Mao Zedong.
• Later, she returned back to the UK as a defence correspondent and also travelled to Hong Kong to cover the colony's handover to Chinese control in 1997.
• She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
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