Clare Hollingworth, OBE (10 October 1911 – 10 January 2017) was an English journalist and author. She was the first war correspondent to report the outbreak of World War II, described as "the scoop of the century". As a reporter for The Daily Telegraph in 1939, while travelling from Poland to Germany she spotted and reported German forces massed on the Polish border; three days later she was the first to report the German invasion of Poland.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. She persuaded the British Consul-General in Katowice, John Anthony Thwaites, to lend her his chauffeured car for a fact-finding mission into Germany. While driving along the German–Polish border on 28 August, Hollingworth observed a massive build-up of German troops, tanks and armoured cars facing Poland, after the hessian screens concealing them were disturbed by wind. Her report was the main story on the Daily Telegraph's front page on the following day.
On 1 September, Hollingworth called the British embassy in Warsaw to report the German invasion of Poland. To convince doubtful embassy officials, she held a telephone out of the window of her room to capture the sounds of German forces. Hollingworth's eyewitness account was the first report the British Foreign Office received about the invasion of Poland. She 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.Her telephoned reports ignored censorship rules and she is reported to have once avoided arrest by stripping naked. In 1941 she went to Egypt, and subsequently reported from Turkey, Greece and Cairo. Her efforts were hampered by the fact that women war correspondents did not receive formal accreditation.[4] After Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery took Tripoli in 1943, she was ordered to return to Cairo. Wishing to remain at the front lines, she went on to cover General Dwight D. Eisenhower's forces in Algiers, writing for the Chicago Daily News. She subsequently reported from Palestine, Iraq and Persia.[5] During this time she became the first to interview the Shah of Iran.
