Obituary: Clare Hollingworth died on January 10th

WELL into her 80s Clare Hollingworth would sleep on the floor every week or so, just to prevent her body from getting “too soft”. Her passport was to hand, with visas up to date, just in case the foreign desk rang. She liked to have two packed suitcases, one for hot climates, one for cold, though her wardrobe was notoriously sparse: in later life she was seldom seen in anything but a safari suit and cloth shoes. And all you really needed, she said, were the “T & T”—typewriter and toothbrush.

Hardiness and bravery were her hallmarks. Neither shot nor shell ruffled her—excitement trumped fear, she said. She admitted to disliking only rickety lifts, and fleas in her hair. But she didn’t mind bedbugs, going without food for five or six days, or not washing for even longer (despite entreaties from her colleagues).

She could swim, ride, ski, fly a plane and jump with a parachute. And shoot: during the war she slept with a revolver under her pillow; spares included a small pearl-handled one for her evening bag. Aged nearly 80, she was seen climbing a lamppost to gain a better look at the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. She once avoided arrest in Bucharest by staying wrapped only in a towel. Romanian secret police might strip a woman, she reckoned, but would not dress one by force.

Her wiles were legendary. She ruthlessly trounced rivals, broke rules and exploited an unmatched array of contacts. When India banned foreigners from covering the war with Pakistan in 1965, she cajoled the information minister, Indira Gandhi—whom she knew from a previous posting in Paris—into making an exception. She then asked to bring along two “servants” (in fact, they were colleagues). She had a knack for the telling detail: still-wet concrete in a Polish gun emplacement as the country buckled under the German assault, or insanitary plumbing in a supposedly advanced Chinese arms factory.

Laconic and unadventurous in print, she was better at getting the story than telling it. Her husband, Geoffrey Hoare, also a journalist, would briskly correct the spelling, enliven the prose, and unearth the lead—which she tended to bury five paragraphs down, prefaced, cryptically, with “according to certain sources”.

And what sources they were. She quizzed and befriended generals, prime ministers and spymasters, politely but relentlessly. She gained the first interview with the last Shah of Iran in 1941; after his fall in 1979, he said he would speak only to her. Another scoop, in 1968, was the plans for peace talks to end the Vietnam war, brought to her in Saigon cathedral by an anonymous source. At an age when most journalists are contemplating retirement, she moved to Beijing to open the Daily Telegraph bureau. Though she spoke not a word of Chinese (languages were not her thing) she became a notable China-watcher. Scoops there included Mao’s stroke in 1974 and Deng Xiaoping’s rise. Both were met with scepticism; both proved true.

It all started in August 1939, when, aged 27 and a foreign correspondent for barely four days, she commandeered a British consulate car and drove into Germany from Poland. A gust of wind lifted a roadside hessian screen, revealing Hitler’s army, mustered for the invasion. It was to be the scoop of the century, though at first nobody believed her. On her return she had to produce her shopping—German products unavailable in Poland—to show she had crossed the border.

It was a similar story with her next scoop, that the invasion had started. The official line was that talks were still continuing—so she held her telephone out of the window to prove to Warsaw that tanks were indeed roaring into battle. When she deduced that Kim Philby, a former British spy, had defected to Moscow, her editors sat on that story for three months (she later took over his job, writing for this paper from Beirut).

She was sometimes thought to be a spy herself—a notion she airily dismissed by saying that there was no need: if she found out anything like that she would tell the British military attaché anyway. In fact, the spy world originally regarded her with deep mistrust for helping some undesirable communists reach Britain (part of her unsung, pre-journalistic work with refugees in pre-war Poland).

Pots and kettles

She was loyal when it mattered. In Algiers she marshalled her fellows into a 30-strong posse to accompany (and save the life of) a journalist arrested by paramilitaries. But she was mostly a difficult colleague. As an editor in London, she habitually second-guessed her correspondents: “clarevoyance”, they called it crossly. She struck most people as driven and unreflective. But a biography compiled from diaries and letters revealed a more three-dimensional picture, including a conversion to Catholicism prompted by her husband’s adultery (she also threatened to shoot his mistress). Her own love life was discreetly lively, too.

She was ferociously competitive, unabashedly criticising female colleagues for being “pushy”, or for—perish the thought—using their femininity to get ahead. Retirement was also anathema. Even in her final, half-blind years she haunted the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, poring over the news, with passport at the ready, just in case.

Correction (January 26th): At the time she was lobbied by Clare Hollingworth, Indira Gandhi was India's information minister, but not, as the obituary mistakenly claimed, prime minister, It has now been amended. Sorry.