Arms and the woman

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.