Clare Hollingworth WW2 correspondent circa 1939 Metal Print

Clare Hollingworth (born 10 October 1911) is a British journalist and author, who is noted as the first war correspondent to report the outbreak of World War II.

On 31 August 1939, Hollingworth had been working as a journalist for less than a week for The Daily Telegraph when she was sent to Poland to report on worsening tensions in Europe. Hollingworth 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, Hollingworth chanced upon a massive build-up of German troops, tanks and armoured cars facing Poland.

The following morning Hollingworth called the British embassy in Warsaw to report the German invasion of Poland. To convince doubtful embassy officials, Hollingworth held a telephone out of her room window to capture the sounds of German forces. Hollingworth's eyewitness account was the first report the British Foreign Office ha...

I first became obsessed with photography and motion pictures while growing up in post WW2 Manila in the Philippine Islands in the late 1940's/early 1950's. Film noirs were a particular influence. But my first love remains the theater. I acted in numerous amateur productions from 1958 to 1978. In 1979 I earned a MA in drama from the University of Arizona; earlier getting a BA in English from the University of Minnesota, where I co-founded the first film society on campus and ran it for four years. While at the U of A, I studied with the master black and white photo essayist W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) the last year of his life. I am the last person cited in Jim Hughes' definitive biography of Gene, as I wrote about attending his final...