Canary behind the lines

Clare Hollingworth was on her first assignment when she saw German tanks invading Poland.

Seventy years ago, a limousine crossed the border of Poland and Germany and sped along the autobahn between Beuthen and Gleiwitz. Inside was a 26-year-old reporter on her first assignment for The Daily Telegraph, who was about to break the scoop of the century. Once past Gleiwitz, the road began to climb a hill. Clare Hollingworth, now nearly 98 years old, suddenly caught sight of 65 German motorcycle dispatch riders, who overtook her car and sped away with a roar. As she looked to the side, a gust of wind lifted up the hessian sheets that had been strung alongside the road. That was when she spied hundreds of tanks, armoured cars and field artillery - von Rundstedt's 10th Army and its Panzer Corps - massed in the valley below, waiting to roll into Poland and begin the Second World War. Hollingworth filed the story that appeared on Tuesday, August 29, on The Daily Telegraph's front page, underneath the headline: "1,000 tanks massed on Polish border. Ten divisions reported ready for swift stroke."

"I wasn't frightened," she says from the modest apartment in Hong Kong where she now lives, just around the corner from the Foreign Correspondents' Club. Today, Hollingworth's health is frail, her eyesight and hearing nearly gone but she is a unique witness to the events of 1939. "I broke this story when I was very, very young," she says. "I went there to look after the refugees, the blind, the deaf and the dumb. While I was there, the war suddenly came into being." For much of 1938, Hollingworth had been working out of Warsaw, helping refugees to escape after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia. Because of the in-depth knowledge of the region this gave her, she was hired on the spot when she bumped into Arthur Watson, the then editor of the Telegraph, on a trip to England in August 1939. "I never knew much about her refugee work, she didn't talk much about it," says Patrick Garrett, her nephew and biographer. "But it is estimated that the group she headed saved around 3,000 lives."

A day after she was signed up to the paper, she flew to Warsaw. Hollingworth was met at Warsaw by Hugh Carleton Green, the Telegraph's Berlin bureau chief, who had been kicked out of Germany to Poland. They agreed that Hollingworth would travel on to Katowice, near the border, because she knew the territory. After taking the night train, she was offered accommodation by John Anthony Thwaites, the British consul-general, whom she knew from her refugee days. The following morning, she discovered that German diplomats were crossing the border at will and asked Thwaites if he would lend her the consulate's car. "He roared with laughter when I told him why I wanted it but sent me on my way," she recalls. Together with her driver and a companion who also worked with the refugees, Hollingworth set off towards her scoop.

"People tend to confuse it, but she actually had two scoops," Garrett says. "The first was to spot the tanks. The second was to see the war break out when the Germans invaded Katowice."

It was as dawn broke on September 1 that she was woken by explosions and distant gunfire. "Someone rushed into the room and said: 'The Germans are coming,'" she recalls.

Hollingworth called the British Embassy in Warsaw and asked to speak to Robin Hankey, her friend and the second secretary. "Robin, the war has begun," she shouted. "Are you sure, old girl?" he asked. In response, she held the telephone out of the bedroom window where the roar of tanks encircling Katowice was audible. She helped the staff at the consulate burn documents and then drove to the border about 10am when the gunfire subsided. She witnessed the mass evacuation and then returned to Katowice where the mood was grim. In fear of a night attack, she spent the night in Crakow, about 80 kilometres away. Returning on September 2, she found Katowice being evacuated. For the next two weeks, she criss-crossed Poland, keeping just ahead of the advancing Germans. Many of her words never made it back to London.

It was only the start of a distinguished career that took her to wars in Algeria and Vietnam before she was appointed the Telegraph's Beijing correspondent in 1973 at the age of 62. For the past 25 years or so, she has been based in Hong Kong. "She was my hero aunt. I used to get gifts from across the world; my uncle got a ton of war booty she dragged back from the front, including a German dagger and a forager's cap," Garrett says.

"I was just very, very lucky," says Hollingworth herself.