Scoops of the Century

‘Deutschland über Alles’ can hardly be a frequent selection on Desert Island Discs. But in 1999, it was the second pick of foreign correspondent extraordinary Clare Hollingworth, then aged 88, for whom it triggered memories of her two ‘scoops of the century’ sixty years before. The first was in late August 1939, when she drove across the Polish-German border in a borrowed official car and spotted scores of German tanks lined up facing Poland. The second followed a few days later when, woken by anti-aircraft fire, she rang her paper’s senior correspondent in Warsaw with the news that the war had started. When he told her he didn’t believe her, she held the telephone out of the window to catch the sound of exploding German bombs. Not bad for a cub reporter on her first foreign assignment.

Her next assignment was to be rather longer in duration and only marginally less dangerous: a commission to write a book about Romania. The result was There’s a German Just Behind Me, the catchily (and aptly) titled book that covered her Balkan travels between the fall of France in June 1940 and the invasion of Russia a year later when, as she writes in the preface, ‘the Balkan states were the principal object of Germany’s designs’. As such, the region was of interest to other powers: Britain was anxious to keep the Axis’s hands off Romanian oil and protect British territories in the Eastern Mediterranean; Russia was concerned for her fellow Slavs in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia; and Italy, having occupied Albania, now had her eye on Greece. The Balkans were obviously the place for a keen young reporter like Hollingworth to be, with her knowledge of the region (acquired by poring over maps of the Balkans as a child) and her single-minded dedication to ‘the story’. Journalism has been called the first rough draft of history and while Hollingworth’s book certainly reads like journalism – it was written at speed, by someone also working as a reporter – it will just as certainly remain a valuable source for future historians. For readers who are not professional historians, it is fair to say that a little previous knowledge of pre-war Balkan history is useful. It is handy if such names as Antonescu, Horia Silva, Metaxas and Venizelos ring some kind of bell. Even handier is a map of south-eastern Europe, or two – a present-day one and, if you can find it, a pre-war edition. Here’s why. In a chance encounter on a cross-Channel ferry in 1936, Clare is told by a fellow traveller: ‘Watch Cernauti! The first great clash of the Second World War will occur there.’ Cernauti? There’s no Cernauti on my map that I can see. A quick Internet search is needed to reveal that Cernauti in Romania is now Chernivsti in Ukraine (and before being Cernauti in Romania was Czernowitz in Austro-Hungary). Fortunately, our author is an excellent guide, if not so much to the geography (since she takes for granted that you are familiar with it) then to the politics, the places and the people. She is brisk, forthright, daring and with not a drop of sentimentality in her veins, all of which make her an exhilarating and incisive guide to the often squalid and volatile Balkan scene in these months before the Wehrmacht arrived. To convey her style, here’s an extract from one of her chapters on Romania, the country which, with Greece, most fascinated her. Arriving in Bucharest in June 1940, she finds the city enjoying ‘the same gay life’ as when she was there at the beginning of the war. Beneath all the gaiety, though, it is quite obvious that things had been going wrong.

The British Minister, Sir Reginald Hoare, had lost a great deal of his power. Before the war began he had been an intimate friend of Armand Calinescu, prime minister until his assassination just after the downfall of Poland . . . A few days after I had left Poland, on my way out to lunch, I was held up by a crowd; they were explaining how a farmer’s cart had blocked the route of the Prime Minister’s car on his way home from lunch, and whilst the luxury car was slowing down his body and that of his private detective had been riddled with bullets by the Iron Guard. Calinescu was immediately made a public hero; his body was laid out in state surrounded by candles, dressed in purple velvet. The members of the Iron Guard who shot him were taken out in a lorry to the spot where the incident happened, and were there shot one by one, with half an hour’s interval between each shooting. Their dead bodies were allowed to lie in the dust for forty-eight hours; newsvendors, orange sellers, gipsy fortune-tellers, and particularly sellers of hot food did a great trade meanwhile.

This passage has all the hallmarks of Hollingworth’s reportage: her knowledge, often personal, of the individuals; her knack of being near the centre of the action; her detail; and her matter-of-fact observation of the nastier sides of human nature. She is also keen to record the ‘human interest’ side. After the loss of Calinescu, Sir Reginald Hoare established close contact with Gafencu, the Romanian foreign secretary. ‘Gafencu’, Hollingworth writes with characteristic candour, ‘is physically one of the most attractive men I have ever had the good fortune to see. He married when young a Frenchwoman, who it is said was brought to Bucharest as the mistress of an elderly rich industrialist who tired of her. She then became a cabaret dancer, and, rumour has it, used to be carried naked on a pseudo-golden plate into one of the night-clubs of Bucharest.’ But Hollingworth’s last word is kept for the politician. Gafencu, she writes, ‘is a man of convictions, but not of convictions sufficient to carry him through the German political attack on Romania’. It will be a failure repeated across the region, as leader after Balkan leader fails to put up any resistance to the German advance – at first clandestine, then open – and is mirrored, in Hollingworth’s trenchantly expressed view, by the failure of the majority of British officials to defend their country’s interests there. The directness of Hollingworth’s opinions on public matters is echoed in her brisk approach to her own personal comfort and safety, whether in grubby hotel rooms or roughing it on the Albanian front. In the course of her book, we learn variously that our reporter always carries a revolver (and at times three), can sleep anywhere, including on a stone floor, is not bothered by fewer than twenty bed bugs at a time, never catches a cold and has a very hard head when it comes to drink (to be tested later in Beirut in the company of Kim Philby, whose departure to the USSR was another scoop of hers). Aspiring young foreign correspondents take note! Her tone of authority extends to more mundane matters, too. Lavatories, for instance (these in Chisinau in Bessarabia) ‒

The water-closets at the Hotel Londra, the best in the place, are repellent even by Balkan standards

– brothels (this in a Greek town recently abandoned by Italian troops) ‒

I walked through the passages and looked into many of the deserted rooms. They were cleaner than I expected, devoid of the pink lighting effects so noticeable in the brothels in Romania.

– and, last but not least, fascist parades, these being from Romania in September 1940:

They reminded me very much of the Fascist processions I used unwillingly to watch on Sunday afternoons while waiting for a bus in King’s Road, Chelsea. In Bucharest as in Chelsea, the longer the procession, the pimplier the youths.

Le style c’est l’homme, or in this case la femme – the whole robust, no-nonsense, clear-sighted foreign correspondent is right there. Clare Hollingworth lived to the high old age of 105, spending much of her last years in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in her adopted home of Hong Kong. Even at the age of 92 she was said to be prepared to head out to whatever hot-spot her editor might want to send her to. After reading There’s a German Just Behind Me, you’ll rather wish her editor had given her the call.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 62 © Anthony Wells 2019