Clare Hollingworth Quotes

And as for returning to work as a reporter—something she’d given considerable thought to before taking over her father’s inquiry agency—the Sydney newspapers had dismissed most of their women reporters home once the men started to return from the war, or else confined them to the social pages, or covering the Easter Show, which was a bit too steep a downgrade for Billie after she’d chased Nazi activity across Europe, built a good portfolio of published articles, and worked alongside the likes of Lee Miller and Clare Hollingworth. No, she wouldn’t last in that kind of work. It was an imperfect world, and her chosen profession was decidedly imperfect, but for now she had a hint of that spark again, that sense of doing something that mattered to someone.

Now, in February 1944, Clare speculated in a Sketch article that come summer, ‘when the Eastern European mud dries’, the many thousands of allied troops in the Middle East would coordinate with the Soviet Red Army to make a pincer movement against German troops in the Balkans. This, Clare said, would force the Germans to withdraw from Crete, Rhodes and other key strongholds. The real Allied military plans were however entirely different – as became clear a few months later when the D-Day invasion forces launched across the English Channel, and stormed into occupied France. It is well known now that deliberate misinformation was a key part of the D-Day success. The Germans were led to believe, by all possible means, that the first Allied landings would be aimed far from Normandy. From her reporting it does seem that Clare Hollingworth was one of the journalists who (presumably unwittingly?) played a small part in the grand deception

Clare also got to know author and adventurer Fitzroy Maclean (one of the many supposed ‘inspirations’ for James Bond) during his stint with the SOE in Cairo. Paddy Leigh Fermor was another of the colourful SOE characters whom she could not avoid meeting at the SOE boys’ wild parties, which took place in a grand rented mansion in the Gezira district, and whose guests ranged from the British ambassador to Egypt’s King Farouk. It was true that the SOE did not always maintain the low profile one might have assumed from a supposedly secret organisation. There was usually always at least one SOE representative, drink in hand, on the Shepheard’s hotel veranda. And the location of the SOE headquarters was the worst kept secret in the city. Fitzroy Maclean recounted his first visit, when having whispered the street address to a ‘villainous-looking’ taxi driver the Egyptian just nodded – ‘ah, you want Secret Service …