Clare Hollingworth . . . a remarkable journalist

I have just learnt about the death, at the age of 105, of the renowned war correspondent Clare Hollingworth. She had a most remarkable and most active career, beginning at a time when she must have been the only female war correspondent. She is remembered as the person who 'scooped' the story of German tanks about to invade Poland and some years later, in the 1960s, filing the news that Kim Philby was the 'third man' in the Burgess and Maclean affair of espionage.

I met Clare in Calcutta in 1971 when she visited both East Pakistan and the refugee camps in the West Bengal border areas. As far as I remember she came in August by which time there were already eight million women, men and children in the refugee camps. Together with my Oxfam colleagues, I arranged programmes for Clare and accompanied her so that she could visit the border crossing at Benapol/Bongaon and visit the refugee camps, at that time severely flooded, that were being supported by Oxfam and being run by both the Gandhian Abhoy Ashram and Father Joe D'Souza's Catholic Church, both at Bongaon. At the time, Clare wrote in an Oxfam publication,"It is difficult to say how many of them die on the way to India but at least, according to some doctors, one fifth."

Clare also wrote forecasting a possible famine inside East Pakistan. "Many hundreds of thousands of people are already suffering from the pangs of hunger in their own homes when there is still plenty of rice in the nearby village market; but they have no purchasing power owing to the breakdown of economic life."

Clare went on to write, this time from inside India,"But this is not a question of figures. I recall in a flooded area only 10 miles away from Dacca seeing a queue of half-naked people waiting outside a reed hut to obtain clothes and a ticket for a daily rice ration from a Catholic priest and I talked to one woman who had five small children. She told me her husband had been killed earlier in the fighting. Her Basha — reed home — had been suddenly burnt by the Pakistan soldiers. She only had time to pick up her sleeping children before the flames enveloped their home. That is why she had no clothes, nothing. Her story could be repeated thousands of times."