Journalist Hollingworth - a life well lived

I think it must have been in late 1972 that I first met the redoubtable Clare Hollingworth, the doyenne of all war correspondents whose fame spread far beyond her initial scoop of reporting Germany's plans to invade Poland in 1939, triggering World War II.

Back in those pre-digital days, correspondents in far-flung places had to rely on telex and friendly pilots to get their stories out to a waiting world. Reuters, the global news agency for whom I was a very green correspondent assigned to cover the American War in Vietnam, had a special arrangement that allowed British newspaper correspondents to use our telex system.

The door opened in our office on Han Thuyen Street, just next to the presidential palace in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and in marched the unmistakable figure of Donald Wise of the Daily Mirror - already a legend among us greenhorns - followed by a diminutive figure dressed in a tailored combat jacket of the WWII era.