Troubles with my Aunt
Troubles with my Aunt is the life of veteran war correspondent Clare Hollingworth, seen through the eyes of author Patrick Garrett, her great nephew, who followed her footsteps into journalism. It is the true story of Clare's almost century-long journey from rural Leicestershire, through wars and revolutions in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, to the time she and Patrick spent together in Hong Kong in 1997 experiencing Britain's final “End of Empire” days.
Clare certainly had an uncanny ability to appear on the front lines of world events. She is well known in journalism as the first correspondent to report the news of the start of the Second World War, right from the Polish border. Indeed, her life sometimes reads like an Encyclopaedia of 20th Century Warfare.
From witnessing some of the very first aerial bombing against civilians during her childhood in the First World War, Clare's resume includes Hitler's Blitzkrieg into Poland, the desert war in North Africa, civil war in Greece, terrorism in Jerusalem, and guerilla warfare in Vietnam and the jungles of Borneo. The Cold War also reached its height during Clare's career as a defence correspondent and she was frequently off observing NATO exercises, and “test-driving” the latest fighter jets, tanks and nuclear submarines.
But it's not just about battles - Troubles with my Aunt is also the story of Clare's loves... the fiancée from whom she separated between the wars when their politics diverged (Clare was an early female prospective Labour parliamentary candidate), the husband she ultimately abandoned to go off and report the war, and the husband she rushed back to from the battlefields of Vietnam, only for him to die immediately after her return. Clare never married again, and promptly after that funeral she flew off to cover an outbreak of fighting in Algiers. More than anything else it becomes clear that Clare was married to journalism. Her greatest passion was following “the story” - wherever events might take her, and whatever dangers she might face.
Today nobody doubts the economic significance and industrial might of China. But it was a very different place when Clare was posted to Beijing in 1973 as one of the first western correspondents to be accredited since the country's chaotic, anarchic Cultural Revolution. In those days China was a largely rural economy, and with the death of the ailing Chairman Mao obviously imminent, political battles raged among the other leaders as they jockeyed for position. Clare never met Mao, but as part of the tiny western press contingent in the Chinese capital she did encounter his closest associate, the highly-regarded Prime Minister Zhou Enlai.
But nobody knew who or what might succeed the Chairman. Clare speculated endlessly with her contacts in the close-knit foreign diplomatic corps as these China-pioneers all tried to fathom what was really afoot in the country and what might happen next. Her top contact at the American representation – full diplomatic relations had not yet been established – was a Texan by the name of George Bush...
Clare's ability to establish formidable contacts – sometimes by gritty determination, sometimes by uncanny luck - was one of her extraordinary features. Even her interpreter in Beijing went on to become the senior aide to Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
When in Washington, Clare would sometimes dine with legendary power-broker Henry Kissinger, and successive US Defence Secretaries hosted her for off-record briefings, including even a 44-year-old Donald Rumsfeld, in his first stint in the post.
Clare once interviewed the hawkish US Air Force General Thomas Power, who was later caricatured in the classic movie Dr. Strangelove as mad, paranoid “Gen. Ripper” launching nuclear war against the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile back in the UK Clare was counted as one of former Prime Minister Edward Heath's only three female friends. She didn't always hit it off with all politicians however. When she met future British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher the pair clashed and Clare thereafter remained highly dismissive of the other “Iron Lady”.
Troubles with my Aunt culminates with Clare in her mid 90s's having led a life tied to warfare facing one final battle. But this time the fighting is in the Law Courts of Hong Kong, and concerns Clare's own life savings.
Her opponent is a former intelligence agent, occasional movie actor, broadcaster, businessman and PR executive. And the action in this last episode proves to be no-less dramatic than the wars Clare used to report. (The landmark case would go down in Hong Kong's legal history.)
Patrick Garrett spent five years researching Clare's globe-trotting life both “on the ground” and in archives around the world, and in the process uncovered a wealth of previously-untold stories. For the first time for example we learn about the refugee organisation Clare headed in Poland in the months leading up to the Second World War, which saved between two and three thousand lives. Clare had remained silent about this particular chapter in her life, making only a passing reference to it in her own book.
But as Patrick dug into his aunt's past, puzzling new elements also emerged. Clare was already well known for her reporting on spies and espionage. She and her husband had led the investigation into Donald Maclean and his comrade Guy Burgess, after the two traitors defected to the Soviet Union. She was also the first to break the story of master-spy Kim Philby's defection. But inside once-top-secret archives Patrick discovers new and unexplained connections to the murky world of intelligence - and begins to wonder whether “off record” briefings were really the only secrets that his great aunt kept...
Clare Hollingworth is still resident in Hong Kong, and celebrates her 100th birthday in October 2011.
Book Author
Patrick Garrett was born in London, grew up in Scotland, but has lived in Eastern Europe and Asia since the 1990s.
He began his working life as a television editor in Glasgow. After a stint doing TV commercials in Hamburg, during the turbulent Yeltsin years he moved to Moscow to work in television news for a range of international broadcasters including BBC, ITN, NBC, and CBS. He reported news events across the entire former Soviet Union, including numerous assignments to cover the vicious Chechen Wars in the mid 1990's.
He moved to Hong Kong in 1997 to observe its Handover of Sovereignty...
more about Patrick Garrett...
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