The other day I was writing away when suddenly I needed a street name from my past. Nothing I did would bring that street name back to me. I lived in Hong Kong at the time, and could remember the major streets, but what I was looking for was the small street leading up a hill to the Foreign Correspondents Club. I finally gave up, admitted defeat, and Googled the FCC. And there it was, the address of the FCC. But it wasn’t the name I was expecting to see. While I was reading the article on the FCC, it came to me that the name I needed was Ice House Street, and that the FCC sits at the corner of Ice House Street and Lower Albert Road. Since Lower Albert Road was a major thoroughfare in comparison to Ice House Street, the FCC has been given a street address on Lower Albert Road.
There was a mention of the Clare Hollingworth Fellowship award, which led me to an article on the woman, with whom I was familiar from my time in Hong Kong.
Clare Hollingworth was a journalist, and later a war correspondent, who, although only on the job for a week had the “scoop of the century” when in 1939 she stumbled on a massive number of German tanks and troops amassed on the Polish border when the camouflage screens concealing them were disturbed by wind. When those troops and tanks crossed the border into Poland, the Germans had startedWWII. From that point forward, she had many, many assignments. For instance, in 1967, she went to Viet Nam to report on the war there, and reported that that war would end in a stalemate, which it did. Finally, in 1989, she reported on the Tiananmen Square protests(or the June Fourth Incident as it is known in China) from her hotel balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square.
Hollingworth retired to Hong Kong in 1981 where she became a near-daily visitor to the FCC holding court there like the doyenne of foreign correspondents from the around the world. I so wanted to be present when she was holding court, but alas, I wasn’t a foreign correspondent and they wouldn’t let me in. I eventually toured the FCC, hoping to perhaps catch at least a glimpse of Hollingworth but she hadn’t yet arrived that day. Hollingworth died in 2017 in Hong Kong at the age of 105.
When I returned to what I had been writing I no longer needed the name of the little street in Hong Kong. But I had taken a 50-year trip—from September 1, 1939 to June 4, 1989—with Clare Hollingworth, a woman I had wanted to meet and listen to her stories from those fifty years.
Kay Bigelow 