Doyenne of war correspondents parted from life’s savings
Clare Hollingworth, 98, is one of ours. She is a British expatriate living in Hong Kong and former Telegraph journalist.
By Emma Hartley
Published: 6:50PM BST 22 Oct 2009
She is also the reporter who broke the story of the Germans invading Poland in 1939 for The Daily Telegraph, a strong contender for scoop of the 20th century.
Sadly Miss Hollingworth, whose hearing and eyesight are not what they once were, has been subject to a mercurial acquaintance, who separated her from her money and has failed to repay it, even following a court case at the end of which he agreed to do so.
Ted Thomas, 80, a British-born PR executive, met her at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong, to which she still goes on most days, and in January 2003 offered to “assist” the nonagenarian with her financial affairs. He was given control over her account at the Standard Chartered Bank and obtained a cheque book and ATM card.
Large sums were soon being removed from her account. During one five-day period that August a total of HK$1,446,500 (about £112,000) was withdrawn by Thomas, who kept very limited records and receipts.
When challenged by the British magazine Private Eye about the use to which the money was put, Thomas said it was spent on “wet fish and taxi fares”.
However, as the sum involved is approximately HK$1 million (£77,600), this seems unlikely to be the whole story.
In 2006 Miss Hollingworth filed a writ against Thomas, asking him to account for the whereabouts of the money and the case was settled in 2007. The terms of the agreement are confidential but the Telegraph understands that Thomas agreed to repay more than HK$1 million. Two years on, he has not done so.
As a result of this stalemate Miss Hollingworth’s family are preparing to apply to have Thomas declared bankrupt.
Ms Hollingworth’s great nephew and biographer, Patrick Garrett, lived in Hong Kong until he was moved by his employer to its Moscow office. He said that the sum still outstanding represented more than half of Miss Hollingworth’s life savings. “We’re hoping that this application will encourage the guilty party to put his hand on his cheque book,” he said.
“Ted Thomas has not met his obligations and we hope that the threat of bankruptcy might motivate him to do the decent thing. In particular, a bit of publicity can’t do any harm as I’ve met people who seem to be under the impression, as a result of speaking to him, that the family is somehow in the wrong.
“And yet part of the case was that this so-called friend of Clare’s was charging HK$400 an hour ‘chatting fees’ - he was charging her to have a conversation. He agreed to pay the money back in 2007. I would like to know what’s changed since then?”
Speaking to the Telegraph, Thomas said the following: “I have every intention to pay it. I don’t have enough to pay it at the moment, though. Clare and I are old friends of nearly 20 years standing.
“I didn’t charge anything at all to talk to her – not until it got to six times a day. I was under the impression that she was still working for the Telegraph, so charging a nominal fee did not seem unreasonable.” In 2003, Miss Hollingworth was 92 years old.
He went on to dispute the sum owed and suggested that Miss Hollingworth had, in fact, received a bargain from him. “If I were charging full price for my time I would have charged her HK$1,200 an hour,” he said.
He complained about the re-writing of Miss Hollingworth’s will before adding that the sum owed was not a very large amount.
This poses the question: why not pay it back, Mr Thomas?
Clare Hollingworth had a 40-year career in British journalism that began and ended with The Daily Telegraph, by which time she was in her seventies.
She had been in the business for only a week in 1939 when she noticed, travelling towards the Polish border from Germany, that huge screens of hessian had been erected along the roadside, concealing the valley behind from passing traffic.
As she looked, the wind caught a loose piece of tarpaulin, revealing large numbers of troops, hundreds of tanks, armoured cars and field guns, lined up, battle ready - and facing Poland. She had stumbled across the beginning of World War Two.
She went on to cover conflicts in Algeria, Aden and Vietnam among others, and in 1973 at the age of 61 became the first Telegraph correspondent in Beijing since the imposition of the "bamboo curtain" in 1949.
