On Hella Pick’s first day as the Guardian’s Washington correspondent in 1963, she opened her office door to discover her predecessor had cleared the bookshelves of reference volumes, emptied out the archive of old article cuttings and carted off all the bureau’s address books.
There is no real modern equivalent for how devastating this was. The closest a journalist might come now would be having the internet permanently cut off.
In the pre-Google era, these personal reference libraries for checking names, dates, and other facts, and hand-filled address books, were vital to a correspondent’s credibility and source network.
A lesser journalist might have collapsed. Pick just turned to the roster of friends she had accumulated over a long and distinguished career as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian.
One threw a party to bolster her contact list, the Washington Post agreed to open up its own libraries and archives, and once again she was off, scooping her competitors, as she did around the world for over three decades.
That mix of intense rivalry and supportive camaraderie still marked foreign reporting when I was starting out nearly half a century later. In Afghanistan one competitor slipped a memory card out of a camera during a party to steal footage. But a colleague from the same paper helped me stay safe when I landed in Zimbabwe the day of a coup and discovered the local journalist I planned to work with had been detained by soldiers while I was in the air (he was released the next day).
Many foreign correspondents for western outlets cover war and oppression abroad with the knowledge they can always leave and return home. Pick had a particularly personal understanding of how much was at stake when she wrote about conflicts and brutal governments.
Born in pre-war Vienna, the rise of the Nazis had ripped apart a comfortable, middle-class childhood. She fled to Britain as a child refugee on the Kindertransport, aged 11, knowing only one word of English. She greeted the family that took her in with a cheerful “goodbye”.
Her mother reached London soon after, but Pick lost her beloved grandmother in the Holocaust. Although years of precariousness and poverty followed, she defied suggestions she should start work at 16, scraped together scholarships and financial support to keep studying, and stumbled into journalism as a way to travel beyond postwar Britain after she failed to get a job at the UN.
It was a rejection she would always be grateful for. She would eventually spend three decades at the Guardian, with her distinguished career tracking the long arc of the cold war, the thrill of postcolonialism, and America’s postwar transformation.
Her extraordinary personal story, and the history she tracked are captured in a new memoir, published at the age of 92, Invisible Walls. Its title is a reference to the insecurities that caged her yet drove her to become a pioneer.
When she broke into the insular male-dominated world of 1950s journalism, she was a minority several times over – a woman, a refugee and a Jew.
“When I started work, women who were doing any kind of political foreign affairs reporting were really very, very thin on the ground. You could really name them all,” she says, though she benefited from having the industry legend Clare Hollingworth – who broke the news of the start of the second world war – as friend and mentor.
Foreign reporting has long been a particularly chauvinist enclave in an often macho profession. When I asked a former employer for a little cash to make a crumbling war-zone bureau a little pleasant for those of us living and working there, my then boss grudgingly agreed, “as long as you don’t paint it pink”.
He also replied to a request for better safety gear with sexual innuendo. But that kind of casual sexism paled in comparison with what Pick had to deal with.
She worked at a time when the Foreign Office felt justified shutting her out of its regular briefings because she was a woman, and diplomats ushered her out of the room at ambassadorial dinners, so that the men – including colleagues and competitors – could talk politics over cigar and port.
Other aspects of reporting life half a century ago seem much more attractive. We are now tethered to London by mobile networks that cover most countries, and satellite phones where they peter out. The only place I’ve been where I couldn’t call home was North Korea. It makes filing much easier, and helps keep us safe.
But I envy how Pick could immerse herself in a story or a reporting trip, uninterrupted for days at a time. Phone calls and telegrams were so expensive she was told not to file while travelling, except in an emergency.
Even after the US military attache was shot in his bed when she was in Léopoldville [now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo] in 1962, potentially an opening salvo in a cold war skirmish, she decided not to call London. Her instinct proved right; it was a personal feud.
Other things have barely changed. Covering world leaders and big events, peace talks or diplomatic summits may look glamorous on TV, but for journalists involve many boring but anxious hours waiting in corridors to try and grab a comment from a leading player, or the inside scoop from an official sitting in on talks.
Pick was so good at collaring her targets that the British delegation to the UN – all male at the time – once fled to the toilets to try avoid her.
Covering west Africa in the 1950s, during the heady days of independence from colonial rule, she was even able to forge personal friendships with some of the key figures.
Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to independence, picked up the phone when she needed a quote. I don’t have any world leaders on speed dial, although smartphones are part of a digital revolution that has transformed how journalists work.
We can now work in large teams spread across countries and timezones, and report in depth on places that are impossible to visit. When Aleppo was under siege during the Syrian civil war, I could call people using satellite internet connections for interviews, download their videos and write about the unfolding humanitarian crisis.
But while how we work may have shifted enormously, according to Pick the personal attributes needed to be a good reporter have not changed much. “In terms of how you actually pursue your craft, the world of today bears very little relationship to the one I started out in,” she said. “But you still need people to trust you, you need to have an inquisitive mind and good antennae for priorities.”
And one great pleasure of the job remains constant, the excitement of getting the front-page “splash”. “To pick up the Guardian and see my name on the lead story – this was happiness; this was satisfaction,” Pick wrote in her memoir of the first time it happened. “The pleasure of seeing one’s work on the printed page never quite goes away.”
• Hella Pick will be in conversation with Emma Graham-Harrison at a Guardian Live online event on Monday 12 July. Book tickets here
