Clare Hollingworth marked with Google Doodle – here is how the journalist broke the news of WW2

As well as serving as a journalist for The Daily Telegraph Clare also helped thousands of Czech refugees escape from Hitler's regime

On what would have been her 106th birthday, Clare is the subject if a Google Doodle - here's her story...

Who was Clare Hollingworth?

Clare was born on October 10 1911 in Knighton, which is a southern suburb of Leicester.

An an early age she showed an interest in becoming a writer, despite opposition from her mother, and her interest in warfare was prompted by visits to a number of battlefield sites in Britain and France with her father.

After working as a secretary to the League of Nations Union, Clare won a scholarship to the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, and later, a place at Zagreb University to study Croatian.

She then went on to write articles on a freelance base for the New Statesmen before she went to Warsaw in 1938 to help Czech refugees escape Hitler's forces.

Between March and July 1939 she helped rescue thousands which led her to being hired by Arthur Wilson, the editor of The Daily Telegraph, in August 1939.

She had only been at the Telegraph for less than a week when she was sent to Poland to report on the increasing tensions in Europe.

While she was there, Clare wrote a front page story on a massive build-up of German troops, tanks and armoured cars which were facing towards Poland.

On September 1, Clare called the British Embassy in Poland to report the German invasion of Poland and had to hold the telephone out of the window of her room to capture the sounds of German forces in order to convince them.

This meant her eyewitness account was the first the British Embassy received about the invasion of Poland.

Clare passed away at a hospital in Hong Kong in January 2017.

What is a Google doodle?

In 1998, the search engine founders Larry and Sergey drew a stick figure behind the second 'o' of Google as a message to that they were out of office at the Burning Man festival and with that, Google Doodles were born.

The company decided that they should decorate the logo to mark cultural moments and it soon became clear that users really enjoyed the change to the Google homepage.

In that same year, a turkey was added to Thanksgiving and two pumpkins appeared as the 'o's for Halloween the following year.

Now, there is a full team of doodlers, illustrators, graphic designers, animators and classically trained artists who help create what you see on those days.