As one of the first female diplomatic correspondents in the British media, Hella Pick, who has died aged 96, was at the centre of the Guardian’s coverage of superpower summitry in the final decades of the cold war. Tall and elegant, she was a commanding presence at press conferences with world leaders, and also had a rare ability – based on her careful and intelligent reporting – to win the confidence of powerful politicians and get privileged access for interviews and background briefings.
Willy Brandt, as chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in the early 1970s, became her friend, as did Mieczyslaw Rakowski, the last prime minister of Poland in the communist era. She was also trusted by Eduard Shevardnadze, who served as Soviet foreign minister at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s nuclear arms reductions and detente with the west.
These successes were the culmination of an extraordinary life journey for an Austrian Jewish girl who escaped Nazi repression in March 1939 after being put by her mother on a train from Vienna to London as part of the Kindertransport. Hella’s father, Ernst Pick, had an orthodox Jewish background; her mother, Johanna (nee Spitz), was a non-practising Jew, and they divorced when Hella was a toddler. He emigrated to the US and she never saw him again. Hella’s maternal grandmother was arrested and taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where it is assumed that she died.
In July 1939, Hella, who had spent three months with foster parents in London, was joined by her mother, who arrived in Britain with almost no contacts. Johanna had the good luck to get a job as a cook for a well-to-do and generous family, the Chorleys, who had a home in Stanmore in north-west London and another in the Lake District. Their young son, Roger (later Lord Chorley), became Pick’s lifelong friend.
Living in Cumbria with her mother, Hella learned English quickly and did well at Fairfield school in Ambleside, where she was an ardent member of the Guides. She went on to study economics at the London School of Economics and got her first job in 1958 by answering a newspaper advert for a post on a London-based weekly magazine, West Africa. It had a small staff but her title – commercial editor – delighted her, as did the opportunities it gave her to travel regularly to the region. Africa was in the midst of decolonisation, and Pick got to know the leaders of several states on the cusp of independence, including Guinea’s Sékou Touré, Senegal’s Léopold Senghor and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.
In 1961 she approached the Guardian and persuaded the editor to send her to Belgrade as a freelancer to help to cover the conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was trying to carve out a position whereby governments did not have to be clients of either the US or the Soviet Union. Pick used the argument that many Africans whom she knew would be there as guests of the Yugoslav president, Marshal Tito, and the movement’s other leading lights, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent, Richard Scott, missed his plane and arrived in Belgrade a day late, and Pick was thrilled to have her story on the opening ceremony as the paper’s front-page lead – one of hundreds she was to write during almost 40 years on the Guardian.
Impressed with Pick’s energy and ability to mix with foreign politicians and diplomats, Scott asked her to cover the annual leaders’ meeting of the UN general assembly. Pick found herself in her element. After several more months as a freelancer she was taken on to the Guardian staff as UN correspondent, based in New York. A brilliant networker, she got to know dozens of young diplomats from numerous countries who later became senior figures in their respective chancelleries.
She fell in love with Narendra Singh, India’s deputy head of mission at the UN, after he had divorced his French wife. They stayed together for four years, but both assumed the relationship would never lead to marriage because of family pressures on Singh’s side.
In the US her colleagues were Scott, who had moved to Washington, and Alistair Cooke, who covered the US from New York and took Pick under his wing. She concentrated on diplomacy and foreign policy, which she loved, but was frequently dispatched to cover US news. During the 1964 presidential election she followed the losing candidate, Barry Goldwater. She covered one of the five-day Selma-to-Montgomery marches for voting rights led by Martin Luther King Jr in 1965. She also contributed an uncharacteristically breathless piece on the Beatles’ arrival in New York in February 1964.
In 1965 the Guardian’s editor, Alastair Hetherington, phoned her with an offer to cover Vietnam and she had no hesitation in refusing. As she put it in an interview many years later, about being a female journalist in what was a largely male world: “I protested and said, ‘I am not a war correspondent. And I am a coward, I could not do it’ … I could never have done what so many of these women are doing now. I would never, ever have the guts to do it. I am not proud of myself. I would fight any political battles, but I couldn’t get involved in physical warfare.”
As the European Economic Community grew in importance and Britain struggled with the issue of whether to join it, Pick was transferred to reporting on continental Europe in 1967. She was posted to Geneva so she could continue to report on the UN while also travelling to Brussels and other EEC capitals.
In 1972, at the height of the Watergate crisis, which was to engulf Richard Nixon, she was sent to Washington to help with the Guardian’s coverage of one of the most dramatic periods of postwar US history. It was her dream job, especially as Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, was at the peak of his power, negotiating the US opening to China, the end of US involvement in Vietnam and the first presidential visit to Moscow. Kissinger used to pay court to European correspondents in Washington, flattering them with invitations to off-the-record lunches that produced opportunities for news stories or opinion pieces that favoured his agenda.
In 1975 personal problems were to strike again. Pick had developed a relationship with Ralf Dahrendorf, the German director of the LSE. She decided to resign her post in Washington and come back to London to get married. But the relationship abruptly unravelled and Pick found herself single and now without the job she loved. She described it as the lowest point in her life.
Peter Preston, newly appointed as the Guardian’s editor, understood that the best remedy for a person with Pick’s determination and resilience was to give her a new work challenge. She was made east European correspondent, based in London, with a brief to travel throughout the Soviet-dominated communist bloc while also covering US-Soviet summit meetings and other significant diplomatic encounters.
Pick, along with other Guardian reporters (myself included), was excited by the emergence of Solidarity, the independent trade union movement in Poland in the 1980s. In a revealing appearance on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2018, she said one of her two most memorable career moments was being with the Solidarity leader, Lech Wałęsa, in Gdansk on the day in 1983 when he was due to be handed the Nobel peace prize but was effectively blocked from leaving Poland.
Her other big moment was her interview, several months earlier, with General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish communist leader. It was one of the first he had given to a western correspondent since declaring martial law and arresting Wałęsa. Many readers criticised Pick for what they considered was too soft an interview.
In 1982 her job title changed to diplomatic correspondent, but she continued to cover much the same beat as before. With the arrival of Gorbachev as Soviet leader, and his plans for wide-ranging easing of relations with the west and the construction of a “common European home”, east-west summit diplomacy reached a new intensity. Pick was in Reykjavik in 1986 for the meeting between Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, which almost produced pledges from both men to dismantle all nuclear weapons. She also attended the Gorbachev summit with George HW Bush in Malta in 1989, which formally ended the cold war.
On her retirement from the Guardian in the mid-90s, Pick put her still plentiful energy into helping to organise international conferences for the publisher and philanthropist George Weidenfeld. He had started a group called the Club of Three, which invited influential people from France, Germany and Britain to meet to discuss current affairs. The programme later expanded to include high-level participants from China, Turkey and Russia.
In 2000 she was appointed CBE, and in 2006 she took a role in a more ambitious Weidenfeld project, the creation of a thinktank called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. It was designed to study and counter extremism and the ideologies that fuel it, and Pick served as the director of its art and culture programme until 2017, continuing to indulge her passion for travel. She credited Weidenfeld with making her comfortable, and proud, to be a secular Jew.
Although she regretted having few clear childhood memories of Austria, Pick felt a special attachment to the country and took a strong interest in its postwar development. She was angered by the elite’s unwillingness to investigate the roots of antisemitism or recognise its extent. She wrote two books on the issue. One was Simon Wiesenthal: A Life in Search of Justice (1996), a biography of the Viennese Nazi hunter. The other, Guilty Victim (2000), took issue with the image of Austria, manufactured by the postwar Austrian elite, as a country that had suffered under nazism and had no responsibility for Hitler’s coming to power.
Pick’s attitude to Germany was more complex. An encounter with the former German chancellor Brandt changed her outlook. Preston had asked her to get a reaction about a news story from Brandt, who was the guest of honour at a dinner in May 1971 to mark the Guardian’s 150th anniversary.
As Pick recalled later, “[Brandt] said: ‘Come back to my hotel room and we can talk.’ I went back and we sat down and he asked about my background and we talked and we talked and we talked. I didn’t get out until 3 in the morning and everyone on the Guardian thought: ‘She must have gone to bed with him.’ Well, she didn’t go to bed with him, but she became completely reconciled to Germany because she had got to know Willy Brandt. And he remained a good friend until the day he died. And that really, really made me understand that there are good people in Germany.”
Pick’s range of high-level contacts was astonishing, and much of her social life seemed to revolve around long weekends and holidays with diplomats in embassy residences in capital cities around the world. When she won a high Austrian award, the Goldenes Ehrenzeichen, in 1988, a lunch was given in her honour at the Austrian embassy in London, where one of the guests was the former German ambassador, Hermann von Richthofen. As he wrapped up his tribute to Pick, he turned toward her, gave a little bow of his head, clicked his heels in the Prussian manner, and said: “It was a pleasure to have served under you.” This brought the house down.
One of the Guardian foreign editors she worked for, Martin Woollacott, who died in 2021, said: “In spite of her moodiness, fierce protection of her turf, occasional arrogance, and imperious treatment of colleagues, very much including three editors of the paper, she inspired so much affection. She had a warm nature that was not always evident on first acquaintance. She had a great gift for friendship and a deserved reputation for hospitality. Like her mother, she was a brilliant cook, and was still giving large dinner parties in her 90s.”
Yet, in spite of her apparent self-confidence while with friends or at diplomatic parties, Pick never entirely lost the feeling of vulnerability that began with her disrupted childhood. “As a refugee one never loses a certain sense of insecurity,” she told her Desert Island Discs audience. “It stays with one one’s whole life. I’ve grasped at things because of a desire for security. I’ve made many mistakes.”
In her 90s Pick started writing an exceptionally frank autobiography. It was almost left unfinished when she had a catastrophic accident in London in November 2019, falling from the front steps of a friend’s house into the basement area. She broke several ribs, her pelvis and her neck. She survived a precarious operation and two months later resumed work on the book, using the Covid-19 lockdowns as a spur. She called it Invisible Walls, after the cage of insecurity that she felt always surrounded her.
Pick had no siblings and she wrote movingly about her ultra-possessive mother, who was as dominant as Pick herself, and grasped irrationally for Pick’s presence by her side, even to the point of ringing the Guardian editor and demanding that Pick not be given so many foreign postings.
In the book she said she regretted not having done more to support younger female journalists’ campaigns for equal opportunities. She also said that she had always longed for marriage and children, but had compensated for the failure of her two longest relationships with men by immersing herself in travel and intensely hard work. “Escapism has been my way of dealing with unresolved questions of exile and identity, with vulnerability and self-doubt,” she wrote. “Friendship has given me courage and saved me from loneliness.”
• Hella Henrietta Pick, writer and journalist, born 24 April 1927; died 4 April 2024
