Martha Gellhorn, legend of war reporting, dies

She was one of the most distinguished voices of a bloody and turbulent century, writes Rupert Cornwell

Martha Gellhorn, who died in London at the weekend, aged 89, was not so much a woman war reporter as one of the very greatest correspondents to cover the conflicts of this bloodiest and most violent of centuries.

This American who made London her final home practised journalism for the best part of 60 years, from the end of the 1920s to what she would call her "last piece of war reporting", from South Wales, on the doomed British miners' strike of 1984 and 1985. In between, she covered wars from Spain to Finland, China and Java, and Europe and - much later - the Arab-Israeli Six Day War and Vietnam. Somehow too, she found time to produce a dozen novels and collections of short stories, as well as four volumes of memoirs.

Yes, a part of her fame was owed to marriage (her second) with Ernest Hemingway. whom she had met in Key West in 1936. But only a small part. Gellhorn followed him to Madrid, and from there covered the Spanish Civil War for Colliers Weekly. War's long separations and Hemingway's own idiosyncracies broke the relationship, and they divorced in 1946. But however impossible his ways, the writer helped Gellhorn learn her craft and distil her passion.

She once declared she could not abide "all that objectivity shit". The reporter's duty, she believed, was to "limit yourself to what you see or hear, and not suppress or invent". Which is of course in a sense subjectiveness - but also as good a definition of journalistic objectivity, under real or extreme emotional fire, as can be found.

Gellhorn was among those who first conveyed the atrocities of Nazism to the world. "Behind the barbed wire and the electric fence," she wrote of just-liberated Dachau, "the skeletons sat in the sun and searched themselves for lice. They have no age and no faces ... they watched us but they did not move. No expression shows on a face that is only yellowish, stubbly skin stretched across bone."

Those who have witnessed such depravity can never thereafter be blind to the injustices of life. Gellhorn was a radical, who instinctively took the side of the disadvantaged and unprotected - a special bete noire in later life was Margaret Thatcher and her "evil revolution" that stoked hatred of the working class. A lifetime of observation had taught her that the disadvantaged and unprotected are usually the first victims of war. Martha Gellhorn told it like it was.

To later generations of women war reporters, she was inspiration and a role model. Among her female contemporaries only Clare Hollingworth, who from the Polish-German border in 1939 scooped the Foreign Office on the outbreak of the Second World War, came close. Oriana Fallaci, the BBC's Kate Adie, Carole Walker and Sue Lloyd Roberts, and now Christiane Amanpour of CNN, are among her professional descendants.

By the end, her sight had almost gone and her physical powers were ebbing. But visitors to her top-floor flat in Cadogan Square, with its views over the rooftops of the great museums of Kensington, found her mental sharpness and commitment as fierce as ever. And in the months before she died, she drew renewed enthusiasm from the election of a Labour Government pledged to an "ethical foreign policy". In a sense, that had been Gellhorn's objective, from behind a typewriter, every day of her professional life.

Obituary, page 18; Comment, page 17