Hellcat of The Hague

Caroline Studdert

Description

At a time when women were finding their voices comes Hell Cat of the Hague: The Nel Slis Story, the remarkable tale of a female journalist who became the Associated Press' first correspondent in The Hague after WWII. This story delves into the origins and follows the adventures of a larger-than-life character, fighting her way to make her mark in the world as a lone woman journalist and forming enduring friendships across the world. From a lonely childhood on an island at the bottom of Holland, a love of languages launches Nel on her travels in the 1930s. From the Sorbonne and White Russians in Paris to a top-class nursing diploma in Switzerland, from the U.K. and Germany to Mussolini-watching in Rome as World War II breaks out, Nel sees it all. With her experience in nursing and the BBC wartime intelligence monitoring service, Nel falls 'like a hair in the soup' into journalism when the mighty Associated Press (AP) sets up shop in the UK. Postwar, Nel becomes the AP's first correspondent in The Hague - and meets the love of her life, young American journalist Daniel Schorr. Together with Schorr, her direct and challenging American style of reporting transforms a profession suffering from the legacy of wartime occupation. The book also follows her reporting on the Dutch Royal Family, Nel and the Queen of Libya, her travels and work in the U.S. and much more. She becomes a legend in her own time, the exciting woman journalist every other journalist wants to interview and emulate. Also famed for her warmth, her wide circle of friends including cultural icons like Isaac Stern and Leo Bernstein, and her support for new journalists, especially women, this is a figure history should celebrate as this book surely does.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781803139647
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 Caroline Studdert

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.


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ISBN 978 1803139 647

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd






To Patrick and Isabella






By the same author

AGAINST the ODDS
Elizabeth Studdert, a life in carving
Matador, 2018


Contents
Introduction
Conversations with Nel’s Friends

BEGINNINGS
DISCOVERING EUROPE
(1913–1939)

Chapter One The Islander
Growing up on Goeree-Overflakkee

Chapter Two Leaving Goeree-Overflakkee
Secondary school at the Kennemer Lyceum

Chapter Three A Moveable Feast: Paris and Onwards
Searching for a role

WAR
(1939–1945)
Chapter Four To the Finland Station: Nursing, Ball Bearings and the BBC
‘Like a hair in the soup’

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
(1945–1962)

Chapter Five The AP’s Slis
“Who are you, actually?”

Chapter Six An American love
Slis with Schorr

Chapter Seven The Great Flood of 1953
A climacterical event

Chapter Eight Life after Schorr
Indonesia to Staphorst: scoops and schnabbeltjes

Chapter Nine Slis Goes to America
A far country

Chapter Ten The Last Queen of Libya
Fatima the Beautiful

Chapter Eleven Three Dutch Queens: Juliana’s ‘Rasputin’ Affair
Wilhelmina, Juliana and Beatrix

‘LA SLIS’ IN BRUSSELS
(1963–73)

Chapter Twelve Emerging Europe
Prising open the door to Brussels

Chapter Thirteen Brussels!
La mer à boire

Chapter Fourteen Portrait of Two Dutchmen: Mansholt and Luns
If the CAP fits…

Chapter Fifteen The Brussels Scene: A Painful Farewell
Parting is such sweet sorrow: Nel’s Hartman nemesis

Chapter Sixteen Leaving Belgium: Valedictions
Friendships, Belgians, Europe, Dale on Slis

HELLCAT OF THE HAGUE
(1973–2001)

Chapter Seventeen Return to Holland
Slis on the Dutch; a few more scoops

Chapter Eighteen The Lockheed Affair
The Prince and the Aircraft-maker – The Big Fudge

Chapter Nineteen The Foreign Press Association
Nel and the FPA, Prince Claus, Lubbers and many others

Chapter Twenty After the AP
The light that failed

Chapter Twenty-One Celebrations and Reflections

Postscript Ave Atque Vale

Acknowledgements
References
Author’s interviews
About the Author


Introduction
A quest and a tribute
I was struck first by Nel’s deep, smoky voice on the telephone. I was looking for a job, and the famous old pioneering Dutch journalist immediately gave me every conceivable contact in the Netherlands. She also told me to use her name. Thanks to Nel, in spring 1981, I started my first regular job as a journalist. I was even working in the Amsterdam office of her former Associated Press wire service, albeit on the affiliated AP-Dow Jones financial newswire.
I didn’t actually meet Nel until August that year when she agreed to do a magazine interview, which took place in her apartment by the sea in The Hague. She was a surprisingly difficult interviewee, rattling happily through her dramatic life on her own terms but reticent to the point of obstinacy about more personally revealing matters.
Nel must have been sixty-eight then; thin, tough and weather-beaten with a dark complexion. She had a long, craggy face like a gloomy monkey, until it lit up with a dazzling smile. She was very smartly dressed in a chic tweed business skirt and top over a silk shirt, in colour-coordinated moss greens. This was an elegant woman. I was embarrassed when my editor headlined her interview ‘Hellcat of The Hague’, but Nel loved it. After the interview, I said I would look forward to her autobiography. She said yes, indeed, she must write one.
Some dozen years on, I asked Nel, what about your book? We were lingering amid empty white-clothed tables, about to be swept out with the crumbs after some press function in The Hague. She said immediately, we’ll write it together – in short story form. I very much liked that idea. Just then, though, I was starting a new financial news bureau in Amsterdam, so I didn’t get a chance to start visiting her regularly for several more years.
By then, Nel had lost her memory.
I didn’t realise this immediately, as she could still churn out her oft-told life story on autopilot. But now I couldn’t get her to pause and expand on any particular scene, or depart from her own script. I just kept on visiting and recording, and worked on a book plan starting with her island childhood.
Then came the final blow. I phoned as usual to tell her helper, Sonia, that I planned to visit, but Sonia said I couldn’t come because Nel was going into a care home that day. I did visit her there a few times, but by then her memory had really gone. One of her minders, journalist Friso Endt, reckoned it lasted about six seconds. That’s not even the length of a sentence.
So what was I to do next? I had no idea how to write this book on my own, but I still wanted to tell Nel’s story. That is, if I could find out what it was. A long struggle followed, collecting anything I could find about her, and interviewing anyone who knew her. This was difficult too, as people kept dying on me – Nel was no spring chicken.
After I moved to Prague in summer 2001, I was shocked by the news of Nel’s death at the end of that year. Facing a writing deadline, I had to miss Nel’s funeral, a great sadness for me – though Nel would have understood the deadline. So I just went on slowly collecting pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of Nel’s life and writing draft after draft of the book. Later, I put her story away for several years, before being irresistibly if nervously drawn back to it again.
I have asked myself, what is the point of it all now after such a long time? The point is Nel herself, her life and struggles as a groundbreaking woman journalist. It’s her highly coloured personality, the impression she made on people and they on her. Her charm, rages, tiresomeness and reticence; all are part of Nel. The point is one woman’s struggle and one woman’s views on journalism, on women and feminism, on her country, on the EU at a formative time, and on the wider world. It wasn’t an easy ride for her. There are sacrifices involved in breaking new ground. But she has left us a valuable legacy. She’s left us a generous slice of twentieth-century history, seen through the eyes of someone who was there. After all, who could have foretold the future of this motherless child called Nel growing up on a tiny Dutch island in the 1920s? An island that was only reachable once a day by boat. Lonely, neglected by her uninterested, absentee father, dependent on the care of a kindly maid; a young girl driven to seek solace and a surrogate family with her best friend’s mother.
When I met Nel in 1981, she was a legend in her own time. That feisty, groundbreaking woman journalist with the smoky voice; that woman who stopped Molotov – blocking Stalin’s ‘Molotov cocktail’ comrade from being made ambassador to the Netherlands. Correspondent in The Hague for the mighty American news service the Associated Press from the end of World War II, famed for her turbulent thirty-five-year career with the AP.
And famed for her coverage of the Dutch royals, starting with the old Queen Wilhelmina. Then chronicler of Queen Juliana, from her strange attachment to the Rasputin-like Greet Hofmans to the cataclysmic Lockheed bribery scandal involving her husband, Prince Bernhard. Meanwhile, Nel would follow the career of Beatrix, the last of the three queens, from princess to monarch. And far away in Libya in the 1950s, she claimed a unique interview with Queen Fatima, long before Gadaffi’s coup.
In a completely different sphere, Nel broke new ground in initiating the Associated Press coverage of the EEC, during a formative period in the history of the European movement.
Nel became close to many leading figures around Europe and the US, straddling worlds of national and international politics, royalty, trade, developing Europe and culture. From Dutch premiers and monarchs to unusual people like British diplomat and maze-maker Randoll Coates, and in the music world, composer Leonard Bernstein and violinist Isaac Stein. She formed enduring friendships with other eminent women such as columnist and writer Flora Lewis, while also remaining loyal to her best friend from her island childhood.
She was much decorated. For services to journalism, one prime minister made her a knight and another promoted her to officer in the order of Oranje-Nassau. The French government awarded her with La Croix d’Officier de l’Ordre Nationale du Merit for services to France. And there were earlier decorations for her first career in nursing