A former Guardian foreign correspondent tells a successor about defying prejudice and gaining global acclaim for her work
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.