Evelyn Irons (June 17, 1900–April 3, 2000) was a Scottish journalist, the first woman war correspondent to be decorated with the Croix de Guerre.[1]
She was born in Glasgow and attended Somerville College, Oxford. Her career in journalism began at the Daily Mail, where the editor assigned her to the beauty page even though she herself had never worn makeup. She was ultimately fired for "looking unfashionable".[1] At the Evening Standard she edited the "women's interest" pages, but when World War II broke out she informed the news editor "From now on I'm working for you."[2] Though General Montgomery objected to women reporters on the battlefield, she gained the support of French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny and became one of the first journalists to reach liberated Paris.[1] She was the first woman journalist to reach Hitler's Eagle's Nest after its capture; after climbing there through the snow she helped herself to a bottle of Hitler's "excellent Rhine wine".[3]
Her relationship with the writer Vita Sackville-West was well-known - months before her death, an Evening Standard headline identified her as the "war correspondent who broke Vita's heart" - but the romance was brief.[1] Afterward she became the life partner of fellow journalist Joy McSweeney, with whom she lived until McSweeney's death in 1978.[2]
She travelled to the United States in 1952 to cover the presidential election and stayed on afterward, settling near Brewster, New York.[2] In 1954 she broke a news embargo on the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán by hiring a mule to take her to Chiquimula while other journalists, forbidden to cross the border, waited in a bar in Honduras. She became the first reporter to reach the headquarters of the Provisional Government; a reporter for a rival paper received a telegram from his editor ordering him to "offget arse onget donkey".[2]
She died on April 3, 2000, at age 99.[2]