Gertrude Bell (2 page)

Rising in three generations from artisan to high middle class, the Bells were beginning to marry into the aristocracy. They remained outside the great social networks of English life, those exclusive clubs that conferred inherited privilege and power and determined your prejudices, associates, and affiliations. Gertrude enjoyed a rare freedom from the traps that imprison us in the grooves of social life. She met the great and the good on equal terms, but she knew something of what it meant to be working class, and of how those families stood on a knife-edge between
survival and precipitation into the street and the workhouse. Her clear, unequivocal vision cut straight through political correctness, self-importance, status, and fame. She gave no quarter to an opinionated bishop, a pompous statesman, or a self-satisfied professor. At fifteen she decided that the unprovable did not exist, and told her scripture teacher so without prevarication. She would meet people head on—whether a patronizing don, a knife-waving dervish, a corrupt Turkish official, or an effete English aristocrat. Her friends came from diverse walks of life, ranging from an Iraqi gardener to the Viceroy of India, from a
Times
correspondent to a battle-scarred tribal warrior, from a
mutjahid
to a servant from Aleppo. Once they had been admitted to her trust, she was the most loving, the most attentive and faithful of friends.

Of course she made enemies. She snubbed the modestly gifted wives of British officers—“The devil take all inane women!” she once said; she was liable to attack anyone who menaced her, confronted villains and murderers and would denounce them face-to-face over the dinner table. It seemed to me at one point during my research that she might have been murdered by one of the latter, and there are students of her work and at least one recent member of the British Council who believe this to be the case. As if aware of constant threat, she always slept with her gun under her pillow, even at her family home in Yorkshire, where she preferred to spend her nights in a summer-house in the garden rather than in her own comfortable bedroom amongst her beloved family. Was she trying to protect them? While there were undoubtedly people who wished her dead, I found no evidence of murder, though facts are hard to come by. I do believe that, just as, full of curiosity and excitement, she had always courageously ventured out into the unknown on her expeditions, so she ventured out one last time.

She yearned to be married and to have a family of her own, but time and again, tragedy intervened to put an end to those hopes. She was, however, much loved, not least by that great family to whom she finally dedicated her life and work: the people of Arabia. And they have not forgotten her. Recently, her name and her work for Iraq were reinstated in the nationwide school syllabus. Lawrence kick-started the Arab Revolt, but it was Gertrude who gave the Arabs a route to nationhood. She cajoled and intruded, guided and engineered, and finally delivered the often promised and so nearly betrayed prize of independence. While she
remained dedicated to this mission through thick and thin, Lawrence agonized, faltered, and finally abandoned the Arab issue and tried to escape from his own tortured personality, to reappear in the nondescript persona of one Aircraftsman Shaw.

Gertrude Bell stuck to her ambition for the Arabs with a wonderful consistency. She showed her clever but floundering colleagues of the Cairo Intelligence Bureau how to win their bit of the Great War; she guided the fledgling British administration of Mesopotamia to a thriving future, hand in hand with the Arabs and to their mutual advantage. And she stuck to her guns when her colonialist chief tried to have her sacked, when Churchill wanted to pull the British out of Iraq altogether, when political machinations in Europe brought all her achievements to the brink of disaster, and when, playing her last card, she kept King Faisal from throwing it all away in the name of Arab supremacy.

She established the public library and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, of which the principal wing was dedicated in 1930 to her memory. The museum still guards the remaining treasures of a country whose origins were those of the first civilizations. While Iraq's future is desperately uncertain, one fact remains indisputable. Dying in 1926, Gertrude Bell left behind a benevolent and effective Iraq government, functioning without institutionalized corruption and intent on equality and peace. In days when “Empire” and “colonialism” are dirty words, Britain has little to be ashamed of in the establishment of Iraq, in which the promise of Arab independence was finally honoured. I have come to agree with her old friend from Oxford, Janet Hogarth, who wrote of her: “She was, I think, the greatest woman of our time, perhaps amongst the greatest of all time.”

As long as Faisal lived, Iraq was a place where all its people could carry on their daily lives without fear and suffering. His son Prince Ghazi—the little boy for whom Gertrude had bought toys at Harrods—inherited the crown in 1933 and continued to rule the country strongly, perhaps too strongly: in suppressing an Assyrian uprising for independence, he allowed the massacre of 1933. After Gertrude's death, the dynasty she had put in place continued for thirty-two more years, while Europe plunged into war again after only thirteen, dragging the rest of the world with it. What would America and Britain not give today for the promise of a peaceful and well governed Iraq for even four years?

Her prolific letters, diaries, and intelligence position papers, no less than her eight books and her magnum opus,
Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia
, make Gertrude Bell one of the best-documented women of all time. Her voice as it comes through in her writing, so personal, so visionary, so humorous and crystal-clear in its purpose, has guided me as to how to write this book. Although she lacked the narrative strain needed to set all she had to say in the context of her story, her voice ought to be heard and appreciated, it seemed to me—which is why I decided to use many more of her own words than would appear in a conventional biography. In parallel with her story, they give the immediacy and the sparkle of her ardent mind, vividly revealing her wit and character.

GERTRUDE BELL

I
t is 22 March 1921, the last day of the Cairo Conference and the final opportunity for the British to determine the postwar future of the Middle East. Like any tourists, the delegation make the routine tour of the pyramids and have themselves photographed on camels in front of the Sphinx. Standing beneath its half-effaced head, two of the most famous Englishmen of the twentieth century confront the camera in some disarray: Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, who has just, to the amusement of all, fallen off his camel, and T. E. Lawrence, tightly constrained in the pin-striped suit and trilby of a senior civil servant. Between them, at her ease, rides Gertrude Bell, the sole delegate possessing knowledge indispensable to the Conference. Her face, in so far as it can be seen beneath the brim of her rose-decorated straw hat, is transfigured with happiness. Her dream of an independent Arab nation is about to come true, her choice of a king endorsed: her Iraq is about to become a country. Just before leaving the Semiramis Hotel that morning, Churchill has cabled to London the vital message “Sharif's son Faisal offers hope of best and cheapest solution.”

By what evolution did a female descendant of Cumbrian sheep farmers become, in her time, the most influential figure in the Middle East? She was as English as English can be, which is to say that she was bred in the wuthering heights of Yorkshire. These northern farmers have acquired a
very particular character ever since the eleventh century, when, alone among the English, they refused to submit to William the Conqueror. Physically and mentally tough, they are given to few words, unvarnished and bluntly delivered.

Gertrude Bell's great-great-grandfather was a Carlisle blacksmith, and her great-grandfather began the first alkali factory and iron foundry at Jarrow. Her famous and powerful grandfather Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, born in 1816, was a metallurgical chemist and perhaps the country's foremost industrialist. Manufacturing steel on a huge scale, he produced one-third of the metal used in Britain and much of that used for railtrack and bridge construction in the rapidly developing Empire. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain's most distinguished scientific institution. Educated first as an engineer, he studied at Edinburgh University and at the Sorbonne in Paris, then in Denmark and the south of France. Author of
The Chemical Phenomena of Iron Smelting
, he was looked upon as the “high priest of British Metallurgy” and he was the first to identify the value of phosphorus fertiliser as a by-product of steel-making. Referred to as “Sir Isaac” or more familiarly as “Lowthian,” in 1854 he was elected Lord Mayor of Newcastle upon Tyne, then later became Liberal Member of Parliament for Hartlepool and High Sheriff of County Durham. He was a contemporary and friend of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, William Morris, and John Ruskin, men to whom can be attributed seminal advances in evolution and science, art, architecture, and social reform. Lowthian was president or vice-president of eight national engineering and chemical institutions, several of which he had founded. He was also the director of the North Eastern Railway.

With Lowthian's two brothers John and Tom, Bell Brothers owned collieries, quarries, and iron ore mines; factories and foundries whose furnaces, burning twenty-four hours a day, regularly reddened the night skies. His company and its associates employed more than forty-seven thousand men, and the family boast was that they would make anything “from a needle to a ship.” Besides the first iron and steel works in Newcastle, and the second at Port Clarence in Middlesbrough, he set up a chemical plant for the country's first manufacture of aluminium—until then, a metal as valuable as gold. On the factory's opening day, he was driven in his carriage through the streets of Newcastle in an aluminium
top hat, which he doffed to the crowd. He was the first British ironmaster to own a machine for making steel rope.

Lowthian wrote several scientific books, but his most remarkable was a comprehensive and logical assessment of Britain's prospects for competing with the world in steel production. He invested heavily in research into the process of steel-making, and was determined to push Britain into developing new technological industries. In the hope that all of British industry would follow his example, he advocated government support for scientific research and technical development. But in this, after a lifetime's work, he failed. As he had forecast, other countries—and particularly Germany with its Krupps armaments and Thyssen steel—grew in technical competence and productivity, outstripping Britain and building the wealth and power they were to wield in the First World War.

A formidable giant of a man, a paterfamilias who would have almost sixty grandchildren—the number is disputed—Lowthian and his wife, Margaret Pattinson, set a pattern for the Bells of comfortable rather than lavish lifestyle. Considering the huge scale of his enterprises, and his position as the Bill Gates of his day, he did not live extravagantly. This may have had something to do with Margaret's influence: she came from a family of shopkeepers and scientists. His first house, Washington New Hall—four miles south of Newcastle upon Tyne, a stone's throw from the home of the ancestors of George Washington—was not quite a mansion, and the house he built at the zenith of his power, Rounton Grange, was not quite a stately home. He toyed with Gothic, but settled for William Morris's humbler Arts and Crafts style, with its emphasis on traditional artisan skills as a panacea for the ravages wreaked by the Industrial Revolution. This would remain the characteristic style of the Bells' private houses and public buildings. Unlike many heirs to great fortunes, Lowthian's elder son Hugh, Gertrude's father, also lived modestly for a captain of industry. His own first house, Red Barns, at the fishing village of Redcar on the Yorkshire coast, a short train journey from Clarence, reflected this. After Lowthian's death, the house he owned in London was sold, the money presumably divided between Hugh and his siblings—Charles, Ada, Maisie, and Florence.

Lowthian was admired rather than loved, and appears to have been dictatorial and harsh towards his family. Gertrude and her sisters and
brothers addressed him as “Pater.” An illustrated family alphabet they drew up for Christmas at Rounton in 1877, when Gertrude was nine, reflects the feelings of the children towards their abrasive grandfather.

A for us All come to spend Christmas week
B for our Breathless endeavours to speak
C is the Crushing Contemptuous Pater
. . .

Elsa, Gertrude's younger half-sister, has added: “Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell” in pencil, lest it be thought that this description referred to the gentler and kindlier Hugh.

A family story suggests the awe with which “Pater” was regarded by the Bells. Lowthian forbade anyone to use his horses. When one of his granddaughters fainted one evening at dinner from a riding injury (a broken collarbone), everyone conspired to hide the truth: she had borrowed one of his horses and gone hunting with the gentry. The children's grandmother Margaret could be as scathing as Lowthian. A teatime visitor once said to her hostess: “Your scones are lovely.” “So I see,” retorted the old lady. “Your hand has not been out of the dish since you arrived.”