Gertrude Bell (4 page)

The woman that Ada and Maisie had picked for Hugh was, in fact, an extraordinarily appropriate choice. The daughter of a physician, Florence was neither “trade” nor aristocracy, and she harboured a couple of passions that outweighed all the disadvantages of Middlesbrough: she adored children and domestic life. There was a dispossessed aspect to this recent immigrant, adrift in London and still homesick for Paris. She longed for the security of her own household, and had already formed dozens of opinions on the education of children and the right and wrong ways of running a home. Life could hold no greater excitement than the gift of her own domain, wherever that might be.

Hugh finally succumbed to his sisters' scheme, and to Florence, on the night of the private staging of an opera that she had written.
Blue-beard
was performed by friends and relations on 4 June 1876, at Lady Stanley's house in Harley Street. Ada and Maisie were to sing, and the pianist Anton Rubinstein was to play. Hugh afterwards asked if he might take Florence home. Descending from the coach at the front door of 95 Sloane Street, he escorted Florence into the drawing-room. “Lady Olliffe,” he told her mother, “I have brought your daughter home—and I
have come to ask if I may take her away again.” In answer to this graceful speech, Lady Olliffe burst into tears.

On 10 August, after their quiet wedding in the small church in Sloane Street, they spent an urbane honeymoon in Washington, DC, as guests of Florence's much-loved sister Mary and her husband, Frank Lascelles, then a secretary at the British Embassy. Returning to London, they took the train north. At this first homecoming Florence was trembling with emotion at what was to her, and perhaps would be to any new bride and stepmother, a truly momentous occasion. As the heirs of the director of the North Eastern Railway, the Hugh Bells were transport royalty. At Middlesbrough the stationmaster doffed his hat and ushered them onto the train to Redcar. Many years later, Florence's daughter Lady Richmond was to remember an occasion when she was seeing her father off from King's Cross, and he had remained on the platform so that they could talk until the train left. The packed train failed to leave on time. Remarking on its lateness, they continued to talk until they were approached by a guard. “If you would like to finish your conversation, Sir Hugh,” he suggested, doffing his hat, “we will then be ready to depart.” The train to and from Redcar had a personal Bell stopping place on a tiny platform inside the Red Barns garden. Hugh, returning from the works, could simply step out of the train and cross the rose garden by the fountain to reach his own back door. Gertrude, who was always waiting there, would greet him joyfully. When she was small, he carried her to the house on his shoulders, then when she was a little older she would seize his case of papers and run alongside him, talking at the top of her voice.

On the couple's return from their honeymoon, both children would have been washed and brushed and be waiting on the Bell platform to greet them. The staff would have been lined up behind them, ready to curtsy or bow. Florence, hoping to make a firm bond with them from the start, had intended, as soon as she arrived, to ask Gertrude and Maurice to show her into every corner of the house, from cellar to attic. However, to her dismay they had been joined at Middlesbrough by Hugh's brother, Charles, who, with the kindest of intentions but no sensitivity at all, accompanied them to Red Barns. Hugh, equally unromantic, went straight to his office on the ground floor and started to go through his papers. Abandoned with Charles in the drawing-room, and passionately wanting
him to go, Florence made distracted conversation while her new brother-in-law sat solidly in an armchair, also stuck for something to say.

A contented Ada departed for London, and a new life began for eight-year-old Gertrude and five-year-old Maurice. Since children of that age do not naturally assume that their parents have a life independent of their own, they must have been shocked to hear that their father had married Florence. Talking about their new stepmother later, it was Maurice's guess that she was eighty, but his sister thought that she might be quite a bit younger. Perhaps, she suggested, Florence was sixty. Poor Florence was actually twenty-four, eight years younger than Hugh.

And so came into Gertrude's life the good-hearted woman who would influence and form her more than any other, sometimes in opposition but chiefly in fundamental and positive ways. Florence had many talents. She had a keen appreciation of music and literature; she wrote books, essays, and plays; she was able to get on with all kinds of people; and she was deeply interested in sociology and the education of children. Everything she did remained within the limits of the roles she considered the most important for a woman, those of wife and mother. She gave herself unstintingly to her family while achieving a body of work in the community that would earn her public recognition, and eventually make her a Dame of the British Empire. The drawing-room dramas and comedies she liked to write were initially for the children to perform at Christmas and other family gatherings. In time, through the intervention of theatrical friends, she would have three plays put on in the West End. Characteristically, she chose to remain anonymous.

Florence was nonplussed at first by northern manners. As soon as she met her neighbours, she began to institute an “at home” on Tuesdays, when she hoped couples would drop in for light refreshments (nonalcoholic). She was mystified to discover that Yorkshiremen did not accompany their wives on this sort of occasion. Her biographer Kirsten Wang writes that when one lady turned up at the Bells' with her husband she disconcerted Florence by whispering: “I managed to bring Mr. T with me. I had
such
a work to make him come!” Apparently believing there was safety in numbers, the women would arrive together, then seat themselves as far apart as possible, after which a silence would fall. A desperate Florence, offering them chairs closer to the fire, would meet with the response: “Thank you, I am very well where I am.” In one of her books
Florence writes of her heroine, a teacher who had newly come north: “The girl was ill at ease with the downright Yorkshire women who surrounded her . . . In that class of life when people have nothing to say they say nothing; their rough blunt manner, when they did speak, alarmed her still more. Nevertheless, the women after their fashion, were not unkind to her.” The new Mrs. Bell persevered, and before long her “entertainments” were obligatory events in the life of the town.

But Florence was far more interested in cementing her relationship with Hugh's children. The eight-year-old observed her in speculative fashion. This stranger who had burst into their family life had something about her that the child would not have recognized: a Parisian polish in both her manner and her dress. Although Florence was essentially serious and inclined to the moralistic, she never criticized an individual's interest in her appearance or derided a love of clothes as frivolous. Her carefully considered opinions on this and other subjects were often expressed obliquely. She was an intensely private person and preferred to give her views in the form of stories or essays. In one, she wrote of the heroine:

Ursula had what the French call “genre” . . . The nearest English equivalent to the expression is “style,” but that . . . suggests being dashing and assertive; “genre” is a grace inherent in the wearer, and does not depend upon clothes, but upon the way they are put on. And the reason there is no word for it in English, is that the thing is so rarely found that it is unnecessary to have a term on purpose.

From Florence's example, Gertrude, in turn, would acquire
genre
, so that people meeting her for the first time would comment on her “Mayfair manners and Paris frocks.” But Florence never followed fashion. She continued to wear Edwardian clothes all her life because she felt they suited her, even in the 1920s when every other woman was in a short skirt. Her granddaughter remembers being with Florence when she slipped and fell one day on a London pavement. The child was amazed to see that under Florence's skirts was a pair of normal legs. Tending to primness, Florence wore grey silk gloves most of the time, indoors and outdoors, and even to play the piano.

Gertrude was growing up fast, a wilful child used to competing with her aunt Ada, her governess, her brother, and the numerous household staff for her father's attention. Florence could so easily have made an enemy of the child. On the contrary, she was an affectionate step-parent, always gentle, encouraging, and sympathetic. She was attentive to both children, inquisitive and humorous. Lively herself, she liked them to be similarly busy: when they were not doing something active, she liked them to be reading and not “loafing around.” She would always have a story or two ready to read aloud to the youngest. Maurice, who was rather deaf, cannot have had any memory of his own mother, but took to Florence immediately.

Gertrude was divided in her opinion of her new stepmother, whom she was encouraged to address as “Mother.” Her father would undoubtedly have done his best to encourage her to make Florence feel welcome, and to do whatever she was asked, but the child must have smarted at the introduction into their close relationship of a woman that she must have seen initially as an interloper. Hugh and Gertrude's bond was extraordinary. They were all-in-all to each other, and would always remain so, even when living on other sides of the world. As Florence was to write, “The abiding influence in Gertrude's life from the time she was a little child was her relation to her father. Her devotion to him, her whole-hearted admiration, the close and satisfying companionship between them, their deep mutual affection—these were to both the very foundation of existence until the day she died.” Florence's words about Gertrude also reveal the woman's noble and generous instincts: she never gave way to jealousy, never tried to divide the devoted father and daughter.

The artist Sir Edward Poynter, RA, painted a double portrait in 1876. The subject is not, as might be expected, a wedding portrait of Hugh and Florence, but the eight-year-old Gertrude, red curls falling onto the shoulders of her lace-trimmed pinafore, being ushered forward by a proudly smiling Hugh. Having had his first wife, Mary, painted at their marriage, Hugh may well have had the idea of commissioning a portrait of Florence when she became his second wife. It would have been typical of the thoughtful Florence to suggest the change of subject.

Whether Gertrude would have appreciated this tactful gesture is another
question. Florence was too kind and discreet to betray the fact that she was having a difficult time with her stepdaughter, but there are plenty of clues that this was in fact the case.
Angela
, a play she published in 1926—significantly, perhaps, after Gertrude's death—tells the story of the second marriage of a Yorkshire industrialist in which his new wife tries to cope with the exceptionally strong bond already formed between father and motherless daughter.

“Gertrude was a child of spirit and initiative,” wrote Florence in her introduction to
The Letters of Gertrude Bell
. Sometimes this spirit and initiative were too much for her:

Full of enterprise, [Gertrude] used to lead her little brother, whose tender years were ill equipped for so much enterprise, into the most perilous adventures, such as commanding him, to his terror, to follow her example in jumping from the top of the garden wall nine feet high to the ground. She used to alight on her feet, he very seldom did.

On one occasion, a crash and an ominous tinkling brought Florence running from the drawing-room to the greenhouse. Gertrude had led Maurice on a climbing expedition along the ridge of the roof. She had made her way deftly and rapidly along while her little brother, sick with fear, had stumbled after her. Gertrude had clambered down safely, but Maurice had put his boot through the roof and followed it to the ground, landing in the broken glass. On another occasion, she played the garden hose down the laundry chimney and put the fire out. When Florence on this occasion lost her temper, Gertrude and Maurice collected all the hats from the hall and threw them at their stepmother. Gertrude stopped only when one of Florence's hats found its way into the fire. “Even as a child, Gertrude took a great interest in clothes,” one of the family told me.

For most of her eight years, Gertrude had been used to bossing the servants and running rings around her governess. She bitterly resented discipline, and liked to goad people to distraction. Miss Ogle had departed in dudgeon, but Florence hoped for better from Miss Klug. This German lady stayed much longer, but Florence was periodically irked by having to placate the new governess over Gertrude's misdeeds.

The house where Mrs. Bell was establishing her new domain was a raw brick Arts and Crafts building, an early and rather confused Philip Webb experiment with the local vernacular. Webb had designed William Morris's own Red House, and he copied many elements into this second commission, Red Barns. Morris had decorated the interior, and his charming botanical wallpapers were used throughout. The house was solid and small in comparison with the elegant homes of Florence's youth, but it would expand as the family expanded. There was a porch giving onto Kirkleathan Street, which led to a large square of terraced Georgian houses around a bleak green. It was a short walk from Red Barns to Redcar's long beach, stretching from Coatham southward to the Saltburn cliffs. Around its featureless crescent of sand, where the clinker-built fishing boats were beached at low tide, there were striped bathing huts in the summer, and donkeys for children's rides. The countryside around was flat, and not especially pretty. But Florence had always thought that children should be brought up in the countryside, and there was no doubt that Gertrude and Maurice loved the place.