Gertrude Bell (52 page)

A small Kurdish contingent attended the Paris Peace Conference to demand their own country, but no one was prepared to listen to them, and few of the delegates seemed to know who they were or where they came from.

After her tour with her father in the spring of 1919, Gertrude dipped into the Conference once more and then spent the early summer with the rest of the family in England, dodging friends' invitations. “Beloved Mother. Now I want most immensely to see
you
,” she told Florence.

Florence, who had thought carefully about her stepdaughter's domestic
problems—“What I need is a wife!”—had prepared the ground carefully and tactfully, and was able to present her with a solution. Her French servant Marie Delaire was ready, if wanted, to accompany Gertrude to Baghdad and live with her as lady's maid, seamstress, and housekeeper. Gertrude had engaged Marie in 1902, seventeen years previously, for “22 pounds [a year] and her washing.” Since then Marie had become a staple component of the Bell household, working for Gertrude whenever she returned to England. Marie's previous employer had written in her reference that the maid had a bad temper, but Gertrude had “given her a good talking to” early on, and thereafter found her most amenable. Gertrude herself was by no means easy-going, but Marie served her devotedly and was no doubt proud of her fame. After many years of attending to Florence's equally fastidious wardrobe requirements and being just one Bell servant among many, travelling to Iraq with Gertrude must have seemed a great adventure. She would occupy two new rooms that Gertrude was adding to one of the summer-houses, and would become a great help and support to her mistress. At the end of September, after her second visit to the Paris Conference, Gertrude embarked for Port Said with Marie at her side. The Frenchwoman proved to be an admirable traveller and loved every minute of the journey: “I've never been so well dressed on a ship,” wrote Gertrude in a letter home on 26 September, “for she digs into the boxes and produces a fresh costume daily.”

Over recent years, Gertrude had wondered about the well-being of Fattuh, her faithful servant from Aleppo who had accompanied her on many trips. She worried that his connections with the English would have caused him mistreatment at the hands of the Turks: “Heaven knows if [Fattuh] is still living,” she had written in 1917. “Aleppo has suffered and is suffering most horribly from Turkish persecution and I fear his well-known association with George [Lloyd] and Mr. Hogarth and me will put him at a grave disadvantage.” Now, on her way to Baghdad, she decided to travel back via Aleppo and try to find him. But first she would go on a fact-finding tour. She wanted to get a clear and up-to-date picture of the Syrian situation, and of Zionist developments in Palestine, where Jews were being introduced into the country without a great deal of consideration for the Arab population. She predicted much of the trouble that would follow—and apart from Palestine, there were also some fifty
thousand Jews in Baghdad. The last thing she wanted was enmity between Jews and Arabs.

Marie, meanwhile, went on by sea to Basra, from where she would take the train to Baghdad to arrive at more or less the same time as her mistress.

Gertrude touched down in Cairo to “get the hang of things” from Sir Gilbert Clayton, now Minister of the Interior in the new British protectorate of Egypt. Travelling on to Jerusalem, she stayed with the Administrator General, Sir Harry Watson, and saw a great deal of her good friend Sir Ronald Storrs. Now Governor of Jerusalem, a title he described as “directly in line of succession to Pontius Pilate,” he was in reliably comic mode, ready to talk politics or trawl the carpet and antique markets with her. She was surprised at the strength of anti-French feeling in Damascus and Beirut. Moving on to Aleppo, she tracked down Fattuh and found his circumstances every bit as hard as she had feared. A letter dated 17 October 1919 expresses her great affection for her old employee:

. . . Fattuh looks older and as if he had been through an awful time, as indeed he has. He has lost everything he had—he was beginning to be quite a well-to-do man and now he has only a horse and a small cart with which he brings in wood to sell in Aleppo . . . He used to have two big houses of his own, poor Fattuh . . . He was chiefly suspect because he was known to have been my servant . . . We have had such happy times together—I called to mind joyous departures from Aleppo, and looking at his haggard face I said “Oh Fattuh before the war our hearts were so light when we travelled, now they are so heavy that a camel could not carry us” . . . My poor Fattuh.

Visiting his wife in the tiny rented house where they now lived, she discovered that he had kept and still cherished her camp kit. He asked after her father in the terminology that had always made her smile—“His Excellency the Progenitor.” She was able to help him rent a garden for growing his vegetables, and gave him a hundred pounds.

Back in Baghdad, Gertrude began to show, at last, her gratitude for Marie's help and talents, discovering that she was as capable of making a delicious sauce for a dinner party as a set of lampshades. And from now on, Marie became her dedicated dressmaker. It was easier for the Bells to
send off lengths of cloth than the finished article, and Marie was kept busy turning these into dresses. The two women would pore over the fashion magazines on quiet evenings, notably the new British
Vogue
, bought by Florence's maid Lizzie and posted to Baghdad so they would “know the mode.” Fond of animals, Marie was soon being followed about by Gertrude's tame partridge, the latest addition to the garden menagerie, and making winter coats for the two greyhounds. During Gertrude's frequent maladies, the fevers and chills brought on by overwork and the difficult climate, Marie made iced soups and other tempting concoctions. For all the differences between them, the two women became close friends, and maid remained with mistress for the rest of Gertrude's life. She wrote: “Marie has been invaluable in making curtains and generally seeing to things. She is the greatest comfort—I don't know how I did without her.”

Hugh had not given up his idea of visiting Gertrude in Baghdad, particularly since Hugo was back in England from South Africa and staying with Florence. With this visit in mind, Gertrude had spent much of her accumulated income in London buying furniture from the smart furniture shop Maples. She wanted more dining chairs and tables, armchairs, beds, wardrobes, chests of drawers, and a new dinner service. Back in Baghdad, she would wait impatiently for them to follow her by sea.

In the spring of 1920 Hugh made his promised visit, bringing the travelling items that she had stipulated for him: a camp bed, with bedding in a Wolsey valise, flannel and silk suits, a topee, and a sun umbrella. In a photograph taken in her house, Hugh composedly reads the newspaper in one of the new armchairs in its William Morris linen cover, a Persian rug under his well-polished shoes, and an occasional table at his elbow. On the mantelpiece stand framed family photographs. It could be the drawing-room of a comfortable house in the home counties rather than a garden pavilion in the middle of a great Asian city. He was not allowed to rest there long: they set off on a tour of the country, staying with political officers stationed along their route and visiting Arab notables as they went. They covered some of the distance by plane and discussed, besides Iraq, the Depression and its grip on the British economy. For the first time Gertrude became aware of the need for a degree of economy as her father outlined the first indications of looming financial
trouble for the Bells. When he had gone, she missed him dreadfully. He remained what he had always been, save for Dick Doughty-Wylie—the love of her life:

I wonder how anyone can complain about anything when they have a father like you. I can't tell you what it was like to have you here. One takes for granted where you are concerned that no matter how unfamiliar or complex the things may be that you're seeing or hearing, you'll grasp the whole lie of them at once . . . When I got home the house seemed terribly empty without you—my dogs did their best to comfort me but it wasn't quite enough.—Bless you dearest.

If her life in the office had diminished, her social life had expanded. Two years previously she had started her “Tuesdays”: tea in the garden for the wives of Arab notables. Sir Percy had suggested it, as Lady Cox spoke hardly a word of Arabic, and there was no one else who could do it. Soft drinks, cakes, and fruit were provided, and as the daylight faded, coloured glass lanterns would be lit among the bushes and trees. Some fifty women, mostly veiled, and glad to break out of their lives of exclusion, came to meet one another and gossip. She recounted to Chirol: “I had a ladies' tea party the other day, to which all the great ladies came. It was most select—I turned down all the second rate Christians. Nawab . . . who prepared the list of invitees . . . thought it his duty to mention ‘Sahib! There are no Christians!' I burst out laughing and replied ‘You forget that I shall be there!' ”

But more to her taste were the political soirées—men only—that she began for young Arab nationalists. These events were regarded with extreme irritation by A.T., but in her view they were enormously valuable in keeping open lines of communication and preparing for an eventual Arab government. She entertained some thirty at a time, in accordance with her sympathies for the cause and her lifelong belief in the exchange of views. Her opinion of the Englishwomen around her, the wives of her colleagues, was unregenerate. She was irritated by their failure to learn Arabic, and by their pressing invitations to her to take part in the social and sporting activities with which they filled their otherwise empty days. She was angry when they did not turn out for events that she considered obligatory, such as the opening of the first girls' school in Baghdad, at
which she gave the official speech in Arabic. Her attitude towards them, which was becoming apparent, cannot have endeared her to them.

I find social duties rather trying. These idle women here have nothing to do all day long and expect me to call and be called on in the one hour of the day when I can get out and think of nothing. The result is I never get out at all, but I'm going to stop this. It makes life too intolerable and it makes me ill. So they can think what they like about me but I won't bother about them any more.

It was not that Gertrude disliked women, but she did not have much time and she was discriminating. Her relations with Arab women were steadily improving. She arranged for a new woman doctor to give them a lecture on female hygiene, and was gratified to find every seat taken. Before long she was encouraging them to form a committee and collect among the rich families for a new project, a women's hospital. To Chirol again:

I really think I am beginning to get hold of the women here . . .
Pas sans peine
, though they meet one more than half way. It means taking a good deal of trouble . . . Over and above the fact that I like seeing them and get to know a side of Baghdad which I could know no other way, I'm sure it's worth it. One comes and goes in the houses with intimacy and has a troop of female friends who vastly improve one's personal relations with the men.

She had much enjoyed the company of the Van Esses, a missionary and his interesting wife whom she had met in Basra. She missed Mrs. Humphrey Bowman, the wife of the Director of Education, when the couple left for Egypt, and she loved Aurelia, the “darling little Italian wife” of Mr. Tod, who worked for Lynch Brothers in Baghdad; she had stayed with them in 1914. Mrs. Tod was a willing co-worker for charity with Gertrude, and gave fundraising parties for the hospital. When her husband was away, she came for dinners
à deux
with Gertrude, who wrote home that she was delighted to have Aurelia in Baghdad, for she felt she was a real friend. Then there was Miss Jones, the wartime matron in Basra, now running the civil hospital in Baghdad; however seldom these two busy women could meet, she became one of Gertrude's closest
women friends in Iraq. When Miss Jones died a little later, Gertrude recalled her kindness at the officers' rest home when she had been admitted with jaundice. She walked behind the Union Jack that covered her friend's coffin at the military funeral, and as she listened to the “Last Post” she hoped that, when one day people walked behind her own coffin, it would be with thoughts not unlike hers for the good matron.

Hugh's visit had coincided with crucial events in Iraq. While he was with her, in April 1920, she had written soberly and presciently to Florence:

I think we're on the edge of a pretty considerable Arab nationalist demonstration with which I'm a good deal in sympathy. It will, however, force our hand and we shall have to see whether it will leave us with enough hold to carry on here . . . What I do feel pretty sure of is that if we leave this country to go to the dogs . . . we shall have to reconsider our whole position in Asia. If Mesopotamia goes, Persia goes inevitably, and then India. And the place which we leave empty will be occupied by seven devils a good deal worse than any which existed before we came.

Troop reductions had left too few soldiers to hold the country down; A.T.'s repeated requests for reinforcements were ignored or refused. Winston Churchill, as Secretary of State for War and Air, wrote in the summer of 1919: “We are at our wits' end to find a single soldier.” A.T. was required to govern 150,000 square miles of rebel-filled terrain with just seventy political officers in their remote outposts, each supported by perhaps a couple of gendarmes, a British sergeant, and an armoured car, with a few clerks to back them up. There were ever more disturbances, some claiming the lives of these isolated officers. In undefended areas, planes from Baghdad carrying firebombs and mustard gas were often the only means of controlling and limiting an uprising. This much questioned tactic was approved by Churchill, who distinguished between deadly gas and gas causing temporary incapacity. He wrote from the War Office in May 1919: