Gertrude Bell (8 page)

GERTRUDE
: “He will come to Middlesbrough and learn to work pig iron at Clarence, and earn more money for a higher skill.”

As Florence's daughter no less than Hugh's, Gertrude would frequently have become entangled in discussions about the working classes. She was a Liberal and a Gladstonian, and she pursued her views on contemporary political controversies with logical reasoning and sound historical perspective. By the time she went up to university, she had become something of a social hand grenade.

In 1886, at Oxford, the undergraduates still drove dog-carts, Dr. Jowett still presided at Balliol, and the figure of Lewis Carroll could occasionally be spotted crossing the quadrangle of Christ Church. Although there were two colleges for women at the university, it nevertheless managed to remain a bastion of misogyny. At the age of eighteen, Gertrude was joining an almost exclusively male world under the guidance of Lady Margaret Hall's first principal, Miss Elizabeth Wordsworth, grandniece of the poet. But even here, where it might have been expected that emancipation would flourish, she found that chaperones were required whenever the women entered men's colleges or entertained men or mixed in male society. Miss Wordsworth was cautious. Woman, she said, was designed to be “Adam's helpmate” and must develop the “minor graces.” Reluctantly, Gertrude submitted to being taught neat handwriting and “the ways of opening and shutting doors.” On the other hand, she bicycled everywhere and ventured into every circle
that would have her. She swam, she rowed, she played hockey, she acted, danced, and spoke in debates, but she still had to spend precious hours doing needlework. She quickly learnt to compare the extraordinary freedoms of her own upbringing with the modes of conduct of the larger world. “I am going to a teaparty of Mary's today to meet some sort of relation of hers who is Headmaster of Wellington. She is so unhappy because Miss Wordsworth has pronounced that she had better entertain him in the drawing-room! It isn't half the same thing giving a teaparty not in one's own room . . .” Her room was rather bleak, but soon the bed and the floor were covered with the familiar clutter of books and papers. She asked Florence to tell the gardener to put a pot of snowdrops on the train for her.

The presence of women spread dismay throughout the university. It would not admit women to full membership until 1919; Cambridge refused to do so even then. Most undergraduates of Gertrude's day saw university as a series of male-only clubs providing a wealth of contacts for future careers in the army, in Parliament, in the Church or the Empire. Women were no part of this, any more than they participated in the leisure pursuits of drinking, gambling, racing—or womanizing. It was a male society run for males and the presence of women was deeply disconcerting, as embarrassing for them as if their mothers and sisters had joined them at university, preventing them from behaving as men behave without women around.

It was the age when even piano legs were draped lest they should seem too provocative. At Oxford the idea that women were inferior was built into the teaching. Special applications had to be made for permission for women to attend lectures and to take certain exams. “The over-taxing of [women's] brains,” wrote contemporary philosopher Herbert Spencer, would lead to “the deficiency of reproductive power.” “Inferior to us God made you, and our inferiors to the end of time you will remain,” Dean John Burgon had thundered from New College Chapel. When one tutor, a Mr. Bright, made the women in the room sit with their backs to him, Gertrude's shoulders began to shake. The giggles quickly spread between the three women, and soon they were in a state of uncontrollable laughter. The problem, she wrote to Hugh, was Mr. Bright's, not hers.

She put in seven hours' work a day, every day, but wrote home:

The amount of work is hopeless. This last week for instance, I ought to have read the life of Richard III, another in two volumes of Henry VIII, the continuous history of Hallam and Green from Edward IV to Ed. VI, the third volume of Stubbs, 6 or 7 lectures of Mr. Lodge, to have looked up a few of Mr. Campion's last term lectures, and some of Mr. Bright's, and lastly to have written 6 essays for Mr. Hassall. Now I ask you, is that possible?

And so Gertrude, wearing a loose black gown that swirled around her laced boots, rammed a tasselled mortar-board on her bundled-up hair and made her way in a crocodile with the rest of the LMH women across University Parks to Balliol College for their first history lecture. In the hall were two hundred men, already filling the benches. With amazing discourtesy they remained seated and refused to move up. Instead, the women were led up to the platform where they found chairs alongside the professor. At the end of his lecture, Mr. Lodge turned to the women beside him and asked with an insufferably patronizing air: “And I wonder what the young ladies made of that?” Green eyes flashing, Gertrude retorted loudly: “I don't think we learned anything new today. I don't think you added anything to what you wrote in your book.” There was a roar of laughter, and perhaps the atmosphere relaxed a little.

Gertrude's self-confidence was extraordinary. Once, in the middle of an oral examination, she started an argument with a don about the position of a German town: “I am sorry, but it is on the
right
bank. I have been there, and I
know
.” Another time, she offended the distinguished historian Professor S. R. Gardiner by interrupting his discourse with “I'm afraid I must differ from your estimate of Charles I.” When informed of this, Miss Wordsworth shuddered, fretting “Would she be the sort of person to have in one's bedroom if one were ill?” But Gertrude had no ambition to play nursemaid. She polished off her finals in two years instead of the usual three, declared the examinations “delightful!” and went straight out to play a vigorous game of tennis. Then she went up to London to buy an emerald silk gown for the commemoration ball, and came back with an enormous straw hat covered in cabbage roses. Before long she was informed that she had taken a brilliant First.

A first-class degree is the pinnacle of intellectual qualification. A good second is awarded for diligence in acquiring copious knowledge and for supplying logical and discriminating answers to the examiner's
questions. The first-class student must see beyond the accepted theories of the day, marshalling knowledge to explore new horizons of understanding, challenging the finest minds in the subject without faltering. Gertrude was the first woman to receive a First in Modern History, a measure of the outstanding quality of her mind.

There is an anonymous limerick of around this time that could well have been written about Gertrude by one of the male undergraduates she encountered.

I spent all my time with a crammer
And then only managed a gamma,
But the girl over there
With the flaming red hair
Got an alpha plus easily—damn her!

Enterprising as Gertrude thought herself, the wife of one of her tutors described her as “prim.” There are parallels at this age and stage with the fictional Lucy Honeychurch in E. M. Forster's
Room with a View
(published in 1908): she was intolerant, seeing herself as fascinatingly different, and full of elevated ideals. She loved the company of men, and had started what would become a lifetime habit of dismissing their wives as “dull dogs.” On the other hand, she looked down her nose at male high spirits as though she were fifty, not nineteen. “There's a reading party of Oxford men in the Inn with us . . . Judging from the noise they make I should say they read very little indeed.”

The Oxford women she was meeting were far more to her taste than most of her earlier classmates, although one new friend, Edith Langridge, had come, like her, from Queen's College. She liked Mary Talbot, niece of the Warden of Keble, but her best friend was Janet Hogarth. Janet's brother, archaeologist and Arabist David Hogarth, would also become important to her later. Janet wrote a revealing portrait of the nineteen-year-old Gertrude:

She was, I think, the most brilliant creature who ever came amongst us, the most alive at every point, with her tireless energy, her splendid vitality, her unlimited capacity for work, for talk, for play. She was always an odd mixture of maturity and childishness, grown up in her judgement of men
and affairs, child-like in her certainties, and most engaging in her entire belief in her father and the vivid intellectual world in which she had been brought up.

But it is Florence, the sweet woman to whom had been entrusted the extraordinary and clever child that was Gertrude, and who had broken her own rules so as to ensure that her stepdaughter had an education equal to a man's, who provides us with the clearest insight into Gertrude's soul. Florence had handled the difficult girl with great sensitivity, when a wrong move would have turned her into a rebel. She had directed her stepdaughter's life, watched it separate from hers in unforeseen but positive ways; and she would come to feel herself outstripped by Gertrude's adventures and her career. She never resented that Gertrude became more cosmopolitan, a better writer and administrator, more respected as an intellectual, more admired—if not more loved—more famous and influential. Gertrude in her turn began to love Florence, never as much as she loved her father but as someone with whom she would want to keep in close touch all her life, and someone whom she would occasionally protect from the knowledge of her own dangerous predicaments. Her letters to her father were usually more passionate and fond, just as Florence's letters to her own children, Elsa, Hugh, and Molly, had a special intimacy. Warmed by affection but not blinded by love, Florence wrote of her stepdaughter after her death: “In truth the real basis of Gertrude's nature was her capacity for deep emotion. Great joys came into her life, and also great sorrows. How could it be otherwise, with a temperament so avid of experience? Her ardent and magnetic personality drew the lives of others into hers as she passed along.”

*
See “Note on Money Values,”
p. 433
.

O
n becoming the first woman to be awarded a First in Modern History, Gertrude and her triumph were featured in an announcement in
The Times
. Faced with the intellectually arrogant, occasionally self-important young woman who returned to Red Barns after Oxford, Florence told Hugh that they must now get rid of her “Oxfordy manner,” or no one would want to marry her. Florence determined to domesticate Gertrude, and teach her that life was about more than passing exams and winning arguments: but first, she deserved a holiday.

She would go to stay with Aunt Mary, Florence's sister, in Bucharest, where her husband, Sir Frank Lascelles, was British Minister to Romania. Mary was particularly fond of Gertrude, who amused her mightily, and her own daughter, Florence, named after Florence Bell, was one of Gertrude's best friends. There were also the two Lascelles boys: Billy, who had just left Sandhurst and was waiting for his commission in the Guards, and his younger brother, Gerald. Billy, the object of Gertrude's first “fluctuating flirtation,” would meet Hugh and Gertrude in Paris and escort her, otherwise unchaperoned, to Munich, where they would meet Gerald and continue to Eastern Europe.

Gertrude was wildly excited, and ready to be supremely happy. She had slimmed down over the last couple of years, and was no longer an untidy tomboy but a well-groomed young woman whose soft auburn hair was her great beauty, her curls escaping from the pins to soften the effect
of her penetrating gaze. It was Christmas, and Bucharest in 1888 was one of the smartest and most social capitals of Europe, its nucleus the Court and the legations. She travelled with trunks of ravishing new couture clothes for the four-month whirl of balls and dinners and evenings at the opera; fur-collared coats and laced white boots for ice-skating parties in the forest; Indian shawls, muffs, and mittens for sledging expeditions in the hills with their medieval castles and brightly painted inns.

It was not long before she was presented by the Lascelleses to King Carol and Queen Elizabeth, and struck up a passing friendship with the rather sad and beautiful queen. Better known by her nom de plume of Carmen Sylva, the Queen was widely preferred to her austere and somewhat pedestrian husband. “The King was so like every other officer,” Gertrude wrote to her cousin Horace, “that I never could remember who he was and only merciful providence prevented me from giving him a friendly little nod several times during the evening under the impression that he was one of my numerous acquaintance . . . Billy and I waltzed over his toes once. ‘Ware King'—whispered Billy, but it was too late.” Many debutantes meeting their first member of royalty would have been reduced to monosyllables, but here Gertrude displayed her ability to meet important people without becoming either obsequious or self-conscious:

You can't think how charming the Queen is. Yesterday we went to a charity ball . . . and she came and had a long talk with Auntie Mary and me and finally presented me with 10 francs and sent me off to buy tombola tickets . . . I had a long crack with the Queen whom I suddenly became conscious of immediately in front of me . . . However she need not have talked to me unless she liked. She told me how she spent her winters—it sounds dreary enough, poor lady.