by Sue Corbett
In 1886 came one of her greatest undertakings, the tour which began in London and ran through South America, the United States, and Canada for 13 months. Adulation reached its limits. Jules Lemaître has described how “already rich men, wearing black whiskers, and covered with jewels, like idols, used to wait outside the stage door and lay their handkerchiefs on the ground so that dust should not soil the feet of Phèdre or Théodora.” The Argentines gave Mme Bernhardt an estate of 13,000 acres; and Mme Bernhardt gave a lady in her company a horse-whipping, which brought them both before the law. The profits of the whole tour were one million dollars, and her own share amounted to £60,000.
She rarely failed once a year to visit London, a place which she grew to love, and one in which her admirers were as hearty, if not so fiery, as the whiskered gentlemen of Buenos Aires. In 1882 London first saw her in Fédora; in 1888 she played Françillon at the Lyceum; in 1889 she brought us La Tosca. In 1891 she started on another immense tour through the Americas and Australia (the trunks now numbered 80), which lasted for 17 months; and in 1900 came yet another American tour, her company then including Coquelin aîné.
Meanwhile, when Paris had been sufficiently punished, she consented to forgive it. In the winter of 1882 she took a regular engagement at the Vaudeville in M. Sardou’s new play of Fédora. Nearly every year from 1883 to 1893 she spent her winters at the Porte Saint-Martin, and it was here that she produced some of her greatest modern successes, many of them written by M. Sardou. In 1884 came Théodora, in 1887 La Tosca, in 1890 Jeanne d’Arc and Cléopâtre; and here too she appeared as Lady Macbeth in Richepin’s version, and as Ophelia in a subsequently discarded version of Hamlet. Year by year she fortified her position of eminence. In 1893 she bought the Théâtre de la Renaissance, her temple of dramatic art, and opened it with M. Jules Lemaître’s Les Rois; it was here that she was joined for a short time by Coquelin in 1895, and here she produced in the same year M. Rostand’s La Princesse Lointaine, and in 1897 his great religious drama, La Samaritaine, Musset’s Lorenzaccio, and d’Annunzio’s La Ville Morte. In 1896 Paris indulged itself in a great festival in her honour, with banquets, speeches, performances, and a sonnet from M. Rostand.
In 1899 she moved to a larger theatre, now the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt; and here she produced the version of Hamlet by MM. Morand and Schwab in which she gave Paris, and, later, London, the chance of seeing her as Hamlet himself — a weak and violent prince, whose character she thought “perfectly simple.” What is there to add? There is Magda, which she played in a French version in London in the eighteen-nineties, giving an opportunity for hot little disputes between the worshippers of Bernhardt and Druse; there is L’Aiglon; there are one or two huge spectacular dramas, and the performance of that repertory in which her Phèdre has won its way to recognition as the masterpiece. And there is the fact that years after she had passed her prime, Mme Bernhardt became an idol of the English music-hall public. Her annual visit to play snippets at the Coliseum was an “event of the vaudeville year”; and in 1921 the great Mme Sarah, now 75 years old, was acting in Daniel by Louis Verneuil at the Princes Theatre. An address from the actresses of England was presented to her as “the greatest artist of our time.”
During the year 1914 an old injury condemned her to lie for eight months on her back with her right leg in plaster of paris. By February, 1915, the indomitable woman could endure it no longer, and demanded an operation. “Operation,” in this case, meant nothing less than amputation, and amputated the leg was. It is no exaggeration to say that the event turned the thoughts of many aside from the Great War. Crowned heads sent telegrams of inquiry and condolence; and Mme Bernhardt, then a woman of 70, was no sooner safely relieved of the offending limb than she began to make plans for future tours and the adaptation of old plays to the new needs.
By the autumn she was back in her own theatre in Paris, playing M. Morand’s dramatic war poem, Les Cathédrales; and when she brought the piece to the London Coliseum in December London found that, though she must sit in a chair throughout the performance, her power, her fury of energy, and her incomparable charm were undiminished. So it went on throughout the war. She went to the United States in 1916, when she played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (her caprices were indeed violent), and again the following year. She even played Phèdre, though she could no longer move about the stage. She believed that French drama was to be ennobled by the great trials of the French nation; and to the last she was full of plans. In the autumn of 1921 she achieved a fresh triumph in Maurice Rostand’s drama, La Gloire, and last summer she produced Régine Armand, a play written for her by M. Verneuil. In November she toured in Italy, and in December was taken ill in Paris while rehearsing a new play by Sacha Guitry.
Sarah Bernhardt, actress, was born on October 22, 1844. She died on March 26, 1923, aged 78
GERTRUDE BELL
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EXPLORER AND ARCHAEOLOGIST WHOSE DEEP KNOWLEDGE OF ARABIA WAS USED BY BRITISH INTELLIGENCE DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR
JULY 13, 1926
Miss Gertrude Bell was perhaps the most distinguished woman of our day in the field of Oriental exploration, archaeology, and literature, and in the service of the Empire in Iraq. Her life has been in some ways quite unique, for she is the only Englishwoman who has travelled right across the wild deserts of Arabia, winning for herself thereby the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and who, having placed her rare knowledge of the East at the disposal of the British authorities during the Great War, and been sent to Baghdad soon after the British occupation, has held a high position in the Political Department of the Government of India, originally in charge of Mesopotamian affairs. Her premature death must be ascribed to the deep interest in her work and to the unflinching sense of duty which, except for two very short holidays at home, kept her for nearly ten years almost continuously at Baghdad, even during the torrid heat of the Mesopotamian summers, when the thermometer stands for weeks together about and above 120deg in the shade.
Her career was entirely of her own choosing and making, though in its early stages she could naturally not, in the least, foresee the shape it would ultimately take. The eldest daughter of Sir Hugh Bell, the great Yorkshire ironmaster, she studied at Queen’s College, London, and at Oxford University, where she took a first class in history in 1887. Not long afterwards she went out to Persia, where her uncle, the late Sir Frank Lascelles, was then British Minister, and it was at Teheran that she first heard the East a’calling.
But though Persia and the Persians first captured her imagination, it was the Arab countries and Arab life and Arabic literature that soon acquired a far stronger and more enduring hold upon her. She began to travel on her own account and to watch from year to year, while the Arab lands still formed part of the old Ottoman Empire, the stirrings of a new Arab sense of nationhood during the last period of Abdul Hamid’s reign and under the Committee of Union and Progress after the Turkish Revolution. She was a keen observer of the political changes which were taking place all over the Near East under the powerful impact of the West, but her chief interest and delight was in the life of the East, the picturesque habits and customs of the humbler folk, the intellectual outlook of the ruling classes, whether they still stood firm and stubborn in the ancient ways or were taking on a veneer of modern civilization. Doughty’s masterpiece of Arab travel, then almost unnoticed in England, exerted a potent influence upon her, and she learnt from him to seek out the black tents of the Beduin tribesmen, whose confidence she captured by reciting to them favourite passages from the old desert poets as familiar to them as the Old Testament stories to our Roundheads.
At the end of 1906 she revealed herself to her fellow-countrymen in a volume entitled “The Desert and the Sown,” perhaps the most brilliant one she ever wrote, with the breath of the desert still upon her, and yet with the restraint of one whose mind was already trained to sober judgment. It was followed at the end of 1910 by “Amurath to Amurath,” in which archae
ological and topographical research in the silent Mesopotamian borderland plays as important a part as her shrewd speculations in the more tumultuous field of Near Eastern politics, then ripening for the bloody harvest of war.
It was in 1913 that her adventurous spirit compassed and carried out a bold scheme for crossing the Arabian peninsula from west to east and visiting the Shammar stronghold at Hayil, to which no European had penetrated for 20 years, and it is worth noting to-day that the large store of information she brought back with her included an estimate of Ibn Saud of Al Riadh as “the chief figure in Central Arabia,” though very little was then known about him, which the events of the last few years have signally borne out. All these exhausting and often dangerous journeys she accomplished without any European companion and attended only by her one devoted Syrian servant, Fattuh, to whose resourcefulness and loyalty she has paid many warm tributes. She never attempted to disguise her nationality or her sex, and, indeed, she rightly believed that her sex was her best safeguard among the fierce but proud children of the desert who respect the reliance placed in their good faith, whether they are inclined to look upon the strange traveller as a mad woman, and therefore under the special protection of Allah, or as one who comes of a great and honoured race whose customs are inviolable. The real secret of her success in conquering the desert, which she sometimes loved and sometimes hated, was that with a splendid constitution and great powers of endurance she combined absolute fearlessness and quick sympathy and understanding, whatever the particular type of humanity with which she happened to be thrown into contact.
The war changed her life, and not merely “for the duration.” She had hitherto been her own mistress and had done as she listed. She realized at once the magnitude of the issues involved in the East as well as in the West and she threw herself into the service of her country where she knew she would be most needed. After some valuable work in France and in the Intelligence Department in Egypt, she went out at the request of the then Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, to Mesopotamia, where her almost unrivalled knowledge of Arab tribal politics and of many of the most influential tribesmen was invaluable in the critical stages of the Mesopotamian campaign and still more in the work of administrative reconstruction which followed the expulsion of the Turk. She had not perhaps in the first years, when British policy in Mesopotamia was being shaped largely by Indian military administrators, the influence which she acquired afterwards when Sir Percy Cox and more lately Sir Henry Dobbs as High Commissioners had settled down to lay the foundations of a more stable order of things in transition to a constitutional State of Iraq under a British mandate, and ultimately with full rights of sovereignty as soon as the people shall have been proved capable of governing and protecting themselves without foreign help and support.
If Iraq has already made some progress towards that goal, if King Feisal already sits on a less uneasy throne, it is in no small measure due to the indefatigable spade work done by Miss Bell. The close friendship between her and the Sovereign of Iraq dated back to the Paris Peace Conference, which he attended as the son and representative of King Hussein of the Hedjaz, and she as an acknowledged expert on all questions connected with Arabia. But since he was chosen to be King of Iraq and came to reign at Baghdad, no one has enjoyed his confidence more completely or used her influence with him more tactfully and beneficially than the English lady whom he delighted to call his “sister.” In many moments of crisis she was the unobtrusive channel for confidential and delicate communications between the Residency and the Palace, and equally trusted by both. In ordinary times her work was chiefly connected with tribal affairs, but there were few administrative questions on which her ripe knowledge of the country and the people was not consulted or failed to carry weight, and it is to her exhaustive survey of the civil administration, laid before Parliament four years ago, that the British public owes the fullest information yet given to it on the condition of Iraq.
With the conclusion and ratification of last year’s Treaty between Great Britain and Iraq, which formally consecrated the new régime, Miss Bell began to feel that the consummation for which she had always worked in the interests of both countries had been as fully assured as the condition of a still storm-tossed world allowed, and during her last short visit home, barely a year ago, she confessed to her friends that the strain of so many arduous years in so pitiless a climate was beginning to tell even upon her iron constitution. There seemed then some hope that she would return before long, perhaps even this year, to enjoy a much needed rest before turning to the no less valuable work she still hoped to do on the vast materials she had collected and had not yet had time to utilize. But a compelling interest arose for her as soon as she got back to Baghdad in connexion with the development of an archaeological department on which she had long set her heart, and the last piece of work she sent home was a catalogue of the small Iraq Museum of which she was bent on securing the future. The results of the recent excavations at Ur of the Chaldees strengthened her conviction that there lie still buried under the sands of Iraq innumerable remains of a great antiquity equally precious from the point of view of history and of art, and it is a pathetic coincidence that the news of her death should have reached London on the very day on which Mr Woolley was displaying at the British Museum some of the remarkable finds made during the last winter season at Ur to which her private letters have frequently referred with all her old enthusiasm.
Her death is a grievous loss to her country, whom she served in many fields, lending distinction to all; to Iraq, who has had no better friend; to the personal friends who learnt to know her fine character as well as her fine intellect; and to the large circle of those whose admiration she won through her books and her work, and won abundantly. With all the qualities which are usually described as virile she combined in a high degree the charm of feminine refinement, and though only revealed to few, even amongst her intimates, great depths of tender and even passionate affection.
Gertrude Bell, CBE, traveller and archaeologist, was born on July 14, 1868. She died on July 12, 1926, aged 57
EMMELINE PANKHURST
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CO-FOUNDER OF THE WOMEN’S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL UNION, WHICH CAMPAIGNED MILITANTLY FOR WOMEN’S RIGHT TO VOTE
JUNE 15, 1928
Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst was born in Manchester on July 14, 1858. In her early childhood she was brought into close touch with those who had inherited the spirit of the Manchester reformers. Her father, Mr Robert Goulden, a calico-printer, was keenly interested in the reform question and the dawn of the movement for woman suffrage; her grandfather nearly lost his life in the Peterloo franchise riots in 1819. At the age of 13, soon after she had been taken to her first woman suffrage meeting by her mother, she went to school in Paris, where she found a girl-friend of her own way of thinking in the daughter of Henri Rochefort. In 1879 she married Dr R. M. Pankhurst, a man many years older than herself. An intimate friend of John Stuart Mill and an able lawyer, he shared and helped to mould his wife’s political views. She served with him on the committee which promoted the Married Women’s Property Act, and was at the same time a member of the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee.
In 1889 she helped in forming the Women’s Franchise League, which, however, was discontinued after a few years. She remained a Liberal until 1892, when she joined the Independent Labour Party. After being defeated for the Manchester School Board, she was elected at the head of the poll for the board of guardians and served for five years. When her husband died, in 1898, she was left not well off, and with three girls and a boy to bring up. Accordingly she found work as registrar of births and deaths at Chorlton-on-Medlock, but her propaganda activities were considered inconsistent with this official position, and she resigned.
In 1903 her interest in the cause of woman suffrage was reawakened by the enthusiasm of her daughter Christabel, and she formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, the first meeting of which was held in her house in Manchester in Octob
er of that year. Two years later the militant movement was started as the immediate result of the treatment received by Miss Christabel Pankhurst and Miss Annie Kenney, two members of the union who endeavoured to question Sir Edward Grey on the prospects of woman suffrage at a political meeting held in Manchester. In 1906 Mrs Pankhurst and her union began a series of pilgrimages to the House of Commons, which resulted in conflicts with the police and the imprisonment of large numbers of the members. In October, 1906, she was present at the first of these demonstrations, when 11 women were arrested. In January, 1908, she was pelted with eggs and rolled in the mud during the Mid-Devon election at Newton Abbot, and a month later she was arrested when carrying a petition to the Prime Minister at the House of Commons, but was released after undergoing five of the six weeks’ imprisonment to which she was sentenced.
Some months later, in October, a warrant was issued for her arrest, together with Miss Pankhurst and Mrs Drummond, for inciting the public to “rush” the House of Commons. During her three months’ imprisonment in Holloway Gaol she led a revolt of her followers against the rules of prison discipline, demanding that they should be treated as political prisoners. In 1909, the year in which the “hunger strike” and “forcible feeding” were first practised in connection with these cases, she was once more arrested at the door of the House of Commons, and after her trial, and pending an appeal founded on the Bill of Rights and a statute of Charles II, dealing with petitions to the Crown, she went to America and Canada on a lecturing tour; two days before her return her fine was paid by some unknown person, so that she did not go to prison.
