She had the gift of making everyone feel suddenly eager; of making you feel that life was full and rich and exciting. I found myself laughing for the first time in ten days . . . [She was] pouring out information: the state of Iraq, the excavations at Ur, the need for a decent museum, what new books had come out? what was happening in England? The doctors had told her she ought not to go through another summer in Bagdad, but what should she do in England, eating out her heart for Iraq? . . . but I couldn’t say she looked ill, could I? I could, and did. She laughed and brushed that aside.21
It was an apt portrait of the nonstop Bell, hugely busy with work, engaged, chatty, and curious. At the time of Sackville-West’s visit, Bell was involved in strategic decision making to lay the foundations for a new nation and its government, and her work was fueled not only by a rarefied understanding of Arab culture but by a genuine appreciation of that culture and its people. In keeping with the prevailing views of the day, however, Bell was an advocate of indirect British rule, and she subscribed to the tenets of colonialism, viewing the world through an imperial lens, a world perceived to be in need of Britain’s civilizing assistance when in fact it wasn’t. She was a product of her time, and just as she could refer to the people of Jabal el-Druze as great friends, she could simultaneously liken the Arab population to an “unruly child” in need of obedience training.
She worked tirelessly to see that Amir Faisal was installed as king of Iraq, and in 1921 he was. While in tenure, Bell wrote strategic reports and white papers so clever that people questioned whether a woman could really have done it. In a letter to her father she explained that “the general line taken by the Press seems to be that it’s most remarkable that a dog should be able to stand up on its hind legs at all—i.e., a female write a white paper. I hope they’ll drop that source of wonder and pay attention to the report itself . . .”22
During her time in Iraq, Bell founded the Iraq National Museum and was appointed Director of Antiquities and Chief Curator. In the latter role, her abilities matured from choosing to exhibit certain artifacts “wildly according to prettiness” to selecting materials based more on their archaeological and scholarly value.23 Her commitment to Iraqi archaeology was firm, and with the power given to her as well as her own initiative, she collected, catalogued, and installed a vital collection for the new museum she loved and referred to fondly as her own. In the early 1920s she also helped to orchestrate major archaeological excavations at several Iraqi sites. British and American universities conducted these investigations, and their findings bolstered the prestige of the museum where “such wonderful things are to be seen.” Scholarly recognition of Iraq, ancient Mesopotamia, increased, and the very cradle of human civilization was now seen as the source of some serious archaeology.
For all of her archaeological accomplishments, both in the field and in the museum, it was her visionary idea for the Law of Antiquities that set the greatest precedent and served not just the new Iraqi government but archaeology in general. Like Amelia Edwards, Bell was disturbed by the loss and destruction of archaeological treasures. Enacted in 1924, this law prohibited digging up archaeological sites on private land or anywhere else without an authorized permit. In short, it put an end to unchecked looting and plundering. It also stipulated that the results from an excavation be published so that all scholars would benefit from the discoveries and subsequent advances in understanding the region’s history could be made.
The law was a progressive one, and it met Bell’s own needs as Museum Director of Antiquities and Chief Curator too: archaeologists from overseas could no longer dig a site and take the prized artifacts back home with them. The gold would stay put, as would the best of the sculptures and friezes. The best finds would be installed at the museum. It was one of the first promises to a country that it would have the right to preserve its own heritage, within its own borders and for its own people. Bell had provided the people of Iraq with a protective measure to legally safeguard their history from greed and future threats.24 As the archaeologist Max Mallowan (husband of Agatha Christie) noted, “No tigress could have safeguarded Iraq’s rights better.”25
THERE IS ANOTHER element to Bell’s love of archaeology, a personal one. Archaeology allowed her to pack her bags, to fill her mind, and to focus her love on something that could never disappoint her or be taken from her. She chose archaeology as a way of life because it was reliable (there would always be more to find buried beneath the ground) and endlessly surprising (one never knew what would be found). She was skittish about loving objects not built of stone, for she had fallen in love twice and had her heart broken each time. Thus, some have ascribed Bell’s insatiable travel to an unparked heart.
She met Henry Cadogan early in her travels to Persia. He was a young, bright scholar and could ride a horse as well as she. The two would read Sufi poetry and tear through the Persian deserts at a fast gallop, laughing to the wind, exhilarated. When Henry proposed, Bell accepted happily. Her parents, however, did not receive the news happily. Henry was a rumored gambler and did not have the kind of money and financial stability the Bells thought necessary for their daughter. Hugh Bell forbade the union, and Bell accepted the news with a heavy heart. She returned to England as her parents demanded, and not long afterwards Henry Cadogan fell off his horse into a frozen river and died of pneumonia.
When she fell in love again, it was twenty years later. Dick Doughty-Wylie could match her worldly accomplishments and excited her in both body and mind. A military man, Dick was dutifully, if unhappily, married to a “little wife” named Judith. Bell didn’t hold her in very high esteem. In general, she found most English wives boring and once quipped, “The devil take all inane women.”26 Yet Bell was a steadfast believer in marriage and upright behavior and had no intention of adultery; she simply fell deeper and deeper in love with Dick over several years and through the pages of his correspondence, all of which she knew by heart.
From the letters they exchanged, it is clear that the fondness was mutual. Bell would find ways to see him alone, sending invitations to the Doughty-Wylie couple when she knew Judith would be away, and even if her family detected flirtatious, slightly improper behavior, Bell was now forty-four years old and they left her to it. She declined an invitation to travel through the Karakoram Mountains in China on expedition so that she could stay in England, where the parties, days of hunting and sporting, and other social events kept her close to the man she wanted to marry.27 For Bell to decline adventure, the desire to stay near her beloved must have been bone-deep.
Yet Dick was not prepared to leave his wife or put his career and reputation at risk. Although he and Bell had one private encounter while he was paying an extended visit to the family home Rounton Grange—the door closed, the house asleep—Bell declined the intimate advance and remained a virgin her whole life.28 Dick subsequently shied away from the intensity of the relationship and began to cool. His letters grew increasingly stiff and formal, and he eventually announced that he and his wife were moving to Albania.
Devastated, Bell began devising her own (even bigger) adventure back to the Middle East to soften the jilting blow and to keep her chin up. In response to news of her travel plans, Dick wrote in a letter: “Have a good journey—find castles—keep well—and remain my friend.” Was he being trite? Find castles? Friend? She would find some castles to be sure. She threw herself into a desert journey that was almost painful—so demanding and so long that it’s hard to know if she was hoping the trip would be a salve or so exhausting that it would numb whatever feelings she wanted gone.
The two corresponded for years, and sparks of warmth and passion would continue to flash now and then. They kept Bell’s heart hopeful. Then, at a luncheon in London, Bell overheard a stranger comment on how unfortunate it was that Dick Doughty-Wylie had recently died in battle. Such a cavalier way to hear such crushing news. It was a killing blow.
In spite of Bell’s life adventures and achievements, she wanted marriage
and family life very much. She would be midwife to modern Iraq but would never be a mother. If thwarted love wasn’t the very reason Bell traveled as hard and as far as she did, it is certainly what she thought about as she rode her horse for hours alone in sandy silence.
“ARE WE THE same people I wonder when all our surroundings, associations, and acquaintances are changed?” Bell asked in a letter home.29 Was she? Was the multitalented, ever-busy Bell the same person through it all? Beyond the laurels and accolades, who was this person? It’s a question that underlies much of Bell’s story: her own quest for personal definition. Despite all her accomplishments and contributions, Bell seemed to be after a deeper understanding of herself and her claim on happiness. As she hurled herself at whatever challenges were presented to her, one suspects that in her tireless exertion what she really sought to discover was her own peace and calm.
In distancing herself from the constraints of Victorian society, Bell embarked on a series of adventures that allowed her to suspend, at least temporarily, her gender. When she dismounted from her horse at the end of a journey, when she was little more than a darkened silhouette against a twilight sky, she transcended categories of masculine or feminine and existed simply as a strong spirit uncommitted to other people’s ideas of how things should be. Travel was liberation. And as she wrote in the opening page to The Desert and The Sown, “To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the thresholds of wild travel.”30
Bell epitomized a woman’s worth through her life of action and intellect even if she typically did so in isolation from other women (physically, emotionally, intellectually). She was anti-suffrage. While countless women took to the streets to march, struggling and protesting for their equal rights, Bell fought against that. The Honorary Secretary of the Anti-Suffrage League, she believed that women were not yet prepared to make decisions in the matters of government and state. They were too consumed by house and home, Bell believed, and until they collectively decided that their interests did and should rest beyond the home, they were unprepared to make decisions about how a nation should be governed. So while she was a crusader in showing the world what a woman is capable of, she did it alone (as she liked to do most things) and never championed other women. We can wish she was a great-grandmother of feminism, but she wasn’t. She was a female maverick who thrived in a man’s world. In turn, she thought as most men did and considered a lot of ladies to be dull as dogs.
By the time she was in her late fifties, Bell’s obligations in Baghdad had been fulfilled and her next role was uncertain. Her family’s financial resources had become strained, and although her work in Baghdad had lost its urgency after King Faisal was installed, she had little desire to leave Iraq and return to a life in England. Suddenly exhausted by a life lived with such forward-moving gusto, weakened by the Baghdad summers, and frightened that she might experience the unbearable loss of her father, the larger-than-life Bell began to quiet down.
She wrote a note to a friend in Baghdad asking him to look after her dog should “anything happen to her.”31 The next morning the unstoppable Gertrude Bell was found still. She had died in the night, an empty bottle of sleeping pills on her bedside table. Whether her death was an accident or suicide isn’t certain, though circumstances suggest the latter. It was July 1926, and she was just a few days shy of her fifty-eighth birthday. One of her many obituaries summed it up: “At last her body. . . was broken by the energy of her soul.”32
She was buried in a small cemetery in Baghdad, her bones laid to rest in the landscape she felt best in—the desert. Baghdad mourned her, Britain grieved, and those who knew her best were hollowed. What fortune she had left was bequeathed to the Iraq Museum.
ABOVE : Harriet Boyd Hawes sorting potsherds at her desk
1871–1945
HARRIET BOYD HAWES
JUST LIKE A
Volcano
In her book Born to Rebel: The Life of Harriet Boyd Hawes, the author, Boyd Hawes’s daughter, Mary, recalls a strange scene. They were traveling together on a small cruise ship and had arrived at the island of Santorini in Greece. Her famous mother still asleep, Mary walked onto the boat’s deck to find that the engines had been turned off and that the world had been unexpectedly transformed into a “wonderland.” They were afloat “inside the crater of a vast volcano.” From within, “its huge black and coloured walls rose straight up, in places a thousand feet, from the bluest waters . . . Every eight or ten minutes great clouds of smoke or vapour coiled upwards from the cone, called the New Furnace; and a rumble or roar would break from the volcano.”1 The year was 1926, Harriet was fifty-five years old (her daughter sixteen), and it seemed perfectly apt that the woman who lived her life with explosive power should casually journey into the heart of an active volcano. Afterwards, mother and daughter scaled the sheer sides of the rock face and zigzagged to the top on donkeyback, just to see a beautiful old monastery and its ruins.
To compare Harriet Boyd Hawes to a volcano is no overstatement. Her tiny frame of just over five feet packed the power of a giant, and she exerted a decisive and active will always bent on achieving the things she believed in. Her life’s work included Greek archaeology—and lots of it—as well as nursing for the Red Cross in the direst of war conditions, teaching, lecturing, and being a wife and a mother. She also had a tireless commitment to politics and justice that brought her into private conversations with illustrious figures such as Queen Olga of Greece and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Deliberately seeking Boyd Hawes out, the U.S. president’s wife took her by the hand and said, “I want so much to hear what you have to say.”2 Everyone did, and even if they didn’t, Boyd Hawes typically made herself heard anyway. She was, as her daughter described, “super-charged.”
She was also an American, one of the few female archaeologists of the period who didn’t come from European soil. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t make her way across the Atlantic, though. Undecided about what to pursue in life, Boyd Hawes was traveling through Europe on a “grand tour” in 1896 in the company of other young women and under vigilant chaperone.
She knew she wanted advanced learning in either history or the classics, which she loved, and she was pondering over where to study when an acquaintance asked, “Why go to England and study Homer and Plato under dull, grey skies, when Greece is there to teach you more than you can ever learn in books?”3
It seems that was all she needed. Turning her back on the ivywalled libraries of her East Coast youth, Boyd Hawes moved to Greece in 1896 to attend the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. At twenty-five, riding a bicycle, skirts blown back in the city breezes, threading her way down Athenian streets, lost in the shadowy wonders of the Acropolis, she was ready to devote herself to archaeology, though first she had to convince the school that no, she really did not want to be a librarian.
In time Boyd Hawes revolutionized understandings of local archaeology and chronology on Crete, single-handedly directed excavations for multiple seasons with crews of one hundred men, and made legendary contributions to the emerging science—then more precise and respected than ever—of archaeology.
UNLIKE OTHER WOMEN in this book, who were raised by mothers who encouraged, to some degree, their daughters’ independence, Boyd Hawes grew up exclusively in the company of boys. Just a baby when her mother died, Boyd Hawes was raised by her father along with four brothers. She was the youngest, born on October 11, 1871. Her days were filled with playing army soldiers beside her brother Alex; she hardly ever played with dolls or teacups. Alex, the third-youngest sibling, was eleven years her senior and, in the absence of her mother, became a kind of parental figure to Boyd Hawes.
She was a tomboy in skirts. Her hair had been chopped short during a bout of scarlet fever, and as her daughter, Mary, would later recall in her book, Boyd Hawes’s “father tried hard to ‘rouse domestic tastes’ and induce womanliness in his small daughter by having a fine doll’s
-house built. She secretly liked it with its pretty sets of furniture, but under her brother Allen’s martial influence it became a fortress.”4 The dollhouse was occupied by military coup. Happily immersed in games of imaginary war and political intrigue, Boyd Hawes would scramble around and “scout” for the boys. Firefighting was another favorite interest. The whole family loved the fire department—some were even in the business— and they’d delight in going to pyrotechnic shows for fun. A fire alarm would sound through the house, alerting relatives who worked as firemen that they were needed at the station, noise ricocheting off walls, making the five children wild. To match that chaos, the fourth floor of the house was filled with a type of zoo where the children kept a collection of tame pet squirrels that would leap from the tops of doors onto Boyd Hawes’s extended arms. Sports and parades, accidents and roughhousing injuries— the Boyd household was a rowdy, happy scene and it was through all this commotion that Boyd Hawes tumbled out a confident, if unconventional, little lady.
Her beloved brother Alex was a formative presence in her life. He introduced her to the study of classics, cheered her along as she entered womanhood, supported her unconditionally, and teased her affectionately about her messy hair and impatient manners. Unfortunately, Alex fell ill and died when he was still a young man. He left Boyd Hawes all of his estate, which she used to finance future endeavors, including college and travel. She was in her last year at Smith College when he died and, deeply grieved by the loss, felt her “heart was not in it [her studies].”5 Still, she finished her B.A. in classics (emphasis on Greek) and then had to decide what to do next. She wanted to help those in need and so was torn between teaching and nursing.
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