Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  For rainy days, Gertrude and Maurice had invented a game of hide-and-seek called “Housemaids,” a game that she would remember and that would come to have a very different significance for her in the desert, many years later. Beginning in the cellar, where the children could stand upright but the adults had to bend their heads, the object was to run silently along the many corridors and up the narrow, twisting stairs that led up to the maids’ bedrooms, without being seen by the servants. If you were spotted, you screamed and went back, to begin again. Or you might begin from behind the water tank in the attic, which could be reached up a short ladder fixed to the wall, then scuttle down to the laundry and the housekeeper’s room in the quiet semi-basement. Lined with cupboards painted cream, its William Morris wallpaper depicted singing blackbirds perched on a trellis wreathed in leaves and fruit against a dark-blue sky. A trace of it still remains today.

  Gertrude was lucky to have a stepmother with Florence’s sweet nature. A harsher regime could have dented her stepdaughter’s confidence, or more likely turned her into the rebel she somehow never became. Florence’s younger daughter, Molly, later Lady Trevelyan, wrote of her mother: “I cannot remember her speak in a harsh way to us, nor shout at us for wrong-doing. She was gentle and forbearing, full of tenderness to all children, unselfish and sympathetic to a degree that went far beyond any other person I have ever known . . . The security of her presence was an unfailing standby.”

  Florence was also great fun. The children had turned the garden shed into a playhouse and named it the Wigwam. They had a rubber stamp with the name on it, and would deliver stamped letters containing very formal tea or dinner invitations to their parents, the gardener, or the governess. Florence, emerging from the house in response to one of these invitations, in her very best evening gown and with diamonds in her hair, had found the children waiting to wheel her to the shed in a goat cart. On the way to the Wigwam they upset the cart onto the gravel but Florence, though scratched and dirtied, stayed on heroically through the afternoon programme, not only demonstrating her good nature but also providing a fine example of social poise.

  Another invitation invited “Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Bell to tea on Saturday August 13, 1892, at 5 pm” and added “RSVP.” Florence, much teased by the children for her French accent, had accepted along similar lines. “To Monsieur and Mesdames de Viguevamme, Red Barns, Coatham, Redcar” she wrote, “The Marchioness de Sidesplitters will have much pleasure in dining this evening with Mr. Prinketty, Miss Fiddlesticks, and Miss Pizzicato at 7:30,” and—probably anxious not to sacrifice another evening dress—she had added: “She regrets that the unfortunate delicate state of her health will not permit her to wear on this occasion her Court dress and feathers or to powder her hair.”

  Entertaining and tolerant as Florence could be, she was rigorous about behaviour. She was forever writing essays with titles such as “The Minor Moralist” or “Si Jeunesse Voulait” (“If Only the Young Would . . .”). Her rules concerning good manners were not negotiable, whether she was ticking off a waiting coachman who had left his driving seat to shelter from the rain, or a child who had failed to greet guests correctly. Manners, she insisted, were as important for ourselves as for others. She might have been repeating a conversation with an older Gertrude when she wrote: “However valuable the intellectual wares you may have to offer, it is obvious that if your method of calling your fellow man’s attention to them is to give him a slap in the face at the same time, you will probably not succeed in enlisting his kindly interest in your future achievements.”

  The impatient Gertrude had some difficulty with all of this. To her, a conversation was about finding out something or telling someone something. She could not feel very interested, she may well have retorted, in her fellow man’s assessment of her achievements. But there were times when Florence was entirely on Gertrude’s wavelength, as in her deploring “the tendency displayed by many otherwise reasonable people to believe that their own race is of quite peculiar interest, their own family traits the most worthy of note, the school they have been to the only possible one, the quarter of London they live in the most agreeable, and their own house the best in it”; it was “an insidious peril to be striven against.” Half English and half Irish herself, she was sensitive to the kind of slur that commonly figured in Punch cartoons about the French, their habits, hygiene, food, and morals, all of which she knew in many cases to be superior to those of the British. This climate of receptiveness to other standards and ways of life was the best initiation to travel that Gertrude could have absorbed in her childhood. Later in life, she was to take it to its logical conclusion—and far further than Florence could ever have intended.

  “Correct” as had been Florence’s upbringing, the cosmopolitan society to which she had been exposed before her marriage to Hugh Bell had plunged her into an intellectual and artistic milieu that she would probably not have encountered if she had been brought up in England. Not until Edward VII came to the throne were actresses and artists and newly moneyed merchants routinely included in aristocratic circles, unless under the particular freedoms implied by patronage. Florence was to make great friends with actors in the course of her life, in particular Coquelin, a star of the French theatre, Sybil Thorndike, and the American actress Elizabeth Robins. Florence met Robins, who introduced the plays of Ibsen to the English stage, soon after her own arrival in London. Despite the fact that Robins was an active member of the suffrage movement, with which Florence could never agree, they became intimates. Robins brought Florence’s most famous play, Alan’s Wife, to the West End in 1893, taking the lead in this tragedy of working-class life. She became one of the Bells’ most frequent houseguests, adding much to the texture of the intellectual background in which Gertrude was to be raised. Liza, as they called her, would amuse the children by taking them into her bedroom and demonstrating a theatrical “pratfall,” flat onto her face on the carpet. Later, when Gertrude was older and after Florence had retired to bed, the two women would sit up late discussing the pros and cons of suffrage. Florence felt so strongly on this issue, and wrote so much in support of anti-suffrage, that she could not discuss it with Liza. Gertrude and Liza became lifelong correspondents, and the constant traveller was often to mention in the letters she wrote from her desert tents how much she missed their “fireside chats.”

  Florence told Gertrude and Maurice of her earliest acquaintance with Charles Dickens, whose daughter Kitty Perugine had been one of her first companions. Dickens was an intimate of her parents, Sir Joseph and Lady Olliffe, as was his contemporary Thackeray. Dickens often visited them in Paris. Once, when he was about to give a reading at the British Embassy in support of a charitable fund started by her father, Florence remembered Dickens entering the salon and asking, “And where is Miss Florence going to sit?” “Florence is not going,” said Lady Olliffe firmly. “She is too young.” “Very well then,” he replied cheerfully, “I shan’t go either.” In the event, Florence sat in the front row and wept copiously at the melancholy death of Paul Dombey. Dickens wrote in a subsequent letter: “Florence at the reading tremendously excited.”

  Florence’s educational ideas were advanced for her day and much influenced by her admiration for progressive new European theories. Long after her own children had grown up, in 1911 she went to Rome to study the work of the educational reformer Maria Montessori. Her preference, where a governess could be afforded, was for schooling girls at home. This was the education she chose for her own girls, Elsa and Molly. Molly wrote later:

  My mother’s idea of the equipment required for her two daughters was that we should be turned out as good wives and mothers and be able to take our part in the social life of our kind. We must speak French and German perfectly, and be on friendly if not intimate terms with Italian. We must be able to play the piano and sing a bit, we must learn to dance well and know how to make small talk. The more serious side of education did not take any part in the plans my mother made for us. Science, mathe
matics, political economy, Greek and Latin—there was no need for any of these.

  No girl they knew was trained for any profession, nor did “girls of our class” go to school. That this worked well enough for the two sisters in their day is evident in the impression they gave of being delightful company. Less formidable than Gertrude, but with her erect bearing and good clothes sense, they became an attractive and entertaining couple, and much in demand. Virginia Stephen, later Virginia Woolf, mentioned them in a discursive letter about her first May Ball at Cambridge: “It was the Trinity ball . . . Boo was there, and Alice Pollock and the Hugh Bells (If you know them—MAP calls them ‘the most brilliant girl conversationalists in London’—and Thoby [her brother] was much attracted by them and them by him).”

  Florence subscribed to the then common medical theory that girls become overstrained if subjected to too much mental exertion. For adolescent girls in particular, education was supposed to be a serious health risk. As late as 1895, when Gertrude was twenty-seven, a Dr. James Burnett, author of Delicate, Backward, Puny and Stunted Children, informed the world that a girl at puberty would always fall behind her brothers in academic achievement because of her “disordered pelvic life,” and assured readers that “Not one exception to this have I ever seen.” A book by Elizabeth Missing Sewell, Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature and Revelation, had stated that a girl should always be guarded from study, for “if she is allowed to run the risks, which, to the boy, are a matter of indifference, she will probably develop some disease, which, if not fatal, will, at any rate, be an injury to her for life.” Florence saw to it that all of the Bell girls had as active a life as their brothers, but was beginning to realize that when it came to education, her formula would not do for every girl. As she put it, “There are a thousand of us who can walk along a level road and get to the end of it successfully, for one who can swim a river or scale a cliff which stands in the way.” Gertrude, she now speculated, was this exception.

  When Maurice went to boarding school, the fifteen-year-old Gertrude missed him far more than she had expected. Her half-sisters and half-brother were much younger, and life became rather empty. She had long outstripped poor Miss Klug, who was constantly offended at the flat contradictions and dismissive behaviour of her troublesome charge. All her life Gertrude had trouble confining herself to armchairs, and could now be found at all times of day sprawled on the carpet flicking impatiently through a book, or thrashing away at knitting she had begun but would never finish. She would stalk about the house with a scowl on her face, airing her recently acquired views, arguing with anyone who would take issue with her and getting in the way of the maids. Invited to go and amuse herself in the garden, she invented a game called “rackets,” something like squash, which could be played on her own by smashing a ball as hard as she could against the coach-house doors. The constant banging and the cries of fury when she missed must have been a great irritation to Florence, perhaps trying to concentrate on some children’s story or treatise on the nursery. Despite her father’s remonstrations, Gertrude made a point of throwing her dog into the pond every day because “he does hate it so much.”

  Florence, with three younger children to cope with, was at her wits’ end to know how to occupy the teenager. She was not the only member of the family sooner or later to find Gertrude difficult. Molly Bell wrote: “Gertrude is being rather thorny & I shall have to have another scene with her soon—she contradicts everything Mother says, and goes out of her way to be disobliging and snubby.” It was not hard for Florence to come to the decision that Gertrude was a special case and that a fifteen-year-old so confident, so able and thirsty for knowledge, ought to be stretched.

  Florence had made the best of beginnings with her stepdaughter, and her influence on Gertrude would be permanent. That influence would not always turn her in the direction that her stepmother wished, but in the things that mattered, however far she ventured, Gertrude would all her life follow Florence’s lead. She always followed the conventions and observances of her upbringing. She would always be devoted to her family, and however far her life would take her from home, she never distanced herself from their interests or thought them less important than her own.

  Now, breathless with excitement, Gertrude was told that she was going to be sent to school in London.

  *It was Thomas Cubitt who rebuilt Osborne Castle on the Isle of Wight for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

  Two

  EDUCATION

  My darling, dearest Mother,

  I do so hate being here . . . if only you were in town. I couldn’t be more desolate than I am now. Every day I want you more . . .

  Will you please get me Gray’s Elegy, also two brush-and-comb bags and a nightgown case. And a german book called Deutches Lesebuch by Carl Oltrogge.

  And so Gertrude packed her trunk and went up to London with Florence on a third-class ticket—having had it pointed out to her that she would do herself no good if she was seen to be richer than the other pupils. In term time, during the first year, she would live with Florence’s mother, Lady Olliffe, in the imposing but still dingy premises of 95 Sloane Street. It was a staid house, relieved only by the visits of the reprehensible Tommy, Florence’s brother, who when playing billiards with his young step-niece would routinely chalk his nose along with the cue. He was a tease skilled in goading little girls to fury, and with older girls a flirt whose intentions, as he once assured a straight-faced father, were “strictly dishonourable.” His “deaf and stupid” sister Bessie, who lived with their mother, once spotted him through the window flirting with a young lady on a bench in the garden. She opened the window and hurled a tennis ball at him. Narrowly missing the object of his affections it hit him squarely on the side of the head.

  The choice of school for Gertrude had been made easier by the fact that a former friend of Florence’s, Camilla Croudace, had recently become the “Lady Resident” of Queen’s College in Harley Street. Housed in an elegant Georgian four-storey, cream-painted block, it had been founded twenty years before Gertrude’s birth by the educational reformer and Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice. The birthplace of academic education and recognized qualifications for women, it had been granted the first royal charter for female education in 1853. It produced confident and self-assured young women capable of playing a valuable part in the nation’s intellectual, business, and public life. Later the school would number the writer Katherine Mansfield amongst its alumnae, but in 1884, when Gertrude enrolled, many of its graduates were destined to be governesses.

  While this school was the best thing that could have happened for Gertrude, her excitement was soon overtaken by homesickness. This, for a young woman who had scarcely left her home town except for holidays in the company of sisters, brothers, and cousins, was at first severe. Distance certainly made her heart grow fonder of her stepmother. She observed her classmates narrowly, and was soon writing to ask Florence to get her “some stays”—the stiff laced whalebone corsets that she had discovered the other girls were wearing under their tightly buckled belts.

  The pupils were taken to concerts and picture galleries, churches and cathedrals. Gertrude was quickly developing opinions about all things, and stating them forcibly, not least in her letters home: “I don’t like Rubens. I don’t like him at all . . . The passage walls are papered with the most dreadful green paper you ever saw . . . How I do loathe and detest St. Paul’s . . . there is not a single detail which is not hideous not to say repulsive.”

  The young ladies were scrupulously chaperoned wherever they went, and Gertrude, longing to see more of the sights of the city, chafed at not being allowed to go about on her own. “I wish I could go to the National,” she told her parents. “But you see, there is no one to take me. If I were a boy I should go every week!”

  At Queen’s College no less than at Red Barns, strict adherence to the conventions of the day was not negotiable. Gertrude must accept it, explained Mrs. Croudace, as a
condition of her increased freedom and independence. Florence responded to Gertrude’s complaint only that she wished the child would not use abbreviations such as “National” for National Gallery. A ruffled Gertrude replied angrily:

  I waded through [your letter] which I consider a great act of self-discipline—but I avenged myself by burning [it] promptly . . . The next letter I write to you, when I am not too cross to bother myself with finding words, my adjectives shall be as numerous as Carlyle’s own . . . Would you have me say when talking of the sovereign: The Queen of England, Scotland, Ireland, Empress of India, Defender of the Faith? My life is not long enough to give everything its full title.

  Receiving this somewhat smart letter, Florence may well have sighed. Hugh would have found it hard to suppress a smile at his daughter’s spirit and powers of argument.

  These outbursts would soon be followed by contrite messages to her parents that she had made new resolutions, and hoped that Florence would find her a better and more obedient daughter in future.

  It had probably never occurred to Gertrude before to wonder whether people liked her or not. Now she had to acknowledge that she was not very popular at the school, and in response began to betray what might be a reciprocal emotion, the start of a lifelong haughtiness and aversion to the company of “ordinary” women. Florence counselled her, as tactfully as she could, against her tendency to boastfulness, which brought another outburst. Her schoolmates, she said, were “uninteresting” and then, finding a more diplomatic way to express her discomfiture, added: “It’s a very disagreeable process finding out that one is no better than the common run . . . I’ve gone through rather a hard course of it since I came to College and I don’t like it at all.”