Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  For the second year at Queen’s College she became a boarder, and got on better with her peers. She was asked to stay for the weekend by a friend from Florence’s youth, Thackeray’s daughter Anne, Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, and by the widow of the historian whose books she had devoured before breakfast, Mrs. J. R. Green. But approaches from her new schoolfriends were heavily censored from Redcar. Invitations, she had to learn, were not to be accepted before Florence and Hugh had checked the suitability of the family through Mrs. Croudace. Three invitations, already accepted, had to be turned down as a result, which did not help to make her better liked. It has been assumed that these families were “not good enough” for the Bells because they were not important enough. This is unlikely. The homes that Florence would not allow Gertrude to visit were those where alcohol was consumed, where house parties were the excuse for extramarital activities, where girls were not strictly chaperoned—in other words, homes belonging to the often dissolute aristocracy, circles that might even include that of the Prince of Wales.

  In the classroom, Gertrude shone. She was welcomed as an exceptional student who would volunteer for a higher class whenever she found the work easy. In her first year, in a class of some forty girls, she had come first in English history, her favourite subject, with marks of 88 out of 88. She had come second in English grammar, third in geography, and fourth in French and ancient history. She had not done at all well in scripture. When the master had asked her why she had not done better when she was doing so well in all her other subjects, her response was robust: “I don’t believe a word of it!” Hugh and Florence only occasionally attended church, and no one could ever convince Gertrude that there was a God. She began to call herself an atheist.

  She was just as resilient to criticism of her history work. When Mr. de Soyres argued that an essay she had written on Cromwell did not merit his usual comment of “Excellent” because she had assumed facts without proving them and ignored counterarguments, she wrote home indignantly to justify herself to her father: “The fault of my essay is that I tried to prove that Cromwell was right when I need only have proved that he was not wrong.”

  She now had plenty to do, she felt, and begged Florence to let her give up embroidery and piano lessons. Her learning to play, she said, was a “pure waste of time,” craftily adding, “Fancy the amount more books I could read in the practising hour.” Her stepmother, who believed that nothing was to be gained without persistence, did not succumb to this tempting prospect, and wrote that she must continue. Gertrude allowed a few weeks to pass, and then set to work on her father. Hugh interceded—as he always would intercede on her behalf—and she was at last allowed to give up the piano, if not the embroidery needle.

  If she regarded those two skills as optional, she was falling in love with poetry, a pleasure that would endure throughout her life. At fourteen, she had snubbed her cousin Horace because he hadn’t read Robert Browning’s latest volume. Now she was writing home to say, “I’ve done Milton most of today. I always feel I could stand on my head for want of a better outlet for my delight after Lycidas or Comus. It’s very difficult to keep the knowledge of all that exquisite beauty to myself without discussing it with anyone.”

  In her stream of letters home, the difference in her relationship with her father and that with her mother was becoming apparent. She still depended on her father’s judgement on the larger questions, and now wrote to him specifically to ask his opinion of Home Rule for Ireland and the fate of Gladstone and the Liberal Party. She would write to Florence in a different vein when she wanted a new cotton dress, for instance, so that when she was taken to visit Maurice and her cousin Herbert Marshall at Eton she would look her best. She was now a very attractive young woman. Her green gaze was rather confrontational and her nose was a little sharp, but she had a strong, slim figure, a good carriage, and bundles of beautiful, untidy auburn hair.

  Her two history teachers, Mr. de Soyres and Mr. Rankine, felt that she was a brilliant pupil, as did Mr. Cramb, the history master. She had earned the right to go further with her education, they decided, and in her last term she wrote to ask her father if she might go to Oxford. Hugh and Florence had some way to go before they would be convinced. Florence might have given way on Gertrude’s schooling, but Oxford she had never considered for a daughter. Having travelled up to London to discuss the issue with Mrs. Croudace, though, it was finally agreed. Gertrude was enrolled at Lady Margaret Hall, one of the two women’s colleges at Oxford, in 1886.

  Meeting the alarming Lady Stanley, a founder of Cambridge’s Girton College, Gertrude told Florence: “I felt rather guilty when I shook hands with her—rather as if ‘I’m not going to Girton’ were written on my forehead, but she didn’t say anything!”

  In 1885 she heard that her grandfather Lowthian had been made a baronet. She wrote to congratulate him, but told Hugh: “I may say to you I suppose that I am very sorry indeed, it’s a great pity. I think he quite deserves to have it only I wish it could have been offered and refused.” Unknown to her at the time, Hugh had not been informed. “Imagine my astonishment at opening my Times,” he had written to his mother, “to see the announcement that the Pater is to be made a Baronet! Why have you none of you written to me?” Although he added, “I am pleased that the dear clever Pater’s merits should be recognised,” the note of hurt feelings is clear. Hugh felt that he should have been consulted. He, after all, would inherit the title. Gertrude and Hugh appear to have agreed that it was questionable to inherit titles through birth rather than ability, an attitude to equality and plain living perhaps inherited from the Pattinsons’ Quaker tradition. If so, that is probably the reason that Hugh chose to write to her rather than to his father.

  The old lady was already ill when she became Lady Bell, and survived only another year. Within a short time of her death came another to sadden the family: Uncle Tommy, Florence’s naughty brother, was killed when he was run over by a London bus.

  Back in Redcar, Gertrude was drawn into Florence’s social work, as she would always be if she stayed at home too long. Soon after marriage, her stepmother had begun an immense project which she dedicated to Charles Booth, who, a few years later, would begin to publish his voluminous study of poverty, Life and Labour of the People in London. Over a period of nearly thirty years she and her committee were to interview a thousand of the families employed at the Clarence steelworks, putting these working-class people’s lives under the microscope. Gertrude joined the committee intermittently, interviewing the wives and in 1889 acting as treasurer for various works projects. Later, in Florence’s absences, she would arrange teas, give lectures with lantern slides about her own adventures, and organize Christmas festivities for the workers.

  The book that Florence eventually published in 1907, At the Works, was factually exhaustive, providing ample research material for those who had a mission to campaign for change. It is easy to regard Florence’s work as incomplete. Having exposed the suffering endured by the poorer working families and especially when they struck hard times, it explores no further the deep fissures in Victorian society. It poses no remedies. Florence’s position as the ironmaster’s wife has been suggested as compromising. This is to ignore the extraordinary character of her husband and of the Bell enterprises. Capitalist and employer as Hugh was, he saw no conflict between masters and men—more, he saw them as mutually dependent. His men were well paid, enjoying comforts and pleasures denied to many industrial poor and to those who toiled on unenlightened agricultural estates. He carried on his father’s mission to promote education, and it was a lack of education that lay behind much of the hardship in poorly run homes. He was not just a liberal in his thinking, but active in Liberal politics. He joined the debate about the duty of the state to care for the individual. He believed in the role of the new trade unions, and that employers should encourage them in a shared concern for the welfare of the workers. Socialism was already at the heart of the new political philosophy, if not accepted in it
s more Marxist extremes. Hugh was part of the thrust towards a welfare state, realized in his lifetime by Lloyd George and Churchill in legislation for benefits for the sick and unemployed and eventually in retirement. It was enough for Florence to display the workers’ suffering and to show how it arose. Hugh’s respect for her as a woman of intelligence and purpose no doubt lay behind her unique access to his men, their wives, and their homes.

  To understand the importance of Florence’s work, one has to bear in mind that at the time the commonplace middle-class view of the working classes was ill-informed and moralistic. Merchants’ wives and ladies at London supper parties would be applauded for such sentiments as “I cannot have any sympathy for the labouring classes because they don’t look after their children properly, or keep their houses clean. The children die, and it is the mothers’ fault.” What Florence did was to lay down the facts of the workers’ and their families’ lives so truthfully that no one who read At the Works could possibly make such a statement again. Florence’s mission was one that could be properly promulgated even as the wife of the ironmaster whose fortune rested on the workers. Having established the facts, she analysed them. She succeeded in producing an impressive piece of social investigation and left the conclusions to the industrial sociologists and reformers who would follow. Equally, she left the emotional music to the family friend Charles Dickens, who had the God-given ability to put an unforgettable face and soul to the poorest of the poor.

  Readers of At the Works learnt about the poorest of the workers and “how terribly near the margin of disaster the man . . . walks, who has, in ordinary normal conditions, but just enough to keep himself on.”* Wages ranged from 18 to 80 shillings a week; readers learnt what proportion went to the absolute necessities—rent, coal and wood, clothes and locomotion, “in a place where for many of the men the river lies between them and their work, and has to be crossed at a halfpenny a passage on a steam ferry-boat.” They learnt that the quantity of food expected to last a family of three for seven days would be consumed by a better-off family in only two. Working-class women were frequently reviled by the rich for their filthy skirts that dragged in the mud. Florence revealed the truth, which was that they did not choose to display the miserable state of their decaying footwear. She explained how teenage girls went into marriage full of hope and excitement, and how the arrival of one baby after another left them broken in health, depressed, and unable to make the physical effort demanded by cleaning, mending, and cooking: “it is not so very surprising that she should leave the clothes un-mended, that she should leave the floor unswept.” Florence describes the breakdown of marriages as the weary worker begins to look “for comfort and enjoyment out of his own home”; his life is turned in the wrong direction by his wife “not because she is ill-intentioned, but simply from her incapacity to deal with existence, however she may struggle, and above all from her failing health.” She drew the obvious comparison—with the middle-class woman who can rely on someone else to see to the cleaning and tidying. “We shall understand better if we admit this and do not try to deceive ourselves; if we frankly recognize that . . . there is regrettably one code of conduct for the rich and another for the poor.”

  As civic leaders and local benefactors, the Bells built assembly rooms, libraries, schools, and offices. Florence recognized that a place of recreation was needed in Middlesbrough, where exhausted workers could go in the evening to escape their crying babies. She wanted to provide an alternative to the pub, where men were led into spending too much of their wage packet and where fights often broke out. In 1907 she would open the Winter Garden, a large, well-warmed modern hall that was “light and bright and cheerful . . . open to anyone and everyone who chose to pay one penny.” A cup of tea and a biscuit could be had for another penny, but alcohol was not served. At the opening, Hugh made his usual graceful speech: there was no position he would rather hold, he declared, than that of “a fellow-worker, a captain of industry of such an army that I command”; he hoped the Winter Garden would make the lives of that army brighter and better. Women were welcome, although Florence acknowledged that most mothers had to stay at home in the evening to feed and look after their children; but, she noted joyfully on the first day, there were “Lots of women!”

  Hugh had borne the expense of clearing the site and erecting the building, and a further sum of £2,070 was raised locally. The finished hall was decorated with hanging flower baskets and supplied with billiard tables, rows of seats, and tables with newspapers and magazines. During the week and at the weekend there would be brass band competitions, singers, and buskers of all sorts. After working hours it was always crowded, and when Florence dropped in she was generally asked to play the piano and lead the songs. The Winter Garden, later renamed the Dame Florence Bell Garden, was an immediate success, and continued to be so. On one of their wedding anniversaries, Hugh presented Florence with the title deeds of the building.

  Gertrude was both part of this, and not part of it. Observing from close quarters what it took to devote yourself to the improvement of conditions for your fellow men and women, the constant efforts of sympathy to be made and the stamina to go on year after year without acknowledgement, she came to understand that this kind of work was not for her. Florence owned this particular territory. Tacitly acknowledging her step-mother’s enormous achievements in the field, Gertrude began to look outward. Her own concerns would be international rather than local, her contributions on a world scale.

  Her attitudes honed by long discussions with her father, Gertrude already took a strong line on many of the issues of the day. She itched for debate, and hoped to find it at the many lunches and dinners in which she was now included. When she met up with the “normal” views of “normal” people, though, she was often angered by their incomprehension and their failure to take her point. She wrote home from London: “I have had enough of these dinners where people say ‘I think’ all the time.” She wanted to talk to people who knew the facts, or were prepared to discover them. It is easy to imagine her at the dinner table, fidgeting in her seat between two kindly adults, doing her best to derail the lumbering train of the conversation winding its way slowly to the usual conclusions. If Free Trade were the subject, the discussion might have gone something like this:

  NEIGHBOUR: “If we relax the import tariffs there will be terrible unemployment, because we can’t compete against cheap labour from abroad.”

  GERTRUDE: “Nonsense. How do you know?”

  NEIGHBOUR: “Because, my dear young friend, our factories would close.”

  GERTRUDE: “The factories might close, but there would not necessarily be widespread unemployment.”

  NEIGHBOUR: “And how do you reach that conclusion?”

  GERTRUDE: “Because if Britain can buy cotton more cheaply from India, the population will have more money to spend on other things made in Britain.”

  NEIGHBOUR: “And what about the poor crofter whose livelihood has vanished?”

  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.