Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  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.

  Three

  THE CIVILIZED WOMAN

  On 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, whe
re 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.

  The Lascelleses provided plenty of the improving sightseeing that Gertrude had been brought up to. She was entertained by the passionate, almost violent debates she was taken to listen to in the chamber of government, and the many late-evening entertainments and balls were all she had hoped. She was a good dancer, knew all the steps, and even taught the legation secretaries to do a new dance, the Boston. She wrote to Florence of the different Romanian way of taking a partner:

  You dance nothing through with one person. This is what happens: your dancer comes up and asks you for a turn. You dance three or four times round the room with him and he then drops you by your chaperon with an elegant bow and someone else comes up and carries you off . . . The officers all appear in uniform, of course, with top boots and spurs, but they dance so well that they don’t tear one in the least . . . I can’t attempt to tell you whom I danced with for it was impossible to remember them all.

  After these evenings, when she danced without stopping until three in the morning, they went home in a pair of carriages through the moonlit snow, wrapped in blankets, the harnesses of the trotting horses jingling as they passed through the icy cobbled streets. Back at the legation they found sandwiches and hot drinks in the warm drawing-room, and would sit another hour or so by the fire, discussing everyone they had met. Here Gertrude was thrown into a more sophisticated, cosmopolitan circle than she had encountered under the watchful eye of Florence. She expressed her surprise at finding divorced women integrated into society. Unadorned with cosmetics, like all proper young ladies of the time, she was rather impressed by a flirtatious maid-of-honour to the Queen who powdered herself quite openly—and then proceeded to powder the faces of all the young men hanging round the door of the dressing-room. Among the throngs of counts and princes, secretaries and ambassadors, Gertrude met two men who would be of great importance to her: Charles Hardinge, from the British Legation in Constantinople, later Viceroy of India, and the thirty-six-year-old Valentine Ignatius Chirol, foreign correspondent of The Times. Chirol, already an intimate of the Lascelleses, would become one of Gertrude’s closest friends; she would write to him from all over the world, and their relationship would last to the end of her life. To her beloved “Domnul” (Romanian for “gentleman”) she could reveal the emotions and dilemmas she could not expose even to her parents. It was the breadth of his international knowledge that first captivated her. He, in turn, was amused at the enquiring and confrontational style of her conversation, to which he quickly responded in kind. He had begun his career as a Foreign Office clerk; then, equipped with a dozen languages, he embarked on a lifetime of travelling, lecturing, and writing, while passing sensitive information to Whitehall. He became an expert on all aspects of Britain’s imperial power and the threats to it, and later, foreign editor of The Times.

  Gertrude’s independent mind sometimes got her into trouble. On one occasion, listening to a discussion her uncle was having with a foreign statesman concerning European problems, she broke into the conversation to tell the Frenchman: “Il me semble, Monsieur, que vous n’avez pas saisi l’esprit du peuple allemand.” A ripple of disapproval ran round the group, except for Chirol, who turned away, smiling. A horrified Aunt Mary whisked Gertrude away and told her off. When she reflected on the incident some twenty-five years later, Florence agreed with her sister’s response: “There is no doubt that . . . it was a mistake for Gertrude to proffer her opinions, much less her criticisms, to her superiors in age and experience.” But she added: “The time was to come when many a distinguished foreign statesman not only listened to the opinions she proffered but accepted them and acted on them.”

  The end of the Romanian holiday came at last, and Gertrude’s happy four months would end in a trip to Constantinople with the Lascelleses. Adding to her pleasure, Chirol accompanied them, picking out many wonderful and exotic sights that tourists would normally have missed. Billy rowed her in a caique up the Golden Horn: “It was perfectly delicious with a low sun glittering on the water, bringing back the colour to the faded Turkish flags of the men of war and turning each white minaret in Stamboul into a dazzling marble pillar,” she wrote home.

  Gertrude was soon to “come out” as a debutante in London—the ritual for well-heeled girls emerging from the schoolroom to join “society”—and be presented to the Queen at a reception, called a “drawing-room.” But back at Redcar, Florence now put into action her threat of domesticating Gertrude. For intelligent people like Florence and Hugh, men were not moral because they went to church, or women because they kept a clean and orderly house. But intellectual women who filled their lives with “men’s work”—political debate, meetings, campaigning—while neglecting their children, husbands, and homes were quite definitely immoral. Charles Dickens had characterized this type unforgettably as Mrs. Jellaby in Bleak House, written thirty years previously. She was a lady of “very remarkable strength of character, who devotes herself entirely to the public” and especially to “the African project.” Her dress was undone at the back and her hair unbrushed. Her dirty room was strewn with papers while her hungry children milled and whined around her, and the mild and silent Mr. Jellaby, his virility in shreds from long exposure to this virago, sat in a corner with his aching head pressed against the wall. Gertrude might be a bluestocking, Florence thought, but she would not be a Mrs. Jellaby.

  Having some travelling of her own to do, Florence put her stepdaughter in charge of the three youngest children. She was to teach them history, run the house and the servants, balance the books, and have everything in order when Hugh came home from Clarence each evening. Maurice was at Eton, where he would stay until he was nineteen. Gertrude, who enjoyed the company of children and was deeply fond of all her brothers and sisters, did her absolute best, scowling over the accounts, visiting Clarence wives and organizing events for them, attempting needlework, and sending Florence bulletins of their daily activities. “I went into the gardens to be cool, but presen
tly came the babies who announced that they were barons and that they intended to rob me. I was rather surprised at their taking this view of the functions of the aristocracy . . . We all played at jumping over a string . . . Molly shocked Miss Thomson [the governess] dreadfully the other day by asking her what was the French for “This horse has the staggers!”

  Not a very distinguished cook herself, she taught Molly and Elsa to make scones and gingerbread. In between domestic duties she took dancing lessons, read Swinburne’s Jonson, and occasionally left the children to the servants and travelled up to Lady Olliffe’s in Sloane Street for fittings for dresses for her London season. Her struggles with the accounts suggest the emphasis that Florence placed on home economy, and her insistence that her stepdaughter should learn the value of money. No one would have thought from Gertrude’s letters at this time that they were from a scion of the sixth-richest family in Britain.

  About the little girls’ frocks, Hunt [the nursemaid] would like to have one for Molly made of cambric matching the pattern of Elsa, 16d. a yard 40 in. wide; the other two of nainsook which will wash better, 13d. and 38 in. wide. There are two insertions, one at 6¼[d.] not so very pretty, one at 10½[d.] very pretty indeed. However it is 4d. a yd. dearer . . . Mr. Grimston says that he cannot supply us with mutton at 9d. a pound, it is so dear now. I have asked the other butchers and find they are all selling it at 10d. or 10½[d.] a pound . . .

  I paid everything but the butcher with what you sent and had over one pound balance which I have kept for next time . . . I went to Clarence today and arranged about the nursing lecture to-morrow . . . Then I paid some visits and came home with Papa at 4:35. Molly and I have since been picking cowslips.