Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  The debate was jocular at first, when Gertrude told a story about the former Bishop of London, Dr. Temple. He had once taken a cab to Fulham and given a tip that had not satisfied the driver, who said: “If St. Paul were here he would give me one and sixpence.” “If St. Paul were here,” the Bishop had responded with great dignity, “he would be at Lambeth, and that is only one shilling to Fulham.”

  She and Hugo talked about utilitarianism, Gertrude maintaining that the pursuit of personal happiness was the most persuasive motivation for mankind’s actions—always remembering that it must not compromise the happiness of others. People had to use their brains. Poetry was a better pastime than croquet, she said, because it was more likely to be of use to the community. To Hugo, every action was either moral or immoral, and man must struggle to follow the moral path. When she climbed a mountain, Gertrude said, it was for her pleasure alone and it hurt nobody—it was neither moral nor immoral. The debate grew warmer when she declared that Christ ranked with Muhammad the Prophet and the Buddha—all great men, but no more than men. Hugo became upset, Gertrude flippant and more provocative. When she declared that if the poor got hold of the idea that all men were equal there would be no more servants, he stalked off, and for a while they went their separate ways.

  Gertrude was an avid sightseer. No temple, museum, or ruin within reachable distance went unviewed by her. Nor did she stop working on her languages or reading. Denison Ross was startled one day to receive a telegram from her on the Rangoon leg of the journey, asking: “Please send first hemistich of verse ending ‘a khayru jalisin fi zaman kitabue.’ ” In whatever distortion of telegraphese the message arrived, he was able to reply, “A’azz makanin fiddunya zahru sabihin,” and she was able to complete the verse:

  The finest place in the world is the back of a swift horse,

  And the best of good companions is a book.

  Gertrude and Hugo ended their global travels in the United States and Canada, where Gertrude spent a day or two climbing in the Rocky Mountains before visiting Chicago. “We went on a switch-back that looped the loop. I can’t say it was nice,” she wrote to her parents, “. . . I only knew a rush and a scramble and my hat nearly off.”

  On her grandfather Lowthian’s death in 1904 when Gertrude was thirty-six, Hugh succeeded to the baronetcy and the family upscaled from Red Barns to Rounton Grange. This substantial country house with massive chimney-stacks set in its own 3,000-acre estate had been completed by architect Philip Webb in 1876 as a showpiece of Arts and Crafts architecture. The house, honey-coloured with red pantile roof—a Bell hallmark—was set amongst old trees that Lowthian had not permitted to be cut down. There was hardly a person in the two villages situated on those acres who was not employed at Rounton. The labourers were housed a short walk from the house in a terraced village development, also by Webb. Florence employed several of the daughters of the Clarence steelworkers, training them as housemaids and laundresses, and made sure that the “rest house,” built to give their families a break in the country, was always occupied.

  The house, Webb’s largest project so far, employed elements of post-medieval decoration and Gothic motifs. A broad staircase spiralled up from the hall, with its enormous fireplace, and an arched gallery ran down one entire side of the house. The drawing-room, with its Adam fireplace and two grand pianos, had a carpet so large that it took eight men to carry it out of doors for its annual beating. Groupings of chairs and tables were arranged across the room to accommodate the largest of house parties. The dining-room, richly decorated by William Morris, featured a tapestry frieze designed by Morris and Burne-Jones to illustrate Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose, executed over several years by the first Lady Bell and her daughters, Hugh’s sisters. There was accommodation for a butler, a housekeeper, and a chief cook, plus a two-storey laundry and a servants’ hall. Every quarter-hour the “Rounton chimes” rang out from the stableyard. Hugh was soon to introduce a “motor house” for the chauffeurs and the fleet of Bell cars.

  A Christmas list of 1907 in Florence’s writing registers twenty staff and their presents: handkerchiefs, brooches, belts, cardigans, and hatpins for the women; tie-pins, handkerchiefs, and knives for the men. For the family, purses and books, boas, scissor-cases, the Larousse Encyclopaedia, gloves, and tool-cases, with little wheeled horses and rattles for the babies. In the same year, there are also presents noted for the permanent London staff of four. In 1900, after the death of Lady Olliffe, in whose house it appears the family had always preferred to stay when in the capital, Florence had taken over 95 Sloane Street and redecorated it from top to bottom, even altering the floors. Gertrude, who had her own suite of rooms there, wrote to Chirol on Christmas Day: “95 grows apace. When you come back you will find us established in the most beautiful house in London!” A month later, she was delighted to report that her friend Flora Russell was “much impressed” by it.

  Gertrude was thirty-six by the time the family moved into her grandfather’s house. Her life was far from spinsterly, but Rounton expanded her world in two important ways. As co-hostess with Florence, she was able to invite large numbers of people to stay, and her spells in England were now punctuated with friends’ and relations’ house parties. The social round began in 1906 with a splendid New Year Ball for all their friends and acquaintances.

  Immediately she took charge of the extensive garden with its sweeping lawns, daffodil wood, rose garden, and two lakes—one of them big enough for boating. She took enormous pleasure in laying out new areas of special plant interest, working with Tavish, the Scottish gardener, and his team of a dozen assistants, and it was not long before she had turned Rounton into one of the show gardens of England.

  Flowers had been precious to her since her ninth birthday, when she acquired her own plot and grew “primroses and snodrops,” her first diary revealing how often she “went into the gardin” to look at flowers. Once she started writing travel books she gave free rein to her love of wild flowers and their effect in the landscape: describing an ancient wall, for instance, she would dwell on the knots of wild violets tucked into the crevices. The watered desert was astonishing to her, with its miracle of instant colour and scent. “I pitched my camp in a grove of apricot trees, snowy with flowers and a-hum with bees. The grass was set thickly with anemones and scarlet ranunculus,” she would write; then:

  When we reached the level of the Jordan plain, behold, the wilderness had blossomed like the rose. It was the most unforgettable sight . . . waist deep in flowers. I found the loveliest iris I have yet seen—big and sweet-scented and so dark purple that the hanging-down petals are almost black. It decorates my tent now.

  Climbing in the Alps, she wrote home to ask her sister to send her a book on alpine flora, so that she could identify the “entrancing” flowers she saw there. In a Swiss meadow at Glion, she wrote of “meadows full—full of flowers. Whole hillsides were white as if snow had fallen on them—white with the big single narcissus. I never saw anything so beautiful . . . Isn’t it odd how the whole flora changes from one valley to another . . .” Toiling up the lower slopes of the Schreckhorn in 1901, she was distracted by the scent of violets: “I walked over the tiny alp botanizing while my guides cooked the soup. Every sort of Alpine plant grows on the cultivated alp; I found even very sweet pale violets under the big stones. I had it all to myself.”

  When she was staying with her friends the Rosens in Jerusalem in 1899, she fell to “gardening violently” at the consulate. In her letters to Chirol the frequency with which she mentions plants and gardening suggests they were a shared interest: “My Japanese trees are coming into flower and all my Syrian roots are coming up finely—when you come home I will present you with a bundle of black irises from Moab!”

  She brought back with her, sometimes sent back, the most sensational botanical specimens. Once it was cones of Lebanon cedars—one planted at Rounton, another still visible at Wallington Hall, the seat of the Trevelyan family into which her half-sister Moll
y married. Another time it was the mandrake, or mandragore, the mysterious plant whose tuberous and divided roots beneath a rosette of leaves resemble the human form. When pulled up the root was thought, from medieval times, to “shriek”—a sound that was said to drive a man mad. Early drawings show men covering their ears while a dog is chained to the plant; when the mandrake was pulled up, it was the dog that would go mad. Rounton received its own mandrake: “I am sending you a little packet of seeds,” she wrote home. “They are more interesting for association’s sake than for the beauty of the plant—it is the famous and fabulous mandrake. By the way the root of the mandrake grows to a length of 2 yards, so I should think somebody shrieks when it is dug up—if not the mandrake, then the digger.”

  On her world trip with Hugo after the durbar in 1903, she stopped in Tokyo long enough to meet Reginald Farrer, “who is a great gardener.” Farrer delighted in the restrained beauty of Japanese gardens, disparaging the popular English “imitations” of the time. Born with a hare lip and having great difficulty in speaking, he covered this deformity with a large black moustache. He came from Clapham in North Yorkshire, not far from the Bells’ family estate. He was destined to become one of the world’s great plant collectors; he favoured a natural kind of gardening and wrote about it in Wildean prose. He had fallen in love at Balliol with Aubrey Herbert, son of the Earl of Carnarvon. Herbert was now attaché to the British Embassy in Tokyo, and Farrer was one of the Oxford friends he had invited to join him. Farrer had a house there, and travelled with Gertrude and Hugo into rural Japan and Korea. In a letter of 28 May she described him as coming down from Mount Fuji carrying a “rose pink cyprodium [cypripedium].” “Reginald Farrer, the Colliers, and Mr. Herbert all came to see us, and carried Hugo off to a tea house to spend the evening in the company of geisha! I wonder how he comported himself.”

  The contrast between Gertrude and a geisha was very pronounced, and in his book published the following year, The Garden of Asia, Farrer includes a chapter on the lives of Japanese women—no doubt a subject for lively conversation between him and the Bells. The double standard applied to Japanese women—they were either geishas or wives—threw into sharp relief his conclusions about his own countrywomen, who were either boring, in which case suitable as wives, or not boring, in which case not suitable. Gertrude, unmarried at thirty-five, with all her radiant curiosity and energy, was perhaps the catalyst for this idea, with which he remained intrigued all his life.

  Gardening before the twentieth century was rather different from gardening as we know it today. The emphasis was on the use of glasshouses, which forced thousands of plants into bloom and enabled the gardens of stately homes and municipal parks to be filled with brightly coloured blocks of flowers in geometric designs, living carpets in borders that could run to hundreds of feet long. In 1877 two million plants cultivated in glasshouses were planted out in London’s parks. The champion of hardy-plant gardening—the more natural gardening of today—was the gardener and writer William Robinson, who set up a press for the denunciation of carpet bedding. Robinson, working with Gertrude Jekyll, filled borders with herbaceous perennials, and planted flowers in drifts: producing effects known to this day as “English garden.”

  Farrer was one of the first rock gardeners. Gertrude wanted a rock garden for Rounton, where she would set it around the lake and plant it with the Alpine flowers she had loved on her mountaineering trips. Farrer’s and Gertrude’s rock gardens were no suburban mounds of rubble with sickly, prickly plants struggling up between the stones. They had both been brought up around areas of limestone quarries, and conceived of something massive, like a natural rockface in whose fissures and crevices flowers blossomed as they did on mountains in the spring. Farrer’s My Rock Garden was published in 1907, four years after their meeting, but Gertrude had established Rounton’s two years previously. Using huge lumps of stone from the quarries in the Cleveland Hills, displaced in the collecting of iron ore, she must have commandeered the services of Rounton’s entire garden and stable staff, village helpers included, to build a massive necklace of rocks around the little lake. She then planted them up with quantities of flowers interspersed with clumps of flowering bushes, in which azaleas are particularly apparent in the Bells’ family album. She wrote to Chirol in April 1910: “I have spent most of the afternoons in the rock garden which is a vision of beauty in spite of weather that passes belief for cold and rain. Still, the world is wonderfully beautiful and no matter what the weather I really think there is no such marvel in the world as England in Spring.”

  A couple of years later, she was constructing a water garden at another part of the lake. “If you look with the eye of faith you can see irises blossoming over the stones and mud heaps. It will be lovely,” she told him.

  In the summer of 2004, London’s National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibition of portraits of pioneering women travellers called “Off the Beaten Track.” Gertrude’s corner contained a watercolour of her as a teenager by Flora Russell, a map, and the beautiful little theodolite given to her with the Gill Memorial Award by the Royal Geographical Society in 1913. She was the first woman ever to be awarded a prize by this august institution. It was given for her many expeditions and exploratory journeys. The short four-line caption—all that was devoted to her—stated: “Despite her own achievements she actively opposed British women being given the right to vote.” Technically correct, the statement is nonetheless a crude assessment of her ultimate intentions and one that takes no account of the complex politics of the times, or her position as a daughter of the Industrial Revolution. This oversimplification is often levelled against her and has been partially responsible for the way in which her achievements have been undervalued.

  Female suffrage was the moral and intellectual debate of the age, and from the moment of being allowed to join the adults for meals, Gertrude would have heard the issue being discussed passionately, and from all points of view. Hugh and Florence were opposed to it for cogent reasons, but some of their friends, and notably the actress Elizabeth Robins, were adamant in its support. All the Bells agreed with John Stuart Mill, the greatest proponent of women’s emancipation of his time, that it was vital for a woman to be a “Person”: it became a family joke that the women seldom felt themselves to be quite enough of a Person.

  Florence has been criticized for coming to no conclusions in her book At the Works. On the contrary, she arrived at one mighty conviction: “There will never be more than a certain proportion of women who can carry the immense burden allotted to the working-woman by the conditions of today.” By “working-woman” she meant the wives of the working-men, and in those twenty-six words lay much of her argument for anti-suffrage.

  If Florence influenced Gertrude in anything, it was in the latter’s endorsement, strange to us, of the movement against women getting the vote. She had seen for herself, as she accompanied her stepmother on her visits to the working families of Middlesbrough, that these women were already at the limit of their capabilities. Without wives who gave themselves unstintingly to the round-the-clock demands of home and family, that family, and the social structure, fell apart. Many women, as Florence and Gertrude saw, fell by the wayside, many families starved and died, and many men drank themselves to death. Weren’t these issues, asked Florence, just as important as parliamentary bills and reforms? How could a Clarence wife leave her children in order to vote, or find the time to read—or, being illiterate, learn to read—so that she could understand the political questions of the day? What could a Clarence wife know of the issues on which she would be asked to vote—Free Trade, the Reform Bill, political corruption, penal reform, Home Rule? These were the questions with which the government of the day was concerned, and the vote, considered today to be a universal human right, was then judged to be a serious business requiring a degree of education and political acumen.

  Matters such as health, schooling, men’s leisure activities, social services, the Poor Laws, subsistence benef
it, the workhouse and almshouses were dealt with by local government, and in these issues Florence and most of the middle-class women she knew were involved up to the hilt. They dreaded a reaction to the demands of the suffragists—who kept within the law—and the suffragettes—who broke it—that would bring swift retribution and destroy the advances that women had already made.

  If anything tipped Gertrude into action, other than family pressure, it was the militancy of Christabel Pankhurst, who by 1904 was leading women against what she called “the noxious character of male sexuality.” The suffragettes were engaged in a sex war, and employed methods tantamount to terrorism. Pankhurst’s supporters attacked property, smashing windows and train carriages, trampled flowerbeds, and slashed paintings of nude women in galleries. They denounced marriage as legalized prostitution, rioted, and worked in gangs, tearing the clothes off their male victims and horse-whipping them. They poured tar and acid into letterboxes and sent packages of sulphuric acid to Lloyd George, later attempting to burn down his house. They assaulted men who happened to resemble the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. On 28 October 1908 Gertrude wrote: “Last night I went to a delightful party at the Glenconners’ and just before I arrived (as usual) 4 suffragettes set on Asquith and seized hold of him. Whereupon Alec Laurence in fury seized two of them and twisted their arms until they shrieked. Then one of them bit him in the hand till he bled . . . When he told me the tale he was steeped in his own gore.” She evidently regretted missing the drama, but perhaps it was providential. Disdaining violence though she did, one wonders whether she might have been tempted to join the fray and break a vase over the head of a suffragette. In any scuffle, the publicity could only have been damaging for her.

  Apart from Florence’s concerns about the strains on the wives of working-men, and the damage being done to the women’s cause by the militant suffragettes, there were sound reasons for the Bells to resist the demands of the noisy campaign for all women to have the vote. For all that the Reform Bill of 1832 and its successors had increased voters from a paltry 500,000 to 5 million by 1884, the vote was still limited to men of property, so that only a quarter of the men in Britain had the vote. When the franchise was denied to so many men, Parliament could not have contemplated giving the vote to all women.