Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  When she travelled, she had no hesitation in making herself immediately known to the consulate, or in calling on the ambassador, mudir, or governor (vali) of the district. Wherever she went—Bucharest, Paris, Homs, Antioch—she would announce her arrival. There would follow dinner invitations, lunch parties, receptions, pressure to conduct her affairs from a room in the consulate rather than from a small tent. If you were a “Person” as she now was—a person who mattered—you knew that it would be discourteous not to call and leave your card. If you were not a duke or an earl you could maintain this position only if you continued to merit it, and if you could prove that you mattered in the milieu of ambassadors and other notables. When Gertrude talked of her discussions with Dr. So and So about the plight of the persecuted citizens in Armenia, or the importance of Aqaba as a supply route for oil, or the reasons for extending the railway to Mecca, or the fact that ten regiments were to be sent from Damascus to bring the Druze of the Hauran to order, the table grew silent. People listened to her, and repeated what she said. Gertrude was not trying to enter the world of men—she was already part of it.

  Since the eighteenth century, women such as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who engineered the success of the Liberal Party—or in America, much more recently, Mrs. Harriman, who resurrected the fortunes of the Democrats—had exercised “salon power” through dinners and house parties. Gertrude was a new and modern phenomenon, a person who exercised influence by delivering first-hand knowledge and opinions based on that knowledge. At home and abroad, she conferred with the greatest men of her day. She was definitively different from other Englishwomen who travelled in the East before and after her: Freya Stark, who said that it was wonderful to be a woman traveller there because you could pretend to be more stupid than you were; Lady Anne Blunt, who accompanied her husband, Wilfrid; and the several romantic women profiled in Lesley Blanch’s The Wilder Shores of Love, such as Lady Burton and Jane Digby.

  As a person of affairs, her up-to-the-minute information about what was going on, as well as her perspective on it, was a vital tool. Her diaries stored, in abbreviated form, everything that a computer memory would now encompass. She would jot down what was being said in one circle, and perhaps find later that it threw light on what she heard elsewhere. She would pass her information on to her journalist friend Chirol, and, from home or abroad, face-to-face or in correspondence, to the statesmen of the day. As with many another archaeologist reporting on local politics in the Middle East, it has been said that she was a “spy.” She would have regarded the label as both sensational and demeaning. She was a gatherer and disseminator of information, who lost nothing by doing the work without pay, gaining entry into the corridors of power—entry as a fully fledged “Person.”

  As already mentioned, her mode of travelling, from 1909, was nothing short of majestic. It was not only that she liked to travel in style, but she knew that the sheikhs would judge her status by her possessions and her gifts, and treat her accordingly. She did not forget the Druze Yahya Beg’s questioning the local villagers, “Have you seen a queen travelling?” She packed couture evening dresses, lawn blouses and linen riding skirts, cotton shirts and fur coats, sweaters and scarves, canvas and leather boots. Beneath layers of lacy petticoats she hid guns, cameras, and film, and wrapped up many pairs of binoculars and pistols as gifts for the more important sheikhs. She carried hats, veils, parasols, lavender soap, Egyptian cigarettes in a silver case, insect powder, maps, books, a Wedgwood dinner service, silver candlesticks and hairbrushes, crystal glasses, linen and blankets, folding tables, and a comfortable chair—as well as her travelling canvas bed and bath. She took two tents, one for Fattuh to put up the moment they pitched camp, so that she had a table to write on, the other with her bath, to be filled with hot water once there was a fire, and her bed, to be made up with the muslin sleeping bag laid out under the blankets. “I need not have hidden the cartridges in my boots!” she wrote home in January 1909. “We got through customs without having a single box opened.”

  Mapping the Euphrates in 1909, Gertrude examined sites for 450 miles along its banks before arriving in the area of Najaf and her destination, Karbala. Here, at Ukhaidir, she found an immense and beautiful palace in a remarkable state of repair. She would never forget her amazement at first gazing on its formidable walls and vaulted ceilings. For a time, when it was confirmed that her plan of the palace was the first to be made, she believed that she had discovered an unknown citadel: “No one knows of it, no one has seen it . . . It’s the greatest piece of luck that has ever happened to me . . . A subject so enchanting and so suggestive as the Palace of Ukhaidir is not likely to present itself more than once in a lifetime.”

  In 1910 she was to publish a preliminary paper on Ukhaidir in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, as well as giving a painstaking account of the building in her fifth book, covering her great expeditions of 1909 and 1910, Amurath to Amurath, which she copiously illustrated with her own photographs. But returning to the site in 1911, this time straight across the desert from Damascus to Hit, she found to her bitter disappointment that the long monograph she was about to publish, 168 pages of skilfully drawn plans and 166 photographs, would not be the first. In Babylon she discovered that some German archaeologists had been to the site during the two years of her absence, and were about to publish their own book. Her attitude to this setback demonstrated grace under pressure: she wrote in the preface to her book, The Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir, of her admiration for the “masterly” German volume, and apologized for offering a second version while explaining why she did so: “. . . my work, which was almost completed when the German volume came out, covers not only the ground traversed by my learned friends in Babylon, but also ground which they had neither leisure nor opportunity to explore . . . With this I must take leave of a field of study which formed for four years my principal occupation, as well as my chief delight.”

  Gertrude’s entry in the Prolegomena, the Who’s Who of archaeology, names her as “the remarkable pioneer woman of Byzantine architecture.” After publishing The Thousand and One Churches, about Binbirkilisse, in 1909, she concentrated on the high Anatolian plateau of the Tur Abdin, publishing the material she gathered there as her seventh book, The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur Abdin, in 1913. Gertrude had by now found her own archaeological viewpoint and argued persuasively against some of the convictions of Josef Strzygowski. Far from taking offence, though, he invited her to write an essay on the Tur Abdin in the journal he published with Max van Berchem, Amida, which she followed with a second essay in the Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Architektur, both illustrated by her plans and photographs.

  Leaving the Tur Abdin behind her, on that same trip she had made a small diversion to the archaeological site of Carchemish, the ancient southern capital of the Hittites. There she had hoped to see her old mentor and friend David Hogarth, but he had left. Instead she found a young man who would become part of her future life, as she would of his. On 18 April 1911 Gertrude wrote of him: “An interesting boy, he will make a traveller.”

  His name was T. E. Lawrence; and he was impressed by her, as she was by him. He wrote of the famous traveller to his mother back home in England that she was pleasant, about thirty-six—she was in fact forty-three—and not beautiful.

  Miss Gertrude Bell called last Sunday, and we showed her all our finds, and she told us all hers. We parted with mutual expressions of esteem: but she told Thompson his ideas of digging were prehistoric: and so we had to squash her with a display of erudition. She was taken (in 5 minutes) over Byzantine, Crusader, Roman, Hittite, and French architecture . . . and over Greek folklore, Assyrian architecture, and Mesopotamian Ethnology . . . prehistoric pottery and telephoto lenses, bronze age metal technique, Meredith, Anatole France and the Octobrists . . . the Young Turk movement, the construct state in Arabic, the price of riding camels, Assyrian burial-customs, and German methods of excavation with the Baghdad railway . . . This was a kind of hors d�
��oeuvre . . . she was getting more respectful.

  To David Hogarth he wrote more flatteringly, in a rather different vein: “Gerty has gone back to her tents to sleep. She has been a success: and a brave one.”

  In every expedition, there is a moment long remembered that catches in memory its essence. For Gertrude in 1911 this came at Ashur, in northern Mesopotamia some sixty miles south of Mosul. Sitting in solitude on a hilltop, she remained there for an hour, while in her mind’s eye she watched the history of civilization stream past:

  The whole world shone like a jewel, green crops, and blue waters and far away the gleaming snows of the mountains that bound Mesopotamia to the north . . . I considered that the history of Asia was spread out before me. Here Mithridates murdered the Greek generals, here Xenophon began to have his command, and just beyond the Zab the Greeks turned and defeated the archers of Mithridates, marching then on to Larissa, the mound of Nimrud, where Xenophon saw the great Assyrian city of Calah standing in ruins. Nimrud stood out among the cornfields at my feet. A little further and I could see the plain of Arbela where Alexander conquered Asia.

  We people of the west can always conquer, but we can never hold Asia—that seemed to me to be the legend written across the landscape.

  She was looking down on what would become Iraq, the country of which she would be the uncrowned queen. Curiously, she had also foretold its future, a future extending far beyond her own lifetime.

  *Engraver Heinrich Kiepert of Weimar was well known in the mid-nineteenth century for his precise maps.

  †A terai was a wide-brimmed felt hat, often with a double crown, worn by white men in subtropical regions. (The terai is a belt of marshy jungle between the Himalayan foothills and the plains.)

  *A Turkish title of respect (usually, effendi) applied to government officials and members of learned professions—necessarily male.

  *For food on one of his journeys, Lord Byron bought a couple of geese which accompanied him in a basket. He could never bring himself to have them killed, and so took them home at the end of the journey, where they spent the rest of their lives.

  *A random example from her visit to Constantinople that year: “As to the fall of Kiamil: it was quite unconstitutional: Kiamil tried a fall with the Committee and was beaten. As far as Sir A knows Ap 13 was due firstly to the Liberals—Ismail Kemal much to blame, he has not come up to expectation. Not unprobably they themselves founded or helped to found the Muhammidiyyah committee.”

  Seven

  DICK DOUGHTY-WYLIE

  Braver soldier never drew sword . . . Tenderness and pity filled his heart.

  In the summer of 1907, with her latest book just published, Gertrude was at Konya and Binbirkilisse in Turkey, working with Sir William Ramsay. Their association over this project, carried out as promised in 1905, entailed Gertrude’s willingly taking on the drudgery of the work, measuring and planning the buildings and working twelve-hour days while he supervised and interpreted. The resulting book, The Thousand and One Churches, published in 1909, is still the standard work on early Byzantine architecture in Anatolia. The reward, for Gertrude, was a prestige and credibility in the world of archaeology that she could have gained in no other way without years of study, and that many archaeologists would envy.

  Gertrude had great advantages as an archaeologist: her willingness to go into dangerous territories, the freedom with which she could pursue her independent and expensive ends, her energy, her enthusiasm. No mountain was too high; no site too well guarded by snakes, spiders, or mosquitoes; no journey too far for her, once she was on the scent. Ramsay wrote in the preface of the book, and in a letter to Florence, that the all-important date that she had spotted two years earlier in Binbirkilisse was concealed in a small cave, where it had hitherto been overlooked. He wrote of his admiration for Gertrude’s “thoroughness and alertness” in having noticed it, adding: “The chronology of the Thousand and One Churches centres round this text.” Compared to Ramsay, Gertrude was a gifted novice in the field. When David Hogarth had applied to work with him, the professor had packed him off to Greece to learn epigraphy. In extending his patronage to the eager student that was Gertrude, Ramsay may not have been entirely ingenuous. She was already famous for her expeditions and it was known that she was an heiress who might contribute financially to excavations.

  Gertrude had met up with her beloved servant from Aleppo, Fattuh, having arrived in Asia Minor in April. She wrote on the twenty-eighth:

  The seas and the hills are all full of legend and the valleys are scattered over with the ruins of the great rich Greek cities. Here is a page of history that . . . enters into the mind as no book can relate it . . . I don’t suppose there is anyone in the world happier than I am or any country more lovely than Asia Minor. I just mention these facts in passing so that you may bear them in mind.

  At Miletus she received a telegram from her half-sister Elsa to say that she was engaged to one Herbert Richmond. Florence’s follow-up letter arrived at the site of the ancient Carian city of Aphrodisias, where Gertrude was entranced by doorways decorated with scrolls of fruit and flowers entwined with birds and animals. She made her way along the shores of lakes and past peach and cherry trees under snow-covered mountains, the rough roads crossed by rushing streams which made the going difficult for the baggage animals. At the Lake of Egerdir she bought another horse for ten Turkish pounds, and persuaded a fisherman to row her out to a tiny island: “It was surrounded by ruined Byzantine walls dropping into the water in great blocks of masonry; here and there there was a bit of an older column . . . and they were densely populated by snakes.” Looking down at the lake below, she could see the glimmer of a fallen stone under the water that seemed to have an inscription on it. Brushing aside the snakes, she climbed down over the rocks and waded in: “I did all I knew to get the inscription. I tried to scrub the slime off the stone, but . . . the slime floated back and finally I gave up and came out very wet and more than a little annoyed.”

  With Fattuh, she crossed into Asia via the Roman roads, noting the many butterflies, and reached Konya. She was already at work at Binbirkilisse, “digging up churches,” when the Ramsays rumbled in on a couple of donkey carts with their son, who had come on a project for the British Museum. Mrs. Ramsay made tea while the professor, “oblivious of all other considerations,” immersed himself at once in what Gertrude was doing, as if continuing a conversation they had broken off only a moment or two earlier. “We think we have a Hittite settlement!” she wrote home on 25 May. “What gorgeous fun it’s being. You should see me directing the labours of 20 Turks and 4 Kurds!”

  Although she was now thirty-eight, she was in her prime. Love apart, she was fully realized and still—as Janet Hogarth had noted at Oxford—effervescently alive at all points. So good a time was she having that Florence probably took with a pinch of salt Gertrude’s scribbled protestation at the foot of a letter, “I’m horribly bored at not being at E’s wedding.” Happy and absorbed, she had no presentiment that she was about to meet the man who would prove to be the love of her life.

  Major Charles Hotham Montagu Doughty-Wylie of the Royal Welch Fusiliers—Richard, or “Dick” to his friends—was a quiet war hero who had won clasps and medals in battles both during the East African campaign of 1903 and before then. He was the nephew of the traveller Charles Montagu Doughty, the poet and geologist who had written the sonorous Arabia Deserta. The record of Doughty’s wild and dangerous adventures, written in rich majestic prose, the book was a kind of Bible to serious travellers in the Middle East. It was one of the books that Gertrude always took with her when she travelled.

  Dick Doughty-Wylie had been educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. In 1889, at twenty-one—he was the same age as Gertrude, almost to the day—he had joined up and gone on to serve in the British Egyptian army in China and in South and East Africa. He had been a transport officer in India, a mounted infantryman in South Africa, and in charge of a camel detachment in Somalia. A military p
hotograph shows him thin and moustached, tanned, taller, broader, and more handsome than many of his contemporaries, and with a chestful of medals. He had been badly wounded in the Boer War and again in Tientsin during the Chinese rebellion. He had married only three years before meeting Gertrude, in the year she had climbed the Matterhorn. His volatile and ambitious wife, Lilian, known outside the family as Judith, had been the widow of Lieutenant Henry Adams-Wylie of the Indian Medical Service. (She had demanded that both husbands add her surname to theirs.) In a photograph taken in Konya she sits in a garden chair, leaning forward looking pensively at the ground, her hands in her lap, the fingers tightly interlaced. Judith’s insistence, combined with Dick’s need for breathing space, had motivated his transfer to the diplomatic field, and he was now the British military consul at Konya. Gertrude made their acquaintance when she knocked at the door to pick up her mail.

  To Gertrude, at first, Doughty-Wylie was just the “charming young soldier” with the “quite pleasant little wife” who invited her to lunch in the shady garden of their Konya house. Gertrude arrived and was ushered into the garden with the other guests. After weeks of digging in the burning sun, she was tanned; her green eyes sparkled; wisps of her auburn hair, escaping from her straw hat, had faded to blonde. When crossing the desert she would habitually wear a pale-blue veil that she pulled down all round from the brim of her hat, but on the dig she needed to survey and inspect, and the veil got in the way. Judith’s skin was pale: she wore white, and tended to frills. She seldom ventured out without a parasol.