Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  As the Turks retreated they destroyed their paperwork, and their beneficiaries went with them, taking their records and all trace of a system. They left behind only the animosity that they had fostered for so long. In the desert, particularly on either side of the Euphrates valley where they had partitioned the lands of some fifty tribes, they had pitted sheikh against sheikh and built on the destruction of native elements of order.

  The vacuum left by the departing power was complicated by the fact that the Turks were Sunni Muslims. They had given preference in almost every aspect of national life to Sunni personnel and culture and had taken into their own hands the immensely wealthy Muhammadan charitable trusts, or Auqaf, in the form of property dedicated in perpetuity to pious purposes. Ignoring the intended beneficiaries, the Turks devoted the income accruing from this to the building of new Sunni mosques and to the salaries of those employed in them. The object of the exercise was to remit as much money as possible to Constantinople. One effect of this policy was that Shia mosques and properties were allowed to fall into ruin. The historic enmities between the majority Shia population and the Sunnis were thus deepened.

  The British administration would be able to establish a government of any kind only if it won a largely united backing. In a land where there were perhaps more races, creeds, and allegiances than anywhere else in the world, it had to identify and engage every prominent man capable of persuading his adherents to cooperate. It had to persuade them of the benefits of the new economic initiatives and regulations. Disparate in character and education, traditionally susceptible to corruption of every sort, jealous of their position to the point of enmity with every neighbour, these leaders came to the Secretariat from ragged tents as well as Baghdad palaces. They had held sway under the Ottoman Empire by reason of wealth or the number of their followers, by land ownership imposed by the Turks or won in tribal wars, or by inheritance and descent from the Prophet. From the most promising of these, Cox and Gertrude hoped against all the odds to find Iraq’s future administrators and political leaders.

  During the spring and summer of 1917, the British Indian army was fully occupied in consolidating its position round Baghdad, which left no detachments for outlying areas. The Turks were dispensing virulent anti-British propaganda, as well as a flow of money to potential dissidents. It was hard for the tribes to believe that the new occupiers of Baghdad would hold on to their conquest, or that the Turks would not eventually return, ready to exact a horrible revenge on all who had placed their trust in the British. The first overtures of the sheikhs and other Mesopotamian notables were made in the spirit of insurance in case the British should stay. The single incentive for joining forces with the British remained the Arab prize of self-determination, so far the vaguest of concepts. To the Shia mujtahids, the religious representatives of the biggest proportion of the population, it meant a theocratic state under Sharia law; to the Sunnis and free-thinkers of Baghdad it meant an independent Arab state under an amir; to the tribes in the deserts and mountains it meant no government at all.

  It was shortage of food that brought more tribes over to the administration, now in command of central transport and distribution. They were warmly welcomed by Gertrude, whatever their political or personal past: “Today there rolled in a whole band of sheikhs from the Euphrates. Most of them I hadn’t seen before, though I know them all well by name and by exploit; hard-bitten rogues—but so attractive!—It’s all to the good, especially if we can get them to sowing wheat and barley this winter,” she wrote on 2 February.

  Once face-to-face with Gertrude and then Cox, they had to be convinced that British administration would be benevolent, that their rights would be maintained, and that the British were prepared for the huge expenditure in both effort and money that would secure their various ways of life. They were welcomed, listened to, their situations comprehended. Word spread, and enormous numbers now descended on Cox’s new Secretariat to lodge their separate interests—nomadic tribesmen, traders, farmers, landowners, owners of wells and watercourses, importers of tobacco and other goods, exporters, businessmen, religious representatives, figureheads of every kind had to be persuaded to support the new regime. Each one had to be met with proper traditional courtesies, such as the giving of small presents, and lengthy discussions had to take place. If they did not make the first approach, they had to be invited, and the most distinguished, particularly the religious leaders, had to be visited.

  Who was there, other than Gertrude, who would recognize and be recognized by so many of them, who could identify their status and interests, who could interview them in their own language or dialect, who could assess and reassure them?

  Perhaps no other Westerner understood as thoroughly as Gertrude how these people had emerged from their history. She was an expert on the Bedouin who, since before the Prophet, had flowed for centuries out of the meagre lands of the Yemen into the desert, carrying the few dates, clothes, and arms that they could trade. She had described their journeys from village to village, oasis to oasis, to the towns, selling off their camels in the northern market-places as they arrived. Reaching the fertile lands of the Euphrates and the Tigris, they had begun to breed a few sheep on the fringes of the grass. She had followed the settlement of those who, having made a little money, had been able to move to watered land and start to farm. She knew the new generations of Bedouin who had begun to trade in grain and goods brought from across the desert, numbering among her friends many who had continued as nomads as well as those who had settled down, and the increasing number who had begun to divide their year between the two ways of life. She had watched the bigger traders, attracted by the markets, learning to manipulate the economy as the cities grew in size and importance. She had been befriended by the Christian professionals, clerks, and teachers who had come from southern Russia and the Mediterranean. She had travelled among the mountainous tribes of the north as they adapted from a life of fighting to one of farming. She had appreciated the hospitality of the Kurds and noted the explosive mix of races and religions in the unmapped northern territory they shared with the historic peoples of Armenia, Assyria, Turkey, and northern Persia. She understood the hereditary lines of Arab families. She knew just how to approach a mujtahid or a Sunni cleric, a mullah, a mukhtar or a mutawalli.

  To the people queuing up outside her office, Gertrude was more than an administrator. She was someone they could trust. She had never lied to them, had respected them and their ways to the point of entrusting her life to them when travelling alone in their lands. To the Arab-speaking visitors demanding interviews, Sir Percy Cox was “Kokus”; but Gertrude was greeted as “Khatun”—desert queen—or “Umm al Muminin,” Mother of the Faithful, after Ayishah, the wife of the Prophet. She was the one with whom everyone wanted to make first contact, and whose blessing they sought. She used these overtures not just to win trust for the administration, but for the sake of peace and prosperity, to improve relationships between the people. She was doing the most important work she had ever undertaken.

  A boisterous character and tremendous admirer of Gertrude’s, Fahad Beg ibn Hadhdbal, now arrived in Baghdad. The paramount sheikh of the confederation of the Anazeh in the north-west of Amara, he was an “almighty swell” bent with ferocious determination on acquiring a set of false teeth. Ronald Storrs, now a firm friend of Gertrude’s, was in Baghdad for a fortnight’s visit and coincided with the eruption into the capital of this magnetic figure. He observed the meeting between Fahad Beg and Gertrude, and told Cox that the sheikh’s affection for her was “almost compromising.” As Gertrude wrote, “Fahad Beg and I had the most tenderly affectionate meeting . . . N.B. Fahad Beg is 75 bien sonné—but a dear, and so wise in desert politics.”

  The sheikh was one of those Bedouin prepared to embrace modern life. He owned extensive palm gardens near Karbala, which brought him a good income, but reverted to his nomadic life for six months of the year. She had paid her respects to him in the desert on her way back to Dam
ascus from Hayyil in 1914, narrowly missing one of his many ghazzus against the pro-Turkish Shammar tribe. He had received her “with a kindness almost fatherly and I loved being with him.” They had sat on beautiful carpets in his tent, where she had admired his hawk and the magnificent greyhound stretched out at his feet, and been introduced to his latest wife and baby. The following night he had paid a return visit to her tent, followed by a procession of slaves carrying the best dinner she had enjoyed for months, and they had talked politics under the stars.

  He now told Gertrude that parties of Turkish and German officers had been approaching his tribe with bags of gold, attempting to buy Anazeh allegiance. At her request he sent a message to his son in the desert, forbidding the enemy’s caravans to cross the territory and ordering that all trade with them should stop. She set up a conference for him with Cox and Wilson, for whose benefit he recalled the powerful effect on him produced by one of her letters:

  “. . . I summoned my sheikhs” he wound up (I feeling more and more of a Person as he proceeded) “I read them your letter and I said to them Oh Sheikhs”—we hung upon his words—“This is a woman—what must the men be like!”

  This delicious peroration restored me to my true place in the twinkling of an eye.

  Complete with new teeth, he made ready to return to the desert. Before he left, she took him to the Baghdad aeroplane base where, for the first time, he saw planes and watched a flying display. Then she led him onto one of the grounded planes to inspect the cockpit. The battle-scarred old warrior took a hesitant step or two inside before exhorting her: “ ‘Don’t let it go away!’ ”

  However much she loved Iraq and its people, the climate did not suit Gertrude, and her health suffered. Sometimes in summer the temperature rose above 120 degrees, and in the winter it could be so cold and wet that she had to wear her furs all day. The Secretariat, accordingly, had its summer and its winter quarters. She particularly enjoyed moving into the winter quarters, out of dark, cool rooms into sunny ones open to the air. Gertrude made her offices charming, not only because she liked them that way but because of her constant stream of visitors. She wrote:

  Our office is a wonderful place . . . two big houses built round courtyards on the river. Mine is all shielded with mats and blinds against the sun and is wonderfully cool. It has a writing table and a big map table, a sofa and some chairs with white cotton covers and lovely bits of Persian brocade over them, 2 or 3 very good rugs on the brick floor and a couple of exquisite old Persian glass vases on top of the black wood book-case. The walls covered with maps . . . Maps are my passion; I like to see the world with which I’m dealing, and everyone comes round to my room for geography.

  On the veranda that ran round the courtyard sat a row of kavasses, office servants in khaki uniform, ready to run messages. The office of Major May, the financial adviser, was across the courtyard from Gertrude and next to the cipher room. A tame peacock that had somehow attached itself to the Secretariat liked to sit in his office, but occasionally looked in on Gertrude.

  Arnold Wilson, Cox’s deputy—or A.T., as Gertrude always called him—occupied the room next to hers. It would be difficult to say which of them was the greater workaholic. Both the rooms were thick with cigarette smoke, stirred into ghostly whirlpools by the slowly turning ceiling fans. A.T., his chair creaking under his Herculean weight, would flail through his paperwork. Sometimes he worked until late at night, snatching a few hours of sleep on the floor before beginning again at first light. Initially he baulked at the inclusion of a woman in what he considered should be a masculine administration. She wrote of him to her family a little later: “I had a difficult time when I first came out here, you know; it makes me laugh now to think of it . . . [A.T.] began by regarding me as ‘a born intriguer,’ and I, not unnaturally, regarded him with some suspicion, knowing that that was his opinion of me . . . I think I’ve helped to educate him a little.” Gertrude, between her streams of visitors, wrote end-to-end reports and position papers, now widely acknowledged as the clearest and most readable of all the official documents the Arab Bureau produced.

  The half-dozen British running the government with Cox were not Arabists and knew little of Iraq. Unfamiliar with the ways of the locals and their needs, they reported at this stage to the army chief-of-staff in Mesopotamia, then later to the India Office in London. Support was needed in terms of men, supplies, and money from the British governments in Delhi, Cairo, Khartoum, and London. Friendly relations had to be maintained with the newly emerging kingdom of Ibn Saud and with the sheikhdoms of Kuwait and Muhammarah. The eastern border with Persia and its unstable government was rent with tribal disloyalties, and in the west the British were trying to resolve borders with the territory of Syria. Every department of the new government was engaged in tailoring its policies to local custom and to circumstances on the ground, and at the same time in justifying them to Delhi or London, and to the local military command.

  Gertrude was the communicating mastermind. At times she would be writing seven articles at once, and whenever relevant she sought to remind the War Office of the promises made to the Arabs and of the obligation to consider their welfare. Her life was now increasingly dedicated to finding a way in which those obligations could be met with credit and advantage to Britain, the West, and the rest of the world.

  In October 1917 she was made a Commander of the new Order of the British Empire, an award that could be made to women as well as to men. The first she heard of it was in a letter from Hugh and Florence. Then followed congratulations from Sir Reginald Wingate, the new High Commissioner in Egypt, and a deluge of good wishes from friends and colleagues. Gertrude’s reaction was curmudgeonly. Much as she loved tributes from unusual quarters, the least expected the better, she was entirely self-motivated and pursued her chosen path uninfluenced by praise and undeterred by criticism. Any suggestion that her motive was love of honour or title was abhorrent to her. Brought up in a tradition of public service, even as a schoolgirl she had regretted that her grandfather had seen fit to accept a baronetcy. She looked up the names of the others who had been awarded a CBE, and was unimpressed. “I don’t really care a button . . . It’s rather absurd, and as far as I can see from the lists there doesn’t appear to be much damned merit about this new order.”

  She had, perhaps, seen too much of inept officialdom in Europe and the Middle East to treat this formal recognition of her abilities with anything like awe. The fact that she was a woman, she thought, had nothing to do with it. She showed little interest, again, when she was awarded in March 1918 the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for her journey to Hayyil, but in this case she was being recognized for a particularly dangerous achievement and was accordingly more courteous—“it’s far too great an honour.” Though only four years ago, that journey seemed to her already to belong to a distant past, almost to another life. Hugh attended the Geographical Society dinner in London in her place, accepted the medal, and wrote her a lively account of the evening. These two honours provoked a surge of new interest in her and in what she was doing in the East, and the Bells were constantly being asked for interviews about her. She still discounted public adulation, and condemned “the whole advertisement business.” She told Hugh and Florence in no uncertain terms that they were never to cooperate with the press: “Please, please don’t supply information about me or photographs of me to newspaper correspondents. I’ve said this so often before that I thought you understood . . . I always throw all letters asking for an interview or a photograph straight into the waste paper basket and I beg you to do the same on my behalf.”

  Traditionally, where the British Empire had established its rule over newly infiltrated nations, it had superimposed its own concepts of justice, administration, language, and military control, including the peculiarly British notion of public service free of corruption. By the time the British moved into Iraq, they no longer had the money, will, or manpower to provide an overarching imperial structure,
having exhausted all their resources in fighting the world war. Their main objects were the defeat of the Turks and their German allies, and the protection of British oil interests. Once the Turkish army had been destroyed, the British could have retreated to the stronghold of Basra to secure their oil supplies and left the rest of the population to anarchy and starvation. This economically sound approach was heartily advocated by influential politicians in London and Delhi, including Winston Churchill, then Minister of Munitions and soon to be Secretary of State for the Colonies. But at the same time, amongst the British administration and emanating from the Secretariat, there emerged a strong sense of responsibility for the inhabitants and a pride in securing good government for them after the abuses they had suffered at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. As the British took hold of more and more of Mesopotamia, attitudes towards them changed. Little by little, the population began to see improvements in their conditions, and that the British meant to do well by them. They saw that their taxes were fed back into their communities and not siphoned off to pay the occupying army or to send to London.