Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  America had recently entered the war, with a view to ending the carnage and limiting the devastating impact of the chain reaction that had affected so much of the world. President Woodrow Wilson had the support of his electorate in providing funds and troops to bring the war to an end, but no mandate to prop up old colonial regimes. Many Americans had themselves fled such old discriminatory tyrannies, and endorsed the spirit of self-determination that the President advocated. This spirit would permeate all discussions about the future of the Middle East.

  There was vital reconstruction to do. In many towns, public buildings and markets had to be rebuilt. Irrigation systems, roads, bridges, and railways had to be repaired and extended, telegraph communication established. Education and justice needed to be made available to all. Police had to be recruited and trained, crime discouraged, and the law defined—and applied—with due consideration for local religion and creed. Guns had to be collected: Gertrude describes the collection of fifty thousand rifles as “making a beginning.”

  Crucially, there was a lack of specialist administrators able to do these jobs. The army, India, and Egypt were ransacked for the most appropriate and capable man for each post; he would be an expert in his field but would almost certainly be ignorant of Iraq. At last a man would be located in a dusty Sudanese office or remote Indian province, and arrive at the docks or the station in a sweat-stained linen suit, be greeted with open arms, and rushed, almost before he had unpacked, to Gertrude’s office. There he would remain for some hours, while she explained the job as it would have to be done on the ground in a territory where each district was quite distinct from its neighbours ethnically, religiously, economically, and socially. Whatever the common policy, it had to be implemented sensitively and intelligently in ways that would suit the attitudes and skills, or lack of them, of the local people. She would explain the status quo, the problems of the specific community, and who was who. The newcomer would enter the debate thinking in terms of British priorities, but come out of it persuaded to think in terms of local needs. As a result, the policy developed in the capital did not, as so often happens, falter in its application to the real world. In the meeting of the two agendas, those of the administration and the population, Gertrude brought about compliance by knowing which benefits would purchase cooperation. As Oriental Secretary, a good part of her day was spent in trading government favours to smooth the path of the administration.

  No wonder that she wrote so often to her family that she could not take a holiday. She was holding the administration together. As Percy Cox wrote of Gertrude, “[She] had all the personnel and politics of the local communities at her fingers’ end.” Confronting the vacuum out of which he would be required to produce order, the new specialist, whatever his field, would be inspired to create the new world that would be Iraq. Gertrude was to write later:

  Any administration must bring to the task . . . singular integrity and diligence, combined with a just comprehension of the conflicting claims of different classes of the population. It must also command the confidence of the people so as to secure the co-operation of public opinion, without which so complex a tangle could not be unravelled.

  Gradually the administrators began to restructure the public life of central and southern Mesopotamia, the half that was under British control. They began with the rebuilding of the deserted ruin that was Kut, as a memorial to those who had given their lives in its defence, both the soldiers and the citizens who had starved to death or been killed after the retaking of the town by the Turks. The mosques and public buildings were repaired or rebuilt, and a splendid arcaded bazaar was erected on the riverbank so that buying and selling could begin again. The families of citizens who had been killed were given funds to rebuild their houses. It was an inspired act of public relations, and within a couple of months the population of Kut numbered two hundred.

  The priority was public hygiene. On entering Baghdad, the army had found it littered with corpses and running with rats, the drains in a state of collapse and water infested. Cholera had broken out. Latrines and incinerators were built and butcheries and markets inspected, chlorinated water provided, pest-control started. By mid-1918 there was a civil hospital or dispensary in each military station of any importance. A medical officer and his military assistant headed a small group of sanitary workers for the first year, but by 1919 there was a Secretary of Health running some fifty civil hospitals and dispensaries. That year there was an outbreak of plague. A vaccine depot ensured a supply sufficient to inoculate some eighty thousand people and the plague was checked: a triumph equalled by the success of the medical educators in convincing them of the need for vaccination. A new isolation hospital was built, an X-ray unit, a venereal hospital for women, and a dental institute, but the Health Department was burdened with the problem of the “pilgrim corpses,” foreigners imported into the country for burial at the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. Under Turkish practice, these corpses must have been buried for at least three months before being examined at the frontier. Even Gertrude baulked at the problem, and performed a quick sidestep around the issue. “The question of regulation of pilgrim and corpse traffic is a difficult and delicate one with many side issues, and will demand . . . very careful scrutiny and consideration.”

  Food was in short supply in the Baghdad and Basra vilayets. In the north, around Mosul where the Turks held on, ten thousand people died of starvation in the winter of 1917–18. The summer rains failed, and the closing of the Mosul road until the British occupation in October cut off all supplies of wheat and fruit to Baghdad. On the banks of the Tigris virtually all cultivation had been destroyed. There had been military action around Balad and Istabulat at the time when the crops were ripe: what the Turks had not eaten they burnt. Elsewhere, watercourses had been blocked to facilitate the building of roads and railways for the use of the army. Where canals existed, they were silted up. Karbala had been flooded, and the breaching of the Saqlawiyah dam had reduced the waters of the Euphrates to such a low level that the crops were unsuccessful. In other areas there was no oil for the pumps that put water into the irrigation systems.

  The man required to prevent famine and put the country back on its feet, the expert arriving in Basra in the sweat-stained linen suit, was Henry Dobbs, the Revenue Commissioner, direct from the fiscal department of the Indian Civil Service. The Revenue Department, wrote Gertrude, could more correctly be considered as the land agent of an estate, represented in this instance by Iraq, the proprietor being the government. Taxes had to be raised to fund all that needed to be done. Without agriculture, there could be no revenue. As virtually all trade had ceased in 1917 and famine was imminent, the only way of acquiring that income would be to tax the landowners, the farmers, and, ultimately, the produce. As neither the landowners nor the farmers had any cash for vegetable seed, cereals, animal fodder, or ploughs, the system had to be kickstarted. Cultivation had to be enforced, seed and cash provided up front, and tax collected when the crops matured and could be sold. Nevertheless, it was decided to reduce the taxes on some holdings, and even entirely suspend them on particularly poor ones.

  Initially, the ownership of land had to be established and recorded, no farmer being willing to produce food unless he had security of tenure, either as tenant or as landowner. Under Turkish rule, the provinces of Basra and Baghdad had been taxed by five independent government departments that interfered with the normal life of the people at every step, a system that invited peculation and corruption—an invitation, as Gertrude would drily warn Dobbs’s successors in Baghdad, that was seldom refused. Nor were Turkish obfuscations the only source of confusion. Landowners, in registering their land, liked to describe the boundaries in terms so vague that the area could not be assessed, and to submit the names of people who did not exist—“East, north, west and south, Haji Hasan Beg’s garden” was one example. The Sharia law of succession, too, generated ludicrous assessments of property and tax: “It has resulted in a subdivision of p
roperty so minute that there is a case on record where a single date tree and the land just sufficient to support it are owned by 21 persons in partnership,” Gertrude noted.

  It fell to Dobbs to gather together and try to make sense of the odd bits of paper left blowing on the floors of the hastily vacated Turkish offices responsible for recording title-deeds, and begin a new system of land registration. It was his job, next, to make cultivation possible by extending and controlling irrigation, clearing the canals, and distributing water from rivers that had a spring rise of twenty feet or more.

  Even the administrators were on iron rations. The food in the mess, where Gertrude ate during the working week, was rationed and monotonous. However little she complained, and whatever she put up with when she was travelling, she missed good food. A family friend, Colonel Frank Balfour, who later became Military Governor of Baghdad—Gertrude’s “beloved Frank”—tells the story of joining her in the mess one evening for dinner. When, for the fourteenth day running, the meal consisted of bully beef, Gertrude rather surprised him by throwing down her knife and fork in disgust and bursting into tears. She wrote to Chirol on 9 November 1918:

  We are put to it to feed ourselves, and it is hard to feel Herculean on biscuits . . . we’ve had no butter all the summer and when we have it it’s tinned. I’ve forgotten what potatoes taste like—the meat is almost too tough to eat, chickens ditto; milk tinned—how sick one gets of it! . . . when one’s feeling rather a poor thing one does hate it all . . . Heaven send us a good harvest next year.

  The responsibility for implementing the new agricultural policies lay with the political officers in the outlying provinces. Meetings of landowners were held, and the new Agricultural Development Scheme explained. British assistance would be given in terms of seed, cash, and irrigation, but if the landowners did not cooperate, they would lose their right to their share in the following harvest. If land was not cultivated over a period of time, it could be taken from them. Local political officers were allowed to dole out small punishments for such transgressions as, for instance, the breaching of irrigation regulations. Gertrude constantly urged caution and leniency, and her guidance was followed. In 1919 irrigation and agriculture were smoothly handed over to the civil authorities staffed by locals who were now in a position to assume those responsibilities. The scheme was, naturally, most successful in the better-controlled areas, but the spring crop of 1918 supplied the civil population as well as providing some fifty-five thousand tons of grain for the army. With forethought, extra seed had been stored against another lean year, but this could now be released to the Bedouin, and to the Kurds on both sides of the frontier. Mesopotamia was safe from starvation.

  From the Sudan legal department came Edgar Bonham-Carter, later Sir Edgar, to be appointed Senior Judicial Officer and then Judicial Secretary in Baghdad. Gertrude thought him a polite and formal person, “just a trifle desiccated,” but welcomed him sincerely. When the British had arrived in Baghdad they found the courts had ceased to function, the courtrooms had been looted, the Turkish judges, court staff, and records gone. The custom normally followed by an occupying administration is to leave in place, as far as possible, the systems with which the population is used to dealing. Having disappeared into his office for eight weeks of study, scrutinizing the stupendously complex system of Ottoman justice for what could be saved and calling in Gertrude to discuss tribal and religious law, Bonham-Carter emerged with his conclusion: the system failed to work on any level.

  The first change was to make Arabic the language for all legal proceedings: civil disputes, criminal cases, and family law with all its religious implications. A court of small causes and a Muhammadan law court were opened at once, providing a civil court alongside a traditional system based on the Koran and following Sharia law. Thirty more Muhammadan law courts were established and operated and used by Sunnis, but the Shias presented a particular problem in that they preferred to submit disputes to their own ecclesiastical leaders, the mujtahids. From now on Shia cases were transferred to the new courts of first instance, together with Jewish and Christian cases, where they could be tried by judges chosen by those communities.

  The intention was to set up sessions courts composed of British and Arab judges cooperating in the administration of justice. The difficulty was to provide British judges who spoke Arabic, or Arabs who were trained lawyers. Almost none of the Turkish judges had known any more law than the average clerk, and since their salaries were roughly commensurate with a clerk’s, they had been eager for bribes. It was said that there were only two honest judges in Mesopotamia—and bribery had remained the only way in which a citizen could obtain a judgement. There had been, before the war, one reputable school of law in Baghdad, and it was now reopened with the proviso that it must be conducted wholly in Arabic. Those students who had been unable to complete their four-year courses were invited back, and some fifty returned to become qualified.

  The myriad faults of Turkish law provided a textbook summary of what not to do. The number of judges was now reduced by necessity to those who were qualified, and their salaries increased to a respectable sum. The new criminal procedure code was based on the Sudan model, which had proved to be clear and workable. Four classes of criminal courts were established, with a court of appeal whose word was final. The beauty of the new judicial system lay in the detail and in the consideration for local conditions that it incorporated. Crimes had to be tried locally—and was it Gertrude who insisted that trials be held within camel- and donkey-ride distance of the accused and the witnesses? Cases must be resolved quickly: under the Turks, the law was so complex that in a case such as a load of dates found to be full of worms, the dispute might go on for three years. Punishments were made more lenient, and in remote areas, where tribal or village law was allowed to hold sway, the headman was forbidden to use the death sentence.

  For a “desiccated” administrator from the Sudan, Bonham-Carter displays in his writings an extraordinary grasp of the medieval rules of Iraqi tribal law—Gertrude again? For instance, he explains the ramifications of the family custom of murdering a daughter for sexual activity before marriage or a wife for adultery, and of the male lover going unpunished; or the traditional compensation for a tribal murder, payment of one virgin in addition to the blood money. Few British legal experts at the time could have comprehended the tendency of the tribal witness to be genuinely incapable of distinguishing between what he had himself observed and what he had been told or had been inferred. In cases of murder in which the motive was revenge or blood feud, the end was considered to justify the means. The family and friends of the victim would get together and agree on the identity of the murderer. To men brought up under the custom that the tribe is responsible for a murder committed by any one of its members, he writes, it must seem of comparatively little importance which tribesman did the deed: the tribal duty is revenge, a life for a life. Tribal law, reflected Gertrude, is no deterrent to crime.

  The new administrators of such a territory were bound to discover anomalies, some almost comic, as Gertrude pointed out in her Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia:

  The Turkish educational programme, as set forth in the official Turkish Education Year Book, full of maps and statistics, might have roused the envy . . . of the British . . . but for the knowledge that, provided a school were shown correctly as a dot on the map, the Turk cared not . . . whether the system of education pursued in it was that of Arnold of Rugby or of Mr. Wopsle’s great aunt.

  In the matter of girls’ education, the inevitably male teachers in the handful of schools for girls were regarded with intense suspicion by the community. Initial British sympathy for the teachers evaporated when they were found to be every bit as libidinous as suspected. They were swiftly replaced by women, and five schools opened for girls. In distant provinces, the officers were often confronted with bizarre problems. The only teacher at Diwaniyah was discovered to be unable to read or write, and the Kurdish edu
cation project was held up by the absence of a formulated grammar and orthography. It fell to the political officer and the education officer for Sulaimaniyah, Major Soane, and Captain Farrell, to sit down and puzzle out an elementary reader. In reversing the Turkish principle that only Sunnis were encouraged to go to school, the Education Department now welcomed boys of every creed into government schools, where they were taught in Arabic. Sunni, Shia, Christian, and Jewish communities were invited to send their own religious teachers to the schools so that religious instruction could be included in the syllabus.

  The Auqaf, or Department of Pious Bequests, was discovered to be the greatest landlord in Mesopotamia, despite which the Turks had left its treasury empty. Now under the auspices of the Judicial Department, its neglected properties and mosques were inspected, registered, and repaired, and—to the amazement of the population—its original intentions and obligations to the poor fulfilled. Bequests were used for the purposes intended, financial irregularities prevented, and a committee of leading Sunnis put in charge of the religious and academic aspects. Much of the Oudh bequest, a large sum of money donated to “deserving persons” in Karbala and Najaf by King Oudh in the mid-nineteenth century, had also found its way to Constantinople, and was now rerouted by the administration to its intended objects.

  Humphrey Bowman, the director of education, wrote a fleeting portrait of Gertrude in Baghdad at around this time, which leaves an indelible impression of her social position in Arab society. The occasion was an “at home” to some fifty Arab notables at the house of Sir Edgar Bonham-Carter. There were only one or two British guests. Bowman recorded:

  We were all sitting on chairs round the room as we do in the East, getting up whenever some special guest arrived. At last the door opened and Gertrude came in. She was beautifully dressed, as always, and looked very queenly. Everyone rose, and then she walked round the room, shaking hands with each Arab in turn and then saying a few appropriate words to each. Not only did she know them all by name . . . but she knew what to say to each.