Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  Being beautifully dressed was increasingly difficult. She often had to get up at dawn to mend her hard-washed clothes, but succeeded in looking well turned out even while working relentlessly, entertaining numbers of people at home, and dining out many evenings a week. While Cox, A.T., and all the men around her wore uniforms that were laundered and maintained by their servants daily, she was using up her thin summer dresses at a rate of three a day during the hottest weather. She wrote to Florence that she had been for four years without a maid: what she needed was someone to look after her clothes and tidy her house and make it attractive, a thing she couldn’t do when she was always working. “What I need is a wife!” she argued, like so many businesswomen after her, and with far more reason than most.

  Florence listened, sympathized, and began to work out a solution. She was also, perhaps, a little tired of constant clothes-shopping for her stepdaughter, and of finding that Gertrude’s requests were increasingly incompatible with what was available in the shops. Every trip that Florence, Elsa, or Molly made to central London must have been partly taken up with dress purchases for Gertrude: five striped muslin dresses requested in one post, a new linen riding habit, shoes by Yapp, tortoise-shell combs, chiffon veils, silk blouses in pale pink or ivory, a dozen pairs of thread stockings, flowered straw hats, satin evening gowns, riding boots, silk dressing gowns, all to be boxed up and sent by ship—a high proportion of them to be stolen en route, or lost at sea together with human life on torpedoed ships. Even when the promised clothes arrived, they could disappoint. In one such case, in a letter dated 26 May 1917, she did not mince her words: “I regret to say that one [of the gowns] which according to Moll’s pattern was intended for me to wear in the evening was no more an evening gown than it was a fur coat, and won’t do at all . . . It’s rather a blow, for I had a vision of some nice trailing muslin gowns with floating sleeves . . . I shall just have not to dine out when it gets hot.”

  Poor Moll was not at fault. As Florence adds in a postscript to this rebuke, since Gertrude had left England, fashion had changed. There were no more “trailing muslin gowns with floating sleeves,” for women were preferring narrower, shorter dresses and less cumbersome silhouettes as they shaped up for the roaring twenties.

  Gertrude found a partial answer to the problem through a French convent she passed on her early morning rides. One day she jumped off her horse and rang the bell to ask if they had any dressmakers. They had.

  The nuns are making me a muslin gown—it will be a monument of love and care, for I really believe they lie awake at night thinking what new stitches they can put into it . . . The “essayages” [fittings] are not like any other dressmaking I’ve ever known. I go in after riding before breakfast and stand in practically nothing but breeches and boots (for it’s hot) while the Mother Superior and the darling dressmaking sister, Soeur Renée . . . pin on bits of muslin. At our elbows a native lay sister bearing cups of coffee. We pause often while the Mother Superior and Soeur Renée discuss gravely what really is the fashion. The result is quite satisfactory. Soeur Renée isn’t a Frenchwoman for nothing.

  Dislike of “flapper” fashion was not the only way in which Gertrude had parted company with London life. Writing to her father on the third anniversary of the day she had said goodbye to Dick Doughty-Wylie, she found herself reliving their four days together minute by minute, and finding no inclination to return to a life that for her was over: “O Father Dearest . . . this sorrow at the back of everything deadens me in a way to all else, to whether I go home or whether I stay here” . . . “the drawback of England is that I don’t want to see any of my kind friends.” To Chirol, as always, she wrote the unvarnished truth. It was Christmas, 1917. “I have been wishing that I had been in Jerusalem this Xmas . . . Yes, I rather long for the grey hills of Judea—never for England, do you know. My England has gone.”

  Life in Sloane Street and Rounton, towards the end of the war, was hard enough for Hugh and Florence, too. Maurice had been invalided home from the front, a mixed blessing given that he returned almost totally deaf. He had always been hard of hearing, but now, in conversation with him, people had to shout to be heard. He retreated more and more into his country gentleman’s life of hunting, shooting, and fishing. The latest death to distress the Bells was that of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the husband of Gertrude’s cousin Florence Lascelles, while he was British ambassador in Washington. She wrote to both Florences, reserving for her stepmother a particularly touching expression of her affection and admiration. Florence’s patience, constancy, and uncomplaining endurance were no longer undervalued by her stepdaughter. Gertrude wrote on 28 March:

  Dearest Mother,

  I don’t think I have ever told you—though it is constantly in my mind, how much I admire your fortitude and your splendid determination to suffer whatever must be suffered and not give way before the end is won. You use no fine phrases and yet there’s not one of us who has shown a finer spirit. Your letters scarcely give any hint of the weariness of the long strain which I can guess at. It’s your courage which is so splendid and I can’t tell you how much I admire and love it.

  In 1918 Florence was made a Dame of the British Empire for her Red Cross work. Gertrude wrote at once to congratulate her. There was never a hint in her letters home that she would have liked such an honour herself, and after her reaction to her own CBE, her views on such orders were clear to all; but it is equally obvious that she too should have been made a dame, then or perhaps a little later.

  Gertrude was taking increasing pleasure in her garden home, which she was constantly improving. Her landlord, Musa Chalabi, had become a close friend with whom she could have a conversation about plants or a frank political debate. She sometimes borrowed a staff car and took him and his family out into the country for a weekend picnic, and one day he presented her with the garden in perpetuity, as a gift. Gertrude stipulated that they would always share it between them.

  The time came when she could collect a few animals, something she had never been able to do before. She bought a cock and four hens, and fretted because they laid so few eggs. Her old friend Fahad Beg, whose greyhound she had so admired on their first meeting, sent her two of his own: a present, very definitely not a bribe. She called them Richan and Najmah, the Feathered and the Star. On 30 November 1919 she wrote to Hugh and Florence:

  . . . two most beautiful Arab greyhounds . . . They had walked ten days down the Euphrates with two tribesmen to conduct them, and came in half starved. They are sitting beside me on my sofa as I write, after wandering about the room for half an hour whining. They are very gentle and friendly and I hope they will soon get accustomed to living in a garden instead of a tent.

  Richan was particularly naughty. Gertrude’s letters are peppered with his antics, how he would run off for days at a time, jump up on the pantry table and break the crockery, or roll on the flowerbed and destroy her nasturtiums.

  More than one of the sheikhs she met at work had tried to curry favour by presenting her with a gift, along the lines laid down in the days of Turkish administration. When one of them brought her an Arab horse, she gave it back with a smile and a shake of the head, but admitted to Cox that it had been a fine animal, and that she had longed to keep it. Before the week was out she had been “issued” by the Secretariat with a splendid mare. In 1920 she would add a pony, a little grey Arab: “He’s quite young and needs teaching, so we take nice confidential rides with the dogs before breakfast, and already he is improving. He is as clever as can be, jumps exquisitely and climbs in and out of water courses, his little feet never making a mistake.”

  The sheikhs, having got the message that the Khatun would not accept valuables, were put about to find an alternative. Two of them, whose problems she had already solved, now sent her a young gazelle. Nothing could have pleased her more. It ran free in the garden, consuming the dates that fell from the trees, and ate cucumbers from her hand. At night she would find it curled up on the veranda outside her be
droom. “It’s a darling little animal. I’m on the look out now for a mongoose,” she wrote. The mongoose soon arrived, via the young son of the Mayor of Baghdad. “It’s a most attractive little beast. It sat in my hand this morning and ate fried eggs like a Christian.”

  Since Cairo, Gertrude had been living in the East on her salary—£20 a month—and her generous annual allowance had been piling up at home, unused. Hugh had written to ask what she wanted done with it. Since the two things she craved—good food and well-made European clothing—were unavailable in Iraq, she wrote back with the lack of financial interest that is the prerogative of the very rich: “Last week you told me of the wealth which was lying at my bank. It’s quite preposterous . . . Always do what you think fit with any money of mine, including appropriating it. I don’t care, as I’ve observed before, a damn. It’s ever been a subject on which I can contrive no interest . . . If ever I want money I can always ask for some, bless you!”

  The climate continued to take its toll on her, and she had to retreat to the officers’ hospital, racked with chills and bronchitis in the cold weather and with heat exhaustion in the summer, together with recurring malaria. With the temperature above 120 degrees even at night, she took her bed onto the roof, where she dropped a sheet into a bucket of water and draped it around herself. When it dried, she would wake up and repeat the process. The rooms in the office were sluiced out two or three times a day. In the winter, she was sometimes driven to wearing two dresses, one on top of the other, and her fur coat over the lot. What with constant overwork, cigarettes, and heat-stress, she became extremely thin. When illness forced her to go into hospital, she chafed to be back at work. She learnt that if she came home too early, she would only have to return to convalesce. Not that she ever completely stopped working: she wrote position papers continuously, drafted a fortnightly diary for the government, and in November 1917 had taken on the editorship of the vernacular paper Al Arab. She thought she had now sampled quite enough tropical diseases, she told her parents, and intended to turn over a new leaf. Writing from her hospital bed, she thanked Hugh for a fabulous forty-ninth birthday present: “One of my few consolations is that your wonderful emerald is pinned on to the brooch which fastens my nightgown and I look at it with immense pleasure and think what a beloved Father you are.”

  About a month later, she received a letter from Florence, followed by a large box through the diplomatic bag: “there arrived a jeweller’s shop of brooches and pendants—the loveliest things—how could you reconcile it with your conscience, both of you, to run to such extravagance? Bless you both; they are exquisite and I expect will excite the unbounded admiration of Indian Expeditionary Force D.”

  Indian Expeditionary Force D had routed the Turks from Baghdad and southern Mesopotamia. But in mid-1917 the army still faced two hundred square miles of battleground in the north, their task to evict the enemy from the Mosul vilayet and from the border with Syria. For another year the Turks fought a rearguard action, stripping the land of food and anything else they could lift as they retreated through the historic breadbasket of Iraq. The advancing British were vulnerable to attacks on their communication and irrigation systems, and the Turks stood ready to flood back into any province that the British army proved insufficient to police.

  In Karbala, the local sheikhs who were temporarily running the administration were discovered to be conducting what Gertrude called “a brisk trade in supplies” to the enemy, through the desert. These individuals were deposed or pulled into line, and Gertrude’s friend Fahad Beg and his Bedouin confederation, the Anazeh, saw to the desert supply runners. In the other holy city, Najaf, the pressure of food shortage caused a local disturbance promoted by Turkish provocation. The tide turned in favour of the British, thanks to the Shias, who had been angered by the way the Turkish administration had treated their holy places. One of the political officers, Captain Marshall, was murdered, but the British responded sensitively: not a shot was fired into the town, and the shrine and holy sites were left undisturbed. Peace was restored, but Karbala and Najaf would continue to be the focus of political unrest.

  Throughout central and southern Mesopotamia, the British army provided an unlimited market for labour and for local produce—and, unlike their predecessors, they paid for it. The two southern vilayets of Baghdad and Basra were enjoying a level of prosperity unknown under the Ottoman Empire.

  Only Gertrude amongst the Baghdad staff was able to identify the multitude of races and creeds in the areas north, east, and west of Mosul. In the mountains, Arab tribes gave way to Kurdish, while west towards the desert were the Yazidis—devil-worshippers—a strange sect of whom Gertrude was particularly fond. Their sheikhs had the singular ability to pick up vipers, and their diviners were reputed to forecast the future. “The Devil Worshippers are tractable and amenable, though of loose morals,” she had written on her encounters with them, noting that in 1915 they had given shelter to a number of Armenian refugees. As well as the Kurdish tribes, there were a number of Christian sects of which the foremost were the Chaldeans, Jacobites, Nestorians, and Turkomans, who claimed descent from Tamerlane. On the left bank of the Tigris there lived, amongst a variety of bizarre groupings, Shabak and Sarli, the possessors of a secret faith; the Ali-Ilahis, the Tai, and a Jewish community. The pre-eminent Arab tribe were the Anazeh’s hereditary enemies, the Shammar, in the pay of the Turkish army and ready to attack convoys, blow up canal heads, raid, and loot whatever they could find.

  So carefully put together and administered, so successful in its occupation until the end of the war, the British government of Mesopotamia was about to be undermined by interminable delays while it waited for decisions not only on its future in Iraq, but, more fundamentally, on where the borders of Iraq were to be. Only when the victors assembled to settle the peace could anyone lay the ground for the people of Iraq to govern themselves with a firm prospect of independence. Without that prospect, many strands of minority dissent, often fomented by the Turks, would grow into outright revolt, threatening all the achievements of the previous three years. As Gertrude would write in 1920:

  The underlying truth of all criticism—and it’s what makes the critics so difficult to answer—[was] that we had promised self-governing institutions, and not only made no step towards them but were busily setting up something quite different. One of the [news]papers says, quite rightly, that we had promised an Arab government with British advisers, and had set up a British government with Arab advisers. That’s a perfectly fair statement.

  In September 1918, Cox, this most able of administrators, had been sent from Baghdad to Teheran. At this most explosive moment in the history of Iraq she was shackled to his former deputy A. T. Wilson as Acting Civil Commissioner, a boss whose high-handed tactics, punitive retaliation against dissidents, and preference for imperialist policies had brought home to her over the last twenty-four months the appalling truth: he had no sympathy for the policy of self-determination, and would do his best to undermine and prevent it. Where was Gertrude’s dream now?

  Thirteen

  ANGER

  It was the astute T. E. Lawrence who noted that one of Gertrude’s failings was a propensity to admire the people that she liked, only to disparage them later when she had fallen out with them. She had so far enjoyed a reasonably good working relationship with A. T. Wilson, both under the delicate handling of the fair-minded Cox. While he was the deputy, A.T. had conducted the day-to-day running and development of government, and she had been complementary to him in securing the commitment of the locals and in moulding the new regime to the realities on the ground. But A.T. always wanted to run his own show. He did not involve her in policy as Cox had done, nor did he consult her before making decisions. Furthermore, their attitudes towards the Arabs could not have been more different. A.T. dealt with their representations brusquely and paid their leaders, however distinguished, scant respect. She found this worse than embarrassing and, far more seriously, found herself radicall
y differing with her “colonial dinosaur” of a chief (as Lawrence had branded him). The very words “self-determination” outraged A.T., whereas the principle was enshrined in Gertrude’s heart: “. . . I might be able to help to keep things straight—if they’ll let me . . . We are having rather a windy time over self-determination . . . I wish very much that Sir Percy were here,” she wrote in January 1919.

  The First World War was over at last, and Gertrude, recovering from another bout of malaria, allowed herself some amusement of a characteristic variety. She steamed down the Tigris on a luxurious boat belonging to one of the generals, reading novels; attended a lecture on Abbasid history; and rode across the desert to view a ruin, escorted by thirty-two horsemen of the Bani Tamim tribe. She also flew in a plane for the first time: “For the first quarter of an hour I thought it the most alarming thing I had ever done . . . It was a windy day, the aeroplane wobbled a good deal. However, I presently became accustomed to it and was much interested and excited. I shall go up whenever I have an opportunity so as to grow quite used to it.”

  For the last year Hugh and Florence had been urging Gertrude to come home for a holiday, for the sake of her health, and avoid the scorching Baghdad summer. She had replied frequently that she could not leave while she was so badly needed. Now, excluded from most of his important meetings, she was forced to face the fact that A.T. did not depend on her. However, she told her family, she was needed by the Arabs, perhaps more than ever. Hugh wrote that he might, then, come to visit her in Baghdad, and the idea of showing him her world gave her enormous pleasure. As the time of Hugh’s visit came nearer, duty intervened in the shape of the Paris Peace Conference. It became clear that A.T. wanted her to cover the conference before his own arrival, to attend meetings, represent Mesopotamian interests, and keep him informed. It was settled that Gertrude would go to England first, then on to Paris, where Hugh would join her for a few days. She could hardly bear the thought of returning to London. She still felt no desire at all to see most of her friends or to visit her old haunts: everything would remind her of Dick Doughty-Wylie, the poignancy of their last days together, and the misery that followed. She knew her true friends would understand. She wrote to one of these, Lord Ullswater’s daughter Milly Lowther, that she was one of the few she wanted to meet. She had become close to Milly at the Wounded and Missing Office in London, after Doughty-Wylie’s death. “When I come back I shall want your help and understanding so much. It will be so difficult to pick up life in England; I dread it. You must give me a hand as you did before.”