Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  At this most inconvenient moment she fell ill again with bronchitis, and had to resign herself to vacating the office for nearly a week. She was not, however, allowed to disappear altogether. The summer-house in the garden received visitors at all hours, ostensibly to enquire after her state of health, in reality to pour out their fears and aspirations. Gertrude gave up any hopes of a quiet recovery. She donned her dressing gown, and in this most unsuitable of attire received a party of the distinguished Muslims of Baghdad, including the Mayor and the son of the elderly Naqib, one of the most important religious nobles in Iraq. Neither could Cox do without her. He called a special meeting to discuss the appointment of Arab ministers and British advisers, and held it in Gertrude’s drawing-room.

  Back at the office, she received a visit from her friend Fahad Beg, now not far short of eighty, who informed her that he had acquired two more wives. She gave a garden party for him at which, at one point, he opened his robes to show off a huge hole in his chest, acquired in a youthful ghazzu when a lance was thrust right through his body. The gasps and screams of the ladies were most gratifying.

  Meanwhile Cox had made out a list of trusted and representative Arab candidates. The first Cabinet choice, without question, would be the Naqib of Baghdad, His Reverence Sayyid Abdul Rahman Effendi. Elderly and venerated, he was also the head of the Sunni community. He, like Faisal, traced his descent from the Prophet, and was custodian of the holy shrine of Abdul Qadir Gilani. He was a good friend of Gertrude’s: he liked to talk with her, and she often visited his wife and sisters. “Abdul Rahman Effendi’s friendship takes an agreeably tangible expression!” she wrote. “He sends in weekly a great basket of fruit from his estate—at this season it’s filled with huge white grapes.” However, the Naqib lived in dignified religious seclusion, and she thought it unlikely that he would accept their suggestion. Cox went to see him, and after a short delay, and to everyone’s pleasure, he did agree. He would now undertake the formation of the provisional government.

  In no time at all he had invited eighteen men to form the Council of State, and it was installed in the Serai, the grand old Turkish offices. One of the most prominent figures was Faisal’s army commander in the Revolt and his supporter in Syria, Jafar Pasha el Askeri. Soon after him came his brother-in-law, Nuri Pasha Said, a more formidable individual whom Gertrude came to admire as she got to know him. These were the first of the pro-independence figures to be repatriated to Baghdad at the government’s expense after the collapse of the Arab regime in Damascus. Jafar Pasha, a Baghdadi Arab with a command of eight languages, was invited by the Naqib to become Minister of Defence, and to focus on forming a native army to relieve the British. It was when he had heard of the public hanging by Jemal Pasha in Damascus of his Syrian nationalist friends that he had changed sides and thrown in his lot with the Arab forces. Gertrude commented: “I wish there were more people of his integrity and moderation.” After his experiences with Faisal in Syria he had, he admitted to Gertrude, many misgivings in agreeing to join the Cabinet. She promised him that, in the end, complete independence was what the British government hoped to give Iraq. “ ‘My Lady’ he answered—we were speaking Arabic—‘complete independence is never given; it is always taken’—a profound saying.”

  There was, inevitably, immediate trouble from the Shias, not only because they looked on the Cabinet as of British parentage, but because it contained fewer Shias than Sunnis. Shias, Gertrude pointed out to all protesters, were almost all subjects of Persia, and not eligible for office in a Mesopotamian government. Shortly, a Shia of Karbala accepted the Ministry of Education, which the Naqib had been induced to offer him.

  The provisional Cabinet was to run the country while it prepared for the first general election. One of Gertrude’s jobs was to suggest some kind of voting system to put before the Electoral Law Committee, one that would be reasonably fair and representative. She noted: “Cox sent an admirable letter to the Council saying that in the election assembly which was to decide on the future of Iraq every section of the community must be represented and that he must be able to assure his Govt. that this was the case.”

  She had to overcome the problem that the big landowners in the Council would do their best to exclude the tribes from the voting process. Sasun Effendi Eskail, the head of the Jewish community, and Daud Yusafani of Mosul came to talk the matter over. “We were all agreed,” she wrote, “that it would be disastrous if the tribesmen were to swamp the townsmen, but I pressed upon them the consideration that . . . an Arab National Government could not hope to succeed unless it ultimately contrived to associate the tribesmen with its endeavours.”

  Her first idea was to include thirty tribal members in the election assembly, one each from the twenty largest tribes, and the other ten representing smaller ones. Jafar Pasha and Sasun came to her with a different scheme: they proposed two tribal representatives for each division of Iraq, but any tribesman who liked to register could vote in the ordinary way. She was delighted, no less that the Cabinet had produced a better scheme than that it had secured a minimum of ten tribal members in the assembly. At the first meeting of the Council of State of the first Arab government in Mesopotamia since the Abbasids, her excitement was intense.

  The first job of the Council was to pacify the country. The violence continued along the Euphrates and in the north, where RAF planes were bombing tribesmen who continued to attack outlying British garrisons. Cox was determined to secure peace before taking another step, and to that end put down the disturbances with all the force he could muster—a task made easier by the additional troops from India now at his disposal. A general amnesty was promised for the leaders of this later revolt, but Cox would not grant it until the tribes submitted. Gertrude urged him to proceed with it at once: she wanted the British to have the kudos of taking the step themselves and to avoid looking as though they were giving way to Arab pressure. She wrote to Chirol: “Sunni opinion [in Iraq] is veering . . . in favour of a Turkish prince. I don’t like it, but I’m prepared to accept it. I’m prepared to accept anything which promises immediate stability . . .”

  Peace and stability for Iraq was her consistent aim, so that the life of the ordinary people could prosper. The tribal violence against the British was a bitter pill for her to swallow. The blame lay as much with A.T.’s discredited administration as with the Western powers and their interminable delays in delivering the promised self-determination. She had fumed at both, and now had to suffer the consequences. She hated the bombing and the burning. At the same time she agreed with Cox that a debutante Arab government could not have coped with a raging insurgency, and reluctantly supported him in taking tough measures to bring about peace. Her apparent readiness to accept a Turkish prince, if that was the wish of a future democratic Iraq, is less surprising in view of a humorous remark she made in a letter to Hardinge at an exasperated moment: “I sometimes wonder whether we should not have done better to leave the Arab provinces under the nominal suzerainty of Turkey, the birth of new states is attended with so much travail!”

  In any case, democracy meant accepting the expressed wish of the people, without flinching. In a letter to Hugh of 18 December 1920 she wrote: “I said the matter was entirely in their hands, we didn’t care whom they put up as Amir or what kind of Govt. they selected to have, provided we felt sure the choice was freely and fairly made without pressure or intimidation.”

  In this she was not being quite honest. She knew exactly the King she wanted for Mesopotamia. Only a week later she wrote to her father: “I feel quite clear in my own mind that there is only one workable solution, a son of the Sharif and for choice Faisal: very very much the first choice.”

  *The Sultans of Constantinople had appropriated the role of Caliph in the eighteenth century.

  *The Treaty of Versailles, deriving from the Paris Peace Conference, established peace terms with Germany; the Treaty of Sèvres, a year later, settled the peace terms with Turkey.

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  CORONATION

  In this preference, she had important allies. Churchill, the new Secretary of State for the Colonies, had picked Lawrence as his adviser on Arabian affairs. Lawrence, like Gertrude, had been shaken by the betrayal of Faisal by the French, and wanted to assuage his feelings of guilt and responsibility for what had happened in Syria. Like Gertrude, he thought Faisal the best solution for the crown of Iraq. The French, however, had to be sounded out first. The result, as Lawrence was soon to inform Churchill, then on a painting holiday in the South of France, was a condition: Faisal must give up all claims to Syria and all support for the Syrian nationalists. Faisal had agreed, and was ready to abandon his father’s claims to Palestine in return for the throne of Iraq for himself, and that of the newly created Transjordan for his brother Abdullah.

  Churchill, however, had a more urgent administrative task: to reduce substantially the taxpayers’ £37 million bill for the military control of the Middle East, and the enormous cost of policing Iraq. To that end he summoned Iraq’s British officials to meet him for a conference in Cairo.

  The ten-day conference began on 12 March 1921, its object to consider the Middle East in all its aspects. In Iraq, Cox had to a large extent quelled the uprising of the previous month, and was as determined as Churchill that the next step towards independent Arab government must not be delayed. Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard of the RAF attended, as did Kinahan Cornwallis, the intelligence expert who had lately run the Arab Bureau and was now attached to the finance ministry in Egypt, and Major-General Sir Edmund Ironside, commander of the troops in Persia. Sir Percy’s party of six included Gertrude, Jafar Pasha, and Sasun Effendi Eskail, the Jewish businessman who was now the Minister of Finance. Also there would be A. T. Wilson, now working in the oil business—which would not prevent him from taking a prominent seat in the official group photograph, leaving Gertrude to stand in the background.

  Lawrence met the Iraq delegation at Cairo station. Since Gertrude had last seen him at the Peace Conference, he had become world-famous, thanks to the efforts of the journalist Lowell Thomas, who had written his biography and now toured the world giving lectures and press briefings about his hero. Lawrence was both tortured and flattered by the publicity—reviling it while having been spotted slipping into the back row of a cinema to watch a film feature about himself. For the first time, he was more widely known than Gertrude—not that she could have cared less. They dodged into her room in the Semiramis Hotel, and she began by taking him to task for some of his comments to the press, some praising, some criticizing the work of the civil administration in Baghdad. Just as Cox had been straining every sinew to put down the insurgents, Lawrence had written in an article in the Sunday Times: “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows.” She confronted him with this, and with his accusations that the English language had been forced on Iraq: these were lies, she told him, and he knew it. “Tosh!”

  But they were still great friends, still the old Intrusives, both now among the major movers in the Middle East and both determined to see Faisal King of Iraq. When Lawrence left, Gertrude paid a short visit to Churchill and his wife, Clementine, in their suite, and the next day they got down to work.

  Cox told Churchill that the provisional Council of State, which reported to the British, must soon be replaced by a new authority, preferably an Arab ruler. There were several candidates, Gertrude told him: the Sunni leader the Naqib, Sayyid Abdul Rahman, aged and sure to refuse; a Turkish prince; the Sheikh of Muhammarah. Then there were the two strong contenders, Faisal and the less salubrious Sayyid Talib.

  Talib, the son of the Naqib of Basra, was a formidable figure, locally popular, politically astute, and once described by Gertrude as “a rogue.” At present Minister of the Interior, he had been very put out not to have been included in the Cairo delegation. He was a known murderer—at least known to have had people murdered—and had attempted to sell his services at an extravagant price to either the Turks or the British during the war. He had been imprisoned in India but was eventually released through the intervention of A. T. Wilson and the British administration in Baghdad: he was, after all, from an important Iraqi family, his father the head of the powerful Sunni faction in southern Iraq. He had recently cooperated with the British in stifling the revolt in Baghdad and Basra, and had attempted to insinuate himself with Gertrude the night before she had left for Cairo, as she recounted afterwards:

  Amid potations of whisky he whispered in my ear in increasingly maudlin tones that he had always regarded me as his sister, always followed my advice and now saw in me his sole support and stay. And I, feeling profoundly that his ambitions never will and never should be fulfilled, could do nothing but murmur colourless expressions of friendship.

  Cox, Gertrude, and Lawrence put their case for Faisal to the Conference. He was a war hero, a brave ally of the British during the Revolt. He was honourable and inspiring—and available. Churchill also liked the fact that Faisal would give the British leverage over his father Sharif Hussain and his brother Abdullah. He agreed. The vote was cast in Faisal’s favour. Churchill cabled home to stress what was for him the chief point: “Sharif’s son Faisal offers hope of best and cheapest solution.” “We covered more work in a fortnight than has ever before been got through in a year,” Gertrude wrote to Frank Balfour on the 25th. “Mr. Churchill was admirable, most ready to meet everyone halfway and masterly alike in guiding a big political meeting and in conducting small political committees into which we broke up.”

  Gertrude’s Iraq was beginning to take shape. The small committee into which she, Cox, Lawrence, and the Iraqi ministers now formed set themselves to work out the timing and the geography. As a Sunni ruler in a country with a Shia majority, the Amir’s descent from the Prophet would be his trump card. He should immediately be invited to Baghdad, before elections for a ruler started. He would need to go to Mecca first, and have his candidature announced from there. Support would grow as he progressed east. Churchill wired home: “Both Cox and Miss Bell agree that if procedure is followed, appearance of Faisal in Mesopotamia will lead to his general adoption.”

  The second big issue for discussion, as far as Gertrude was concerned, was Palestine. Churchill was faced with many conflicting issues: he had to establish with the French a satisfactory border between Palestine and Syria, and another in the south between Palestine and Egypt. He had to honour the promise of a homeland for Jews while sustaining the promise to the half million Arabs living in Palestine that they would have their own self-determination. Furthermore, whatever government he provided for Palestine must cost Britain less than the present £6 million a year. As the conference progressed, he believed a solution had emerged. East of the river Jordan, a new Arab state would be created. Eventually called Transjordan, it would have an Arab government and Abdullah would be invited to be its ruler. West of the Jordan, Jews would be allowed to settle amongst the Arabs but the British would remain in control under the mandate. In addition, it was probably Lawrence who most influenced him to extend the border of the mandate south to Aqaba and drive a wedge between the ever more threatening Ibn Saud and the British in Egypt.

  He instructed Herbert Samuel, High Commissioner in Palestine, to restrict his responsibilities to the lands to the west of Jordan, which the Jews would settle, and gave him a Jewish force to defend it. Gertrude thought this a recipe for disaster. She agreed with the comments of Sir Wyndham Deedes, an idealistic Zionist who could not disguise his alarm at the decisions being taken concerning Palestine. In a private conversation, Deedes had been heard to burst out with: “Have we a policy? Does our Government know where it is going? If you ask Mr. Churchill what he thought would be the position in these Arab countries in 20 years’ time, could he give you the most shadowy answer? He does not know; he does not think; th
ere is no coordination in what we are doing.”

  Gertrude was forthright in her opposition to Zionism from first to last. She wrote to Domnul: “The French in Syria, Zionism in Palestine, form a stupendous barrier to honest dealing with the Arabs; only in Mesopotamia can we pursue an honest policy . . . The impasse in Palestine differs very considerably from that which has been reached in Syria; there is a quite obvious way out, namely the abandonment of the Zionist policy.” She was right in her predictions. As early as July 1922 the Arabs would refuse to recognize the Balfour Declaration, reject the Palestinian mandate given to Britain by the League of Nations, and Jews would be massacred in their settlements by Arab mobs.

  Once the Conference was over, Gertrude was joined for a few days by her father. Like Churchill, he wanted to talk finance. Her grandfather’s empire was on the point of collapse. The share values of the Dorman Long Company, in which Sir Hugh and Sir Arthur Dorman owned the most stocks, had begun to fall. To boost the price of the shares, each had begun to buy them up, but the decline of the company only accelerated. For the first time, Gertrude felt that she too had to turn her mind to the subject of money. As ever, her own finances were of peripheral interest to her—work was her life, and she had no interest in luxuries. Still, she felt that she had to make a sacrifice somewhere. On her return to Baghdad, she was soon so immersed in her work that she could think of nothing better than economizing on feathers. She wrote to Florence for blue tricotine, enough for Marie to run up a dress she could wear to the office, and asked her stepmother to send a cutting of the fabric to her hatmaker for a matching hat “trimmed with reddish brown wings, pheasant would do . . . not ostrich feathers, that’s too dear.”