Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  The fact that the Queen lived in seclusion would make the notion of a Western-style court impossible. Male visitors were entertained at dinners and receptions hosted by Faisal alone in the Baghdad palace, after which he would drive to Harithya to spend the night with his family. Gertrude was one of the first to be received by the Queen, who spoke only Arabic, although she understood a little English and French:

  She’s charming, I’m so happy to say. She has the delicate, sensitive Hashimi face and the same winning manner that he has. She had on a very nice, long tunicked brown gown . . . a long long string of pearls, and a splendid aquamarine pendant. I saw the two eldest girls who are just like her, rather shy but eager to be outgoing.

  As soon as Faisal’s family was settled in Baghdad, Gertrude had the enormous fun of court-making. First, there were clothes to be made, tunics and gowns suitable for a queen and her all-female receptions and tea parties. Out of doors, the royal women and their suites wore the traditional black silk veil, but when they visited the houses of their women friends or relations, the veils would be left with a maid at the door. Gertrude recommended the dressmaker-nuns who had made her own clothes before she had Marie to sew them, and brought the sisters to the palace to introduce them. Later, Elsa and Molly would be dispatched to the London shops to buy suitable Western-style clothes (only ever to be seen in private) for the royal women: “The King sent for me on Monday,” Gertrude wrote home, “to discuss what arrangements should be made about the Queen’s household. I was very glad he consulted me for there were some terrible pitfalls ahead . . . So I’m busy!”

  There had to be a mistress of ceremonies to help the Queen arrange her entertaining and to teach her orders of precedence and other diplomatic protocol. Gertrude suggested that Faisal should appoint the wife of Jaudat Bey, his principal ADC, to perform the role. Mme Jaudat Bey was from a distinguished Circassian family and highly suitable in every way—well educated, greatly respected, and a long-time inhabitant of Baghdad. The King was delighted to comply, and Gertrude congratulated herself on having outmanoeuvred the wife of the King’s chamberlain, a vulgar and unpopular Syrian who had continually thrust her daughter forward in an attempt to persuade the King to marry her—either, presumably, as a new wife or because she was not aware that he was already married.

  At Harithya one morning to help Mme Jaudat Bey arrange the Queen’s first reception, Gertrude was introduced to the children’s new governess, an appointment she viewed with approval but not entirely without reservations, the latter to do with class distinctions: “She is a nice, good little girl and I am very much pleased that she has found a permanent place at the palace . . . She is to teach the girls English and tennis and European behaviour. I shall have to unteach them to call a napkin a serviette, which they will certainly do under her guidance.”

  She asked the Queen if she might invite Ghazi to tea. In time, the young Amir would come to see her regularly, first accompanied by his slaves Hamid and Farese, later with his tutor and governess. Gertrude gave him marvellous modern toys ordered from London: “The train and soldiers I had ordered for him from Harrod’s had arrived last mail and were presented, with great success. Especially the train. He loves all kinds of machinery and in fact was much cleverer about the engine than any of us . . . we all sat on the floor and watched it running along the rails, following it with shouts of joy!” He would then be driven home to write her a careful thank-you letter in English, before going off hand in hand with his father for the sunset prayers. A progressive, modern King, Faisal never failed to observe the traditional call to prayer. Ghazi, being taught to do the same, presumably did so even during his later schooldays at Harrow. For the loss of her son to an English public school the Queen would find it difficult to forgive Gertrude, on whose advice he was sent there.

  Soon after the Queen arrived in Baghdad, it seemed likely that Faisal would be receiving another member of his family, one who would not be so welcome. His father, the septuagenarian Hussain, had been dislodged from Mecca by the forces of his hereditary enemy Ibn Saud, and as the Hejaz was absorbed into Saudi Arabia he had been obliged to abdicate. Gertrude dreaded Hussain’s jealous and interfering presence. “I do pray that Husain won’t take refuge here; he would be the centre of every kind of mischief, anti-Faisal, anti-British . . .”

  Trouble had been foreseen since Hussain had assumed the title of Caliph of the Muslim world, an appointment that had been abolished by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the modernizing postwar power in Turkey. This provocative move on Hussain’s part gave Ibn Saud an excuse to oust the Sharif as the head of the Nationalist Arab Party. Ibn Saud had taken Hayyil, where Gertrude had been held captive, in 1921, the year of Faisal’s coronation, and hostilities broke out when the unbeatable Saud forces began to attack the Hejaz, Transjordan, where Abdullah now ruled, and even the borders of Iraq. In the Akhwan* attack there, two hundred tribesmen were killed, and Royal Air Force planes had to come to their rescue. Gertrude had written to her old friend Charles Hardinge early in 1922:

  The capture of Hail by Ibn Saud has altered the whole political balance . . . Ibn Saud’s ambition is to be Lord of the Desert, all of it, including the marches where Iraqi shepherds have gone out from time immemorial to their spring pasturages . . .

  The day after they had fired on our aeroplanes we bombed their camp. They fled south . . . and next morning our aeroplanes pursued them and bombed them again. They had made a wholly unprovoked attack, looted and killed our peaceful shepherds and carried off our flocks . . . The Akhwan, with their horrible fanatical appeal to a medieval faith, rouse in me the blackest hatred. They are the worst example of that abominable thing, an omnipotent religious sanction.

  In the Akhwan sect of Islam simple pleasures were forbidden and strict observance of religious ceremony was obligatory, but destruction and rapine in war were condoned. Taif, the summer home of the Sharif where Faisal had been born, was attacked, and the residents massacred. Hussain telegraphed to London demanding planes and troops, but he had long ago alienated London with his intransigence over Arab self-determination, and Britain remained neutral. When Hussain abdicated on the insistence of his own people, his eldest son, Ali, briefly took his place as King of the Hejaz. Ali would finally follow the rest of the family to join his younger brother in Iraq.

  Faisal was essentially a man of action trapped in a palace and an office, a volatile personality more used to command than to exercising restraint. Surrounded by intractable problems and not always sure whom to trust, his patience was wearing thin. He resisted yet more attempts to force him into compromise with the British, his ministers, the Kurds, and others, but grew ever more frustrated. And not even now that he was King could he put a stop to his father’s interference. He flew to Transjordan in an attempt to salvage the family fortunes, and on his return told Gertrude that if the British did not take steps to intervene in the Hejaz, he would have to leave Iraq and go back there to die in the defence of his family and womenfolk. She advised caution, but the King no longer followed her counsels, nor did he always take her into his confidence. She shrugged off his explosions and wrote humorously of him as a tiresome diva. But the honeymoon was over. She wrote to her parents that

  The King is in a mighty taking about the Wahhabis . . . the worst thing to do, however, is what we believe HM to be doing—incite our tribes to open the ball by attacking the Wahhabis. That would lead to immediate reprisals and the desert would be a battlefield . . .

  The King had violent hysterics on Monday; on Tuesday he formally abdicated in favour of the Amir Ghazi . . . I remember that in 1922 Ken Cornwallis had Faisal’s abdication lying about in a drawer for a month.

  The “violent hysterics” consisted of Faisal’s losing his temper with his Cabinet over their inaction with regard to the Saudi incursions on the border. He promptly told five of his ministers that they must resign. Cox pacified him in masterly fashion. He had already sent a message to Ibn Saud asking for an explanation, and was soon able to produce a
telegram from him claiming to have been totally ignorant of the attack by his men on Faisal’s tribes.

  Gertrude had been planning to go back to England for a holiday, meeting her father halfway, near Jerusalem. She regretfully decided that while the situation was so finely balanced, she could not spare the time. Instead, she would fly to Ziza and meet him there, and they would have a few days together.

  She emerged deaf and dizzy from the long bumpy flight over the desert in the official plane, and fell into her father’s waiting arms. When she had recovered her hearing, he told her that they had been invited to dinner with the Amir Abdullah, now encamped not far away near Amman, but he had refused the invitation as he had assumed she would be too tired. Gertrude declared herself fresh as a daisy, unpacked her evening clothes, and their first evening was spent as guests of Faisal’s brother.

  During the dinner she observed Abdullah closely and with fascination, and quickly decided that she could not feel much respect for him; she wrote of him subsequently as “useless” and “an expensive excrescence.”

  Nor does Abdullah strike one as a good ally if it came to fighting. His chief asset is a personal charm which is marred less by his lack of vitality than by his inordinate opinion of his own powers . . . He combines with indolence a narrow and almost fanatical outlook . . . he cannot keep his jealousy of his brother Faisal out of his conversations. Every topic . . . reverts to his chagrin at finding himself Amir in Amman while Faisal is King in Baghdad.

  Back in Baghdad, she went to tea with the King and thought herself lucky, after all:

  I had come back with the conviction that we were the only Arab province which was set in the right path, and that if we failed here it would be the end of Arab aspirations. [The King] was most affectionate and charming. I’m glad that it’s he and not Abdullah! There may be difficulties in dealing with a creature so sensitive and highly strung but his fine and vital qualities and his wonderful breadth of outlook make up for everything.

  Hussain would finally descend on Abdullah and Transjordan instead of Faisal and Iraq. Once there, he immediately embarked on a campaign of attack on Abdullah’s deference to the British and to the Zionist-led government in Jerusalem. Abdullah, who was being subsidized by London to the tune of £150,000 a year, also needed British support to fight off Ibn Saud. Arguments broke out between father and son. Dislodged again, Sharif Hussain took to his yacht, first in the Red Sea, where he lay off Aqaba until asked to move on, and then in the Mediterranean. The Hashemite misfortunes began to resemble the tangled plot of a comic opera. “The King’s family, apparently, are sailing about the Red Sea like so many Flying Dutchmen,” wrote Gertrude wryly.

  With his uncanny knack of turning up whenever he was needed, Sir Ronald Storrs now saved the day by finding Hussain a palace on the island of Cyprus, where Storrs was now governor. There Hussain lived in exile until his death. Ibn Saud, meanwhile, accepted the throne of the Hejaz with pious reluctance, giving way only “because the people insisted.”

  The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 had been intended to wind up the final peace negotiations between the Allies and Turkey. Almost inevitably, it failed, and Cox wasted two months in Constantinople attempting to bring about a settlement. While the League of Nations went about its slow business of appointing a Boundary Commission to settle border differences between Turkey and northern Iraq, the Turks invaded the traditional border and laid waste once more to the Assyrians. “We’re in the uncomfortable position,” Gertrude wrote in September 1924, “of not knowing whether we are at war or not. There are some three thousand Turkish regulars inside our administrative frontier busy killing our Assyrians who are fleeing down as refugees once more . . . Meantime H.M.G. says nothing and negotiations continue peacefully at Geneva.”

  It would be seven years after the end of the war before the League of Nations came to the decision that the Mosul vilayet would not revert to Turkey. Once again, the Iraqi government was hopelessly short of troops, and it was the British political officers who stood almost alone against tribal insurrection and Turkish aggression. Churchill vacillated over the future of the north. In 1921 he had ordered withdrawal from Mosul, and then, at the Cairo Conference, he instructed that the Kurds be allowed to decide their own future. Cox carried out the order, and sent back the predictable answer which was no answer: Sulaimaniyah declined to take part in the whole affair, and Kirkuk wanted Kurdish independence but could not define what that would mean, other than its having nothing whatsoever to do with the Sulaimani. Gertrude commented:

  Arbil and all the Kurdish districts round Mosul have come in, realizing that their political and economic welfare is bound up with Mosul. They . . . will obtain certain privileges . . . Some ask that all the teaching in the schools should be in Kurdish, a reasonable request if it weren’t for the fact that there aren’t any Kurdish teachers and those can only be trained in Arabic for there are no Kurdish books.

  There were few Kurds with any inclination for national leadership. Only one family put itself forward, that of Sheikh Muhammad. He was twice allowed to form governments in Sulaimaniyah, and twice he used Turkish support to foment rebellion against Iraq. In retaliation the RAF bombed his base, and he was evicted in 1924. Gertrude remarked that his Christmas card, signed “King of Kurdistan,” had probably not advanced his cause.

  Faisal instigated a holding operation by sending Zaid to Mosul with the seasoned Captain Clayton in support, creating a northern Sharifian court and promising, even as the Turks massed on the border, that once the boundaries were settled he would grant the Kurds a regional government within Iraq. He also pledged to award land and self-administration to those Assyrians who had been dispossessed of their homes: “It’s possible that the Turkish threat will go a long way to making a nation of us,” Gertrude remarked.

  In her daily work and in her occasional differences with the King, Gertrude was growing closer to his adviser, Kinahan Cornwallis. Cornwallis had been known to Hussain and his sons since the start of the Arab Revolt; Faisal, when in Syria, had specifically asked for him as his personal adviser. Cornwallis would devote the rest of his career to the King. It was Lawrence’s opinion that he could “remain for months hotter than other men’s white-heat, and yet look cold and hard.” From their first meeting Gertrude assessed him as “a great standby.” He was married, by coincidence, to a woman called Gertrude, who was with him in Iraq, but they were seldom seen out as a couple. For his part, Cornwallis quickly recognized the Oriental Secretary’s formidable abilities, and was not long in offering her a job in the new Iraqi administration, as chief of intelligence in the Ministry of the Interior. Gertrude smiled and replied that she couldn’t possibly leave Sir Percy: she might have added that as an Iraqi government employee she would have to relinquish her special status as liaison with the King.

  The closer friendship between Gertrude and Cornwallis began just before Christmas 1922 when, returning from the office, she found her cook and her manservant Zaiya in mortal combat amid a sea of broken crockery in her kitchen, wrestling with a carving knife. “I rated them soundly for celebrating Xmas in so unsuitable a manner. Marie had gone out to dinner so I dined alone, wondering dejectedly what steps I should take to reorganize my household.”

  By the end of the month, the issue between the cook and Zaiya had clarified itself:

  I spent last week in acute discomfort on account of Zaiya’s having so completely made it up with my cook as to marry his daughter. It’s less inconvenient when they beat one another over the head than when they enter into matrimonial alliances, for Zaiya being a bridegroom and the cook having to cook the wedding breakfast there was no one left to cook or wait. I billeted myself on Mr. Cornwallis and Sir Aylmer . . .

  The friendship of Gertrude and Cornwallis thrived on proximity and their shared loyalty to and fondness—even love—for the King. They discussed his character exhaustively at lunches, and sharing as they did so many social events hosted by the King they were often thrown together in the evening
s and at weekends at dinners, shooting parties, card games—the King liked bridge and chemin de fer—and the usual swimming picnics by the river.

  More and more she came to love the coolness and buoyancy of swimming, and the picnics provided some of her happiest moments. She teased the King about his poor performance as a swimmer. She would change under the fig trees, helping herself to ripe fruit as she dried her hair, then emerge to eat bonfire-roasted fish under the tamarisk trees. It was, she said, the only meal of the week that she really enjoyed.

  Perhaps because of the difference in their ages, she fifty-three, Cornwallis thirty-eight, he felt able one evening to tell her something of his unhappy marriage, and his loneliness within it. A misty, romantic, note entered her descriptions of such evenings.

  I went up river in the last glow of a wonderful sunset to where Mr. Cornwallis, Captain Clayton, Colonel MacNiece and the Davidsons were just beginning dinner at the edge of the fig gardens. We lay there in the dark till past 10 o’clock talking . . . while the stars came out one by one. Don’t fancy for a moment that we thought of them as constituents of an infinite firmament; for us they were adornments of the skies of Iraq . . .

  Soon the group fell into the habit of spending Sundays together. Gertrude was not, for once, the only woman. She liked Iris Davidson and found her intelligent: she had picked up Arabic “wonderfully fast,” unlike so many of the British wives in Baghdad. “I’ve added the Davidsons and Mr. Cornwallis to my permanent list of friends,” she reported.

  In 1923, the never-mentioned Mrs. Cornwallis left her husband and sailed for home; and in Gertrude’s letters, the frequently mentioned “Mr. Cornwallis” had already become “Ken.” Christmas was usually the nadir of the year for Gertrude, who missed her family more than ever in a deserted Baghdad. But that year, it was different. She joined Cornwallis, Faisal’s brother Zaid, and Nigel Davidson for a six-day shooting party in Babylon. As Marie packed her trunk, she made a point of putting in Gertrude’s most beautiful silk and lace nightdresses. Gertrude asked her why she was doing that, and reminded her that it was just a hunting party. The French housekeeper had hesitated a moment before replying that Nur al Din, Ken’s Sudanese manservant, might see them. It is unlikely that Ken or his servant were in close enough proximity to Gertrude at night to admire the nightdresses, but she came back from the expedition extraordinarily happy: “Altogether I think no more delightful expedition has ever been made in Iraq.”