Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  Sadly, after the Christmas highlight there came some sort of a break. That summer Cornwallis would be going on leave to England to deal with his wife’s divorce proceedings. By the end of January she wrote to Florence that she was profoundly unhappy, and for some ten weeks after that she did not mention “Ken” in her letters at all. Subsequently writing to her half-sister Molly, she briefly outlined her attempts to convince him that she could make him happy, and describes her love for him as that of a mother and sister combined with “that other love.” An acutely uncomfortable Cornwallis presented a stony façade to these representations, and began to avoid her. She was to him an incomparable woman, a precious confidante, and unique in having so many interests in common with him; but he was fifteen years younger, and not looking for a mother or a sister. Never petty or ungenerous towards those she loved, she continued to think him one of the finest men she had known. When he went to England, she asked Molly to invite him to lunch. The rift between them slowly closed, and their companionship returned with his gift to her of a puppy from his spaniel’s litter. Once again, he collected her mail when she was confined to bed, but kept back anything that looked as though it would tax her energies. Such emotional upheavals, however, leave scars: brave as ever, she found herself a little less resilient, more solitary, and, since she had relied on him for internal news about what was going on in the palace and the Cabinet, she felt herself perhaps a degree less well informed.

  Once the Treaty had been proclaimed, and the mandate issue put aside, the King ordered the preparation of elections to the Constituent Assembly. This would ratify the Treaty, approve the Organic Law for the future government of Iraq, and establish an electoral law so that the first parliament could be elected. At this point the Naqib resigned, his place as Prime Minister to be taken by the younger Abdul Mahsin Bey. There was a parallel change of government in London in 1922, when the Conservatives took office under Prime Minister Bonar Law. They brought in a new pledge for the early evacuation of British personnel from Iraq. Once again, Cox was called to London to review Britain’s role in Iraq. He returned with yet another addendum to the Treaty, a protocol which limited Britain’s involvement to four more years. Nonetheless, it gave Faisal almost more than he had asked for. Now the question was, would Iraq be ready to defend and govern itself in only four years?

  At the end of April 1923, Cox finally left Iraq. His last act of kindness to Gertrude was to sanction the cost of an additional drawing-room to her summer-house, in recognition of all the entertaining she did there for the good of the Secretariat. When he had distributed his menagerie and given his last garden party, it not only seemed like the end of an era—it was. Nobody felt his loss more keenly than Gertrude. She wrote to her parents:

  All this time rather tears the heart strings, you understand, it’s very moving saying good-bye to Sir Percy . . . What a position he has made for himself here. I think no Englishman has inspired more confidence in the East. He himself was dreadfully unhappy at going–40 years’ service is not a thing one lays down easily . . .

  I must tell you something very touching . . . Sir Percy has sent me a photograph of himself in a silver frame and across the corner he has written: “To the best of comrades.” Isn’t that the nicest thing he could possibly have written?

  The new High Commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, had arrived the previous December to familiarize himself with the job. He had been among the first handful of officials to join Cox in Basra, as a remarkably successful Revenue Officer. Gertrude herself had written of his achievements in her White Paper on the civil administration of the region. Dobbs took firm charge of Britain’s responsibilities for security and foreign affairs. Elections could now go ahead. Faisal toured the country encouraging the population to go out and vote. Dobbs followed not far behind, so that all could see the united commitment to a democratic Iraq. “As if by magic, the political atmosphere cleared and even the most distant tribesmen of the Euphrates and of the Kurdish hills enrolled themselves as voters with alacrity,” Dobbs recorded later.

  Over the six years he had been Civil Commissioner, it had become routine for Cox to talk things over with Gertrude several times a week. Dobbs discontinued that habit—as she acknowledged, there was no reason why he should go on with it. But she liked her new chief well enough, and found Lady Dobbs kind and considerate, dispensing from the Residency much amusing conversation and the most delicious lunches.

  Gertrude was looking forward to seeing her half-sister Elsa and her husband, now Vice-Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, who were to visit Baghdad on an official cruise on board the flagship Chatham in October 1924. Coinciding with their arrival, Molly’s elder son George Trevelyan was expected too, and would go on to join the Richmonds at their destination, Ceylon. She had planned all kinds of entertainments for them, and was heartbroken when she became seriously ill with bronchitis just before they arrived. The King’s personal physician, “Sinbad”—Sir Harry Sinderson—called on her twice a day, would not accept a penny for his trouble, and decided that she was not well enough to have George at home; the young man stayed at the Residency instead, and Lady Dobbs put her car at Gertrude’s service as she improved just enough to drive the Richmonds around and show them Baghdad. Nevertheless, some of the family had now seen Gertrude when she was seriously unwell, and conveyed to England their deep concerns about her health. She had made light of her illness in letters to Hugh and Florence, but the bronchitis had been complicated by heat exhaustion and a virtual collapse. On top of that, the news that Elsa brought from home was bad. The Depression, combined with strikes, had hit the Bell fortunes hard. Elizabeth Burgoyne, in the second volume of her book on Gertrude based on her personal papers, reveals that she told her friend Nigel Davidson that “black depression had settled on her like a cloud; she even asked him to pray for her. In his opinion private griefs, as well as loneliness and a sense of frustration, combined to prevent her from ever again being really happy.”

  She was further saddened in February 1925, when her much loved dog, and Ken’s too, as it was staying with her at the time, died of distemper within twenty-four hours of each other:

  I don’t know which of them I loved most, for Sally was with me all the summer while Ken was on leave. I shall now miss Peter most—he was always with us, in the office and everywhere . . . we neither of us had any idea that it was distemper, the very worst kind that ends in pneumonia. Peter caught it and died after agonies of stifled breathing at 4 am this morning . . . and Sally died after the same agonies at 5 pm. So you will understand that I am rather shattered.

  This time, Hugh and Florence would brook no excuses. She was in no fit state to go through another summer in Iraq. She was forced to agree; but the King did not: “Faisal, when I say I’m going home next summer replies with asperity: ‘You’re not to talk of going home—your home is here. You may say you are going to see your father.’ ”

  Marie accompanied her, and they arrived in London on 17 July. Gertrude, wrote her stepmother, “in a condition of great nervous fatigue . . . appeared exhausted mentally and physically.” The doctors who were asked to see her, Sir Thomas Parkinson and Dr. Thomas Body, took the same view: that she required a great deal of care and ought not to return to the climate of Iraq. It was a serious warning—perhaps even more than that. Her old Oxford friend Janet Courtney was horrified by how thin and white-haired Gertrude had become since the portrait drawn by John Singer Sargent on her trip two years previously.

  As soon as she was up and about again, Gertrude started to take an interest in the younger members of the family, and particularly in her nineteen-year-old niece Pauline, Molly’s daughter. Pauline Trevelyan was to recall many years later how Gertrude was always cold, wearing a full-length silver fox fur coat all day, even indoors in summer, at both Sloane Street and Rounton: “She would stand with her back to the fire smoking a Turkish cigarette in a long holder, and discoursing on . . . people past and present, history, letters, art and architecture, her travels, archaeol
ogy, our family—and how devoted she was to all at home, above all to her father.”

  Frail, but burning with her perennial enthusiasm, Gertrude swept Pauline off to the British Museum to explain the history of the Assyrian exhibits, then to the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the Constables, inspiring her niece with her own passions. She called at the Stanleys, and invited her recently widowed cousin Sylvia Henley to accompany her back to Iraq; then visited the Churchills at Chartwell. When Janet Courtney went for dinner in Sloane Street one night with Gertrude and her father, Gertrude asked her if she could think of anything she could do if she remained in England. Janet suggested a few days later, in a letter, that her friend might stand for Parliament. She replied:

  You dear and beloved Janet,

  No, I’m afraid you will never see me in the House. I have an invincible hatred of that kind of politics . . . I don’t cover a wide enough field and my natural desire is to slip back into the comfortable arena of archaeology and history . . . I think I must certainly go back for this winter, though I privately very much doubt whether it won’t be the last . . .

  Goodbye, my dear . . .

  Did she mean the last winter in Iraq, or her last winter?

  About this time, Hugh and Florence told her what she had feared to hear: that for financial reasons they were about to shut Rounton up and depart for a small, though beautiful, house on the Bell estate. Mount Grace Priory, the restored abbot’s house set in the ruins of an old abbey and monastery, presented an elegant face to the bleak Yorkshire landscape, but contained only a handful of rooms. The knowledge that the Philip Webb mansion, symbol of the great Bell empire, would soon be gone, and everything with it, lent a poignant fatefulness to these few weeks.

  Before the end of her visit, Hugh offered to give a dinner at the Automobile Club for Faisal, who happened to be in London for medical treatment. The party included Cornwallis, who was particularly attentive. He called at 95 Sloane Street, and was on the platform to see her off to Yorkshire at King’s Cross station the day after the dinner.

  Accompanied by Sylvia and Marie, Gertrude left London at the end of September, waved off by a collection of devoted friends including Sir Percy, Domnul, and Faisal. She wrote a loving letter to each of her parents as she left. Florence commented: “We all felt after this last visit of Gertrude to England that she had never seemed more glad to be with us all, never more affectionate and delightful to all her Yorkshire surroundings.”

  The profound love for her father that Florence called the foundation of Gertrude’s existence had always set the two of them slightly apart from Florence, though she had forbidden herself to feel any jealousy or to stand between them in any way. This time, Gertrude had found a Hugh pained and harassed by the Bell misfortunes. Had the doctors told her in private that her heavy smoking had at last taken its toll and that she had only months to live, then she might have spared him that knowledge.

  On the other hand, something of significance certainly did pass between Gertrude and her stepmother in those last few weeks at Rounton, and it resulted in a closer bond between the two of them than had ever existed before. Perhaps Gertrude, finding that she now needed support and affection of the kind that she had always half shrugged off, was able to tell her what she had not felt able to tell her father. Florence, with that unflinching contemplation of the verities of life and death natural to an experienced mother and grandmother, would have met Gertrude’s revelation calmly and stoically, and perhaps conspired, gratefully, to keep Hugh in ignorance. They talked many times, and it was a changed Gertrude who set off once more for Iraq, writing to Florence of “this last summer” perhaps in more senses than one:

  Darling Mother

  . . . I do so love to think that you liked me to come in to the library [at Rounton] in the mornings, even though I was interrupting you horribly. You know I feel as if I had never known you really before, not in all the years. It was perhaps because of the general crisis we were going through and my immense admiration for your courage and wisdom. Whatever it was I feel certain that I have never loved you so much, however much I may have loved you, and I am so thankful that we were together this last summer and that we both have the sense of its having been a wonderful experience.

  In February 1926, after contracting typhoid on his voyage home from South Africa, Gertrude’s half-brother Hugo died, a shattering blow for the family, and one from which Florence, in particular, would hardly recover. Gertrude’s poignant letter suggests her own sad and regretful preoccupations. At times of great misery or danger, she had called out almost involuntarily to God; at all other times, her pragmatic intellect left her facing an uncompromising universe. Florence may have pondered the letter for longer than Hugh.

  My darling Father and Mother,

  I am writing to you with the heaviest of hearts. It is so dreadful to think of what you have gone through . . . My mind has been so full of Hugo but the thing which comes uppermost is that he had a complete life. His perfect marriage and the joy of his children and then at the last his seeing you again . . . I wonder if we should be happier too if we thought we were all to meet again. I never could bring myself to it even when I lost what was dearest to me. The spirit without the body would be as strange as the body without a spirit. One feels the lovely mind behind, but what one knows are the little gestures, the sweet smile, the expression of the mind. But it’s no good wondering or thinking why one can’t believe in the unbelievable; one just can’t.

  In Baghdad, she went straight to the office, and immediately a stream of people queued to see her. She could do no work at all for two days. Some kissed her hands and called her “Light of our eyes.” She admitted to her parents that it went to her head a little—that she almost began to think she was a Person. But scarcely had she settled in again than she fell ill. Sylvia, to her disappointment, had proved unable to stand even the winter climate of Iraq, and had soon been forced to return to England. Shortly afterwards Gertrude, wrapped from head to toe and with a hot water bottle on her knees, went up in icy weather to the King’s farm at Khaniqin in a Christmas shooting party that included Ken Cornwallis. With them travelled some new furniture that she had ordered for the King from London, and she spent the first evening speculatively shunting it around the room with him. Exhausted, she went to bed. The next day she stayed there. Faisal and Cornwallis joined her in the bedroom in the evening for a game of bridge on the bedspread. When Ken looked in on her the following morning, he immediately telegraphed to Baghdad for a doctor. “By that time I wasn’t taking much notice, except that I had a general feeling that I was slipping into great gulfs,” Gertrude wrote later. The doctor arrived with a night nurse, and within twenty-four hours she was in hospital in Baghdad with pleurisy. She was still unwell when she wrote the letter of commiseration about Hugo.

  As her office duties had diminished during the last few years, a new source of work presented itself. It had been the King’s idea, before Cox left. Already in August 1922 she had discussed the need for a “law of excavations” with him—“he is going to make me provisionally Director of Antiquities as there’s no one else,” she had written.

  Her first job was the writing of an antiquities law giving due weight to the rights of the nation and the excavator. She constructed it in careful consultation with the legal authorities, for wholesale looting stretching back hundreds of years had hugely depleted the immense archaeological wealth of Iraq. Now scientific expeditions from many countries were trying to reconstruct the history of the region.

  Once Gertrude had begun to think in terms of establishing an Iraq Museum she was zealous in exacting the country’s rights to its own past. Very soon she acquired the richest collection in the world of objects representing Iraq’s early history. She came up against an old friend, Sir Leonard Woolley, former intelligence chief at Port Said, who had worked on the Carchemish dig with Lawrence. Now he was heading a joint expedition organized by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania to dig Ur of the C
haldaes, with its royal tombs, temple, and ziggurat of the Sumerian dynasty. In her official capacity, she felt obliged to claim for Iraq a particular artefact that surfaced at this time—the famous plaque showing a milking scene, found in the temple. She “broke his heart.” “[Woolley] values it at ten thousand pounds, at least. I’m not going to tell the Iraq Govt. lest they decide to sell it and thereby blacken my face and theirs. The gold scarab is worth one thousand pounds, but Providence (the toss of a rupee) gave it to me!”

  She began to make short archaeological expeditions with the architectural adviser to the Ministry of Public Works, J. M. Wilson. These expeditions were at first no more than office excursions, the faintest echoes of her earlier adventures. She would be energised when their car ran into a ditch or her luggage failed to follow her, and often could not resist borrowing a horse from a village elder and travelling on alone into the countryside for a day or two while Wilson went back to Baghdad. Of a trip to Kish, one of many with an Oxford University expedition, she wrote: “My sole possessions for the night were a cake of soap, a hairbrush from the Professor [Langdon] and a pair of pyjamas from an unknown benefactor. We spent the time before dinner in looking at their wonderful finds, and after dinner in discussing ancient Babylonian sites.” There she bargained to be allowed to send some fine painted pots to Oxford for expert treatment. She also claimed a Semitic statuette of 2800 BC by her favourite expedient of tossing a coin for it.