Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was born on 14 July 1868 at Washington New Hall in County Durham, in the north east of England. Her grandfather, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, was one of the great ironmasters of Victorian Britain, and the family fortune built on iron and steel made the Bells among the wealthiest industrial dynasties in the country ^[1]. Her mother, Mary Shield, died in 1871 when Gertrude was not yet three, a loss that left her unusually close to her father, Sir Hugh Bell, for the rest of her life. Hugh remarried in 1876, and his second wife, the playwright Florence Olliffe, took a serious interest in Gertrude's education ^[2].

The family moved to Red Barns in Redcar, Yorkshire, where Gertrude grew up with a reputation for restless energy and a sharp tongue. At fifteen she was sent to Queen's College in London, and from there she went up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1886. Two years later she took a first class in Modern History, reportedly the first woman to do so, and she completed the course in two years rather than the usual three ^[1]. Because Oxford did not then grant degrees to women, her achievement carried no formal qualification, a fact that says as much about the period as any Gertrude Bell biography could.

After Oxford came the conventional round of London seasons and country house visits expected of a young woman of her class. Bell found them dull. In 1892 an invitation from her uncle Sir Frank Lascelles, then British minister in Tehran, gave her a way out. The journey to Persia changed the direction of her life ^[2].

Persia gave Bell her first taste of the East and her first book. Safar Nameh: Persian Pictures, published in 1894, recorded her impressions of Tehran and the surrounding country, and she followed it in 1897 with a translation of the poems of the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafiz that scholars still cite with respect ^[3]. In Tehran she also fell in love with a junior diplomat, Henry Cadogan, but her father refused consent to the match on financial grounds, and Cadogan died of illness shortly afterwards ^[2].

During the 1890s and early 1900s Bell travelled almost constantly. She made two journeys around the world with her brother, learned Persian, Arabic and several European languages, and took up serious alpine mountaineering. Between 1899 and 1904 she recorded a string of first ascents and new routes in the Bernese Alps, and a peak in the Engelhorn group, Gertrudspitze, was named after her ^[4]. Her attempt on the unclimbed north east face of the Finsteraarhorn in 1902 ended in a storm that left her party hanging on ropes for some fifty three hours; the climb became one of the famous survival stories of the era ^[4].

From 1900 onward the deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia became her real field. Riding with small caravans, she visited Palmyra, crossed the Syrian desert, and in 1905 published The Desert and the Sown, an account of her travels through Ottoman Syria that established her reputation as a writer and observer of Arab life ^[3]. She studied archaeology as she went, photographing and measuring ruins with a rigour unusual among travellers of the period.

Bell's archaeological work gave her standing among specialists. In 1907 she worked with the archaeologist Sir William Ramsay at Binbirkilise in Anatolia, and their joint study of the Byzantine churches there, The Thousand and One Churches, appeared in 1909 ^[5]. That same year she surveyed the great Abbasid palace of Ukhaidir in Mesopotamia, producing measured plans that remained a standard record of the site. Her 1913 to 1914 journey to Hail in central Arabia, through territory controlled by the Rashid dynasty, was among the most difficult undertaken by any European traveller of the age, and it earned her the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1918 ^[6].

The First World War turned her expertise into an instrument of policy. After working for the Red Cross tracing missing soldiers, she was summoned in 1915 to the Arab Bureau in Cairo, where she worked alongside T. E. Lawrence assembling intelligence on the tribes of Arabia. She was the only woman with an official position in the bureau ^[1]. In 1916 she moved to Basra and then Baghdad as an officer of the British administration in Mesopotamia, eventually holding the title of Oriental Secretary ^[2].

Her influence peaked after the war. Her 1920 report, Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia, was presented to Parliament and praised in the Commons. At the Cairo Conference of 1921, convened by Winston Churchill, Bell was one of roughly forty officials, and the only woman, who settled the political shape of the British mandate territories. She argued for a unified Iraqi state under an Arab king and helped secure the throne for Faisal ibn Husayn, who was crowned in Baghdad in August 1921 ^[7]. Among Gertrude Bell achievements, contemporaries and historians alike rank this work on the foundation of modern Iraq first.

Bell never married. After the Cadogan affair ended in grief, the deepest attachment of her life was to Major Charles Doughty-Wylie, a soldier and consular officer she met in 1907. He was married, the relationship was conducted largely through letters, and it ended when he was killed leading troops ashore at Gallipoli in April 1915 ^[2]. Her letters to him, and the thousands she wrote to her father and stepmother over four decades, survive as one of the great correspondences of the period; Newcastle University holds the archive and has made much of it available online ^[8].

Her politics resist easy labels. She was a committed imperialist for much of her career and, strikingly, an officer of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League before the war, opposing votes for women in Britain even as she outworked most men in her own field ^[1]. Colleagues described her as formidable, impatient with mediocrity, fond of fine clothes even in the desert, and a fluent talker in half a dozen languages.

She smoked heavily, drove herself hard, and suffered repeated bouts of illness in Baghdad's climate. The deaths of her half brother Hugo in 1926 and the earlier loss of Doughty-Wylie, together with the decline of the family steel fortune in the postwar slump, darkened her final years ^[2].

As Iraqi politicians took over the running of their state, Bell's political role shrank, and she turned her energy to antiquities. As honorary Director of Antiquities she drafted the 1924 law regulating excavations in Iraq and supervised the division of finds between foreign expeditions and the new nation ^[5]. Her insistence that important objects stay in the country ran against the habits of the age, when Western museums routinely carried off what they excavated.

Her lasting monument in Baghdad is the Iraq Museum. Bell began assembling its collections in a single room in 1923 and formally opened the first proper museum building in June 1926, only weeks before her death ^[7]. The institution grew into one of the world's major collections of Mesopotamian antiquities.

On the night of 11 to 12 July 1926, Bell died in Baghdad from an overdose of sleeping pills, two days before her fifty eighth birthday. Whether the overdose was deliberate has never been settled; she had been ill, exhausted and depressed, but she had also asked to be woken the next morning ^[1]. She was buried the same day in the British cemetery in Baghdad with full military honours, her funeral attended by the King's representatives and enormous crowds ^[2].

Bell's reputation has travelled a long arc. For decades she was overshadowed by T. E. Lawrence, whose legend absorbed public attention while her own contribution to the same events faded from view. Later biographers, including Janet Wallach and Georgina Howell, restored her to the centre of the story, and the 2016 documentary Letters from Baghdad, drawn from her own words, brought her correspondence to new audiences ^[3].

Her political legacy remains argued over. Admirers point out that she pressed for Arab self government earlier than most British officials and understood the region's peoples with rare depth. Critics answer that the state she helped design bound together communities with divergent interests under a monarchy imposed from outside, and they trace some of Iraq's later instability to the mandate era settlement ^[7]. Both cases begin with basic Gertrude Bell facts: she sat at the table where the borders were drawn, and few others in that room knew the land as she did.

In Iraq itself her name long carried genuine respect; she was remembered as al-Khatun, the Lady, and her grave in Baghdad is still tended. The Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University, containing about 1,600 letters and 7,000 photographs, was inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 2017, recognition that her record of the Middle East before and after the First World War is a document of world importance ^[8].