A female pioneer
Gertrude Bell
pictured with her
father, Sir Hugh
Bell, in 1922
Adventurer,
diplomat,
mountaineer,
anti-suffragette…
…meet Gertrude Bell
Helen Berry celebrates an influential but neglected character
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BBC History Magazine
topfoto
G
ertrude Bell defies
stereotypical ideas about
Victorian women. Before
she became a well-known
archaeologist, traveller and
Middle East diplomat, her
first career was as a
mountaineer. Between 1899 and 1904, not
satisfied with conquering the Meije and Mont
Blanc, she traced 10 new paths or first ascents
in the Swiss Bernese Alps.
In August 1902, an audacious attempt on
the unclimbed north-east face of the
4,200-metre Finsteraarhorn nearly cost her
her life. She spent two terrifying nights roped
to her guides, clinging to the rock face during
relentless snow, hail and lightning. “Forty
eight hours on the rope,” she noted in her
diary afterwards. “Went to bed and [ate] four
eggs and drank quantities of milk. My feet
frostbitten a little.” Though she failed on this
occasion, another Alpine peak, Gertrudspitze,
still bears her name.
Born in 1868, Gertrude Lowthian Bell was
the daughter of a north-east industrialist. A
brilliant scholar and linguist (she could speak
eight languages), she was the first woman to
gain a First in modern history at Oxford. Via
family connections in the diplomatic service,
her travels began in Romania and Persia and
she soon developed a passion for learning
Arabic and the history of the Arab peoples.
Bell went on to spend the early 1900s
mapping and photographing the sites of
Byzantine churches in Anatolia and Turkey,
and ancient fortifications in Mesopotamia.
She became an expert in Syrian archaeology,
and was well-known in Britain for her vivid
travel writings such as The Desert and the
Sown (1907). On one 1,400-mile expedition
along the Euphrates, she discovered the early
Islamic palace and mosque of Ukhaidir that
had been beyond the reach of western
explorers. Her account of the journey,
Amurath to Amurath (1911) was one of her
most famous books.
As a lone European and woman among a
retinue of Arab men, Bell learned how to put
on a queenly show, heading a train of camels
and carrying prestigious gifts to cement good
relations with the Bedouin whose trade routes
she traversed. Her most daring expedition
was to Ha’il in central Arabia (1913–14), home
to the warring Banu Rashid dynasty,
unvisited by Europeans for over a decade.
Bell’s fluent Arabic and first-hand
experience of the Middle East proved
invaluable to the British government. In the
First World War she was seconded to British
military intelligence in Cairo and worked
alongside TE Lawrence in the Arab Bureau,
the objective being to secure British interests
in the Middle East and to speed the demise of
BBC History Magazine
She spent two terrifying nights roped to
her guides, clinging to the rock face
during relentless snow, hail and lightning
Turkish influence in the region. Bell was sent
to Basra as the viceroy of India’s personal
envoy, and she proceeded to gather
intelligence on the Bedouin in central Arabia.
She was the only woman to hold office among
the staff of the chief political officer, Sir Percy
Cox, and helped write the Arab Bulletin,
which updated the British government on
Middle Eastern events during the war.
Bell was among the delegates at the Paris
peace conference, which shaped much of the
postwar world, in 1919. An advocate of Arab
self-rule, she was co-author of an influential
report that eventually contributed to the
establishment of Britain’s legal mandate over
Iraq in 1920. In the turbulent years that
followed, she continued to work with Cox,
now high commissioner in Baghdad. At the
Cairo conference in March 1921, Cox and Bell
persuaded Winston Churchill, then secretary
of state for the colonies, of Britain’s continued
interest in Iraq. Bell played a significant role
in securing the Iraqi throne for Feisal ibn
Hussein and was instrumental in the 1922
Anglo-Iraqi treaty which replaced the former
British mandate. Her political role waned
after the introduction of a new Iraqi
constitution in 1924.
English women are never afraid
In the last years of her life, she became the
first director of antiquities in Iraq, founding
the Iraqi Archaeological Museum in Baghdad.
An energetic supporter of educational
development for rural communities, she
helped promote Muslim women’s education.
Bell had no fear of debating high politics
with powerful men. She relished discussing
“Mesopotamia and other sensible things,” and
disparaged the small talk expected of women
of her class. Her forthright ‘Oxfordy manner’
and high status in the British government gave
her the kudos of an ‘honorary man’ who, by
force of personality and intelligence, could
appear unveiled even among chief religious
figures in the Islamic world, such as the revered
Naqib of Baghdad.
To many Arabs, Bell was El Khatun, ‘the
Lady of the Court’. Rivals saw her as a
political troublemaker, but the men she
encountered, British and Arab alike,
acknowledged her shrewdness. On the rare
occasion when she failed to win an argument,
she either ignored or over-rode whoever was
trying to stop her. When one Mudir, an agent
of the Ottoman state, tried to block her way to
Damascus, saying “It cannot happen,”
Gertrude retorted in fluent Arabic: “It must
happen. English women are never afraid.”
Yet Bell is a problematic feminist icon with
attitudes reflecting her own time and class,
and sitting uncomfortably with 21st-century
sensibilities. She was a founder member of the
northern branch of the Women’s National
Anti-Suffrage League, which campaigned
against votes for women. In a letter to
The Times (dated 12 October 1908), she urged
action against “regrettable programme” being
pursued by the suffragettes.
Like many who found their cause in times
of political unrest and war, Bell did not adapt
well to peace. Though no stranger to love, she
never married and could neither find
contentment by returning to England, nor by
settling in Baghdad. She died in 1926, just
before her 58th birthday, of an overdose of
sleeping tablets. It’s not known whether her
death was an accident or suicide.
The Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle
University forms an important part of her
legacy – a collection of several thousand
photographs and documents that form rich
evidence of archaeological sites in the Middle
East, many subsequently destroyed. Her book
The Thousand and One Churches (1907)
remains the standard work on early Byzantine
architecture in Anatolia. A more controversial
legacy was her contribution in 1923 to fixing
the boundaries of modern Iraq with Jordan,
Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The unresolved
question of how Kurdish interests were to be
safeguarded in the new Iraq was to have
long-term and tragic consequences.
Writer Vita Sackville-West once recalled
Gertrude’s “gift of making every one feel
suddenly eager, of making you feel that life
was full and rich and exciting,” but beyond
the world of archaeology it is astonishing how
quickly she has been forgotten.
Helen Berry is professor of British history at
Newcastle University. Her books include The
Castrato and His Wife (OUP, 2011)
discover more
CONFERENCE
E The life and legacy of Gertrude Bell will be
the focus of a British Academy conference,
Gertrude Bell and Iraq: A Life and Legacy,
on 12–13 September: britac.ac.uk/events
exhibition
E Inspirational Women of North-East
England, an exhibition featuring Bell, opens
at Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery on 21 September.
For details, see iwne.org/
radio
E Gertrude Bell was covered in Radio 4’s
Great Lives and can still be heard online:
bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xhh2q
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