Droves of notables came to visit at her hotel, and every afternoon she held a reception. “Damascus flocks to drink my coffee and converse with me,” she reported with delight. During a meeting with one family, the Abdul Kadirs, she discussed her future plans to visit Ibn Rashid, and won a promise that they would help her in her journey. Most important, she learned that the French Orientalist René Dussaud was also planning a trip to Rashid headquarters in Hayil; it stirred her competitive juices. “I must hurry up!” she exclaimed, hoping to beat him there.
But for the moment it was Damascus that intrigued her, “with the desert almost up to its gates, and the breath of it blowing in with every wind, and the spirit of it passing in through the city gates with every Arab camel driver. That is the heart of the whole matter,” she wrote.
The rest of her trip she spent in Asia Minor visiting Roman and Byzantine churches. At Anavarz, where thousands of mosquitoes and three-foot-long snakes had taken lodging in the ruins, she copied inscriptions, noted archaeological and architectural details and photographed the remains. Her work would be published in a series of articles in the Revue Archéologique.
Along the way she hired a Christian servant from Aleppo, a round-faced fellow of medium height and mild temperament. “Fattuh, bless him!” she wrote, soon after the Armenian started working for her. “The best servant I have ever had, ready to cook my dinner or pack a mule or dig out an inscription with equal alacrity … and to tell me endless tales of travel as we ride … for he began life as a muleteer at the age of ten and knows every inch of ground from Aleppo to Baghdad.” He would be at her side through her most dangerous expeditions.
In Konia she met William Ramsay, a famed archaeologist, and his wife, doing excavations in the area. The meeting was fortuitous: she showed him some of the inscriptions she had copied at Bin Bir Kelesse, the Turkish area of a Thousand and One Churches, an important site for archaeologists, and he confirmed her work, laying a path for their future collaboration.
At Constantinople, her final stop, she talked Turkish politics with British officials, and discussed their major concern, the encroaching power of Germany, manifested in the Kaiser’s plan for a Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway. The Germans and Turks were becoming closely aligned in a region the British held dear. The alliance foreshadowed the bloody world war to come. But for the moment, all was quiet. By early spring, Gertrude was back in England, at work on her book about Syria and the Druze. She had come away with some strong thoughts on the East:
Islam is the bond that unites the western and central parts of the continent, as it is the electric current by which the transmission of sentiment is effected, and its potency is increased by the fact that there is little or no sense of territorial nationality to counterbalance it. A Turk or a Persian does not think or speak of “my country” in the way that an Englishman or a Frenchman thinks and speaks; his patriotism is confined to the town of which he is a native, or at most to the district in which that town lies. If you ask him to what nationality he belongs he will reply: “I am a man of Isfahan,” or “I am a man of Konia,” as the case may be, just as the Syrian will reply that he is a native of Damascus or Aleppo—I have already indicated that Syria is merely a geographical term corresponding to no national sentiment in the breasts of the inhabitants.
It would take her until the end of December 1906 to complete The Desert and the Sown, the book that made it amply clear that not only in the East—in Syria, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Turkey—but in England, too, Miss Gertrude Bell was a Person. For the two years that she worked on the book, Rounton Grange became the center of her life. Both of her grandparents had died, and although Florence Bell was never content in the country (she much preferred London life to the provinces), Hugh had moved his family into the landmark house in Yorkshire. For Gertrude, Rounton was bliss; it had always been her favorite place, and she gave it loving care, nursing her flower beds, creating a huge rock garden that won several awards and working in her study.
She struggled over the book, wrote articles and book reviews for The Times and The Times Literary Supplement, and did social work in the town of Clarence, helping the wives of the Bell Brothers’ ironworkers. A steady stream of house guests kept her from being lonely: socialites such as Lady Russell, who brought the gossip from town, or the American actress Elizabeth (Lisa) Robins, who appeared in Florence’s plays; the diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, posted in Washington; Friedrich Rosen, still a member of the German Foreign Ministry; Sir Alfred Lyall, the British Administrator in India; Sir Frank Swettenham, the High Commissioner of the Malay States. There was the educator Dr. Daniel Bliss, founder of the American University in Beirut; the archaeologist William Ramsay; and the punctilious Domnul, whose political analyses were held in high esteem.
Indoors, in the big Common Room, the guests arranged themselves on the comfortable blue-and-green-patterned sofas designed by William Morris, and, with Gertrude at the center, the heated conversations bounced off the dark, silk-covered walls, jumping to the tiger skin on the floor, to the piano, and out the high arched windows to the sprawling garden. The discussions covered the globe, from Japan’s ability to supplant the Europeans in cheap foreign markets, to the hopelessness of the Russian economy and the probability of a revolution against the Czar, and also the danger of the German Kaiser and the economic threat to Britain from the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway.
At tea in the garden on a lovely summer day, Frank Swettenham revealed one of the secrets of his remarkable career as a diplomat. “Whatever success I have had in life,” he told an attentive Gertrude, “I owe to having been willing to accept information from any source. It only meant a little trouble, being nice to people, and polite when they came to me with news, and rewarding them for it when it was worth having. The government offices won’t accept information except from official sources. I know hundreds of people in the Far East who could give them the most valuable information, but they won’t take it.”
Gertrude took careful note of his words. She felt no hesitation in talking to anyone. Whether with shopkeepers, desert sheikhs or British dignitaries, she radiated confidence. Like a skilled diplomat, she could start a conversation with ease and establish her own credentials with lightning speed, ticking off the influential names, reeling out the right tidbits of knowledge, dishing up the latest gossip, sprinkling her sentences with whom she knew and where she had been, imparting generous pieces of information, but cleverly gathering in more than she gave. Her talent was invaluable, whether in formal drawing rooms or flapping desert tents.
After two years she was eager to return to the East. On a brief visit with Saloman Reinach to have him go over her writings for the Revue Archéologique, she met René Dussaud, who showed her Nabathean and Safaitic inscriptions and discussed what was to be found in the Nejd, the Arabian desert of Ibn Rashid.
But the timing was still not right; the desert was still dangerous, and the British Government would not give her permission to travel there. Instead, she proposed a trip to William Ramsay, boldly offering to pay his expenses if they could work together in Turkey and jointly write a book about their excavations. Although his assistants, ordinarily, were much more experienced than she, Ramsay agreed, and in March 1907 Gertrude went off to meet him in Asia Minor.
She left, basking in the glow of reviews for her newly published book, The Desert and the Sown. Its ebullient prose and careful analysis, her extensive photographs, and a color frontispiece, “Bedouins of the Syrian Desert,” by John Singer Sargent, made it an immediate success. The work was deemed “among the dozen best books of Eastern travel” by David Hogarth, who placed it in importance alongside Arabia Deserta, the now classic work by Charles Doughty. It was called “brilliant” by The Times and “fascinating” by The Times Literary Supplement, which noted: “Women perhaps make the best travellers, for when they have the true wanderer’s spirit they are more enduring and, strange to say, more indifferent to hardship and discomfort than men. They are unquestionably more observant o
f details and quicker to receive impressions. Their sympathies are more alert, and they get into touch with strangers more readily.” The New York Times remarked: “The ways of English women are strange. They are probably the greatest slaves to conventionality in the world, but when they break with it, they do it with a vengeance.”
If not with vengeance, at least with determination, Gertrude plunged into her work with Ramsay, knowing that collaborating with him would help confirm her reputation as a serious archaeologist.
She arrived at the British consulate in Konia, stopped to pick up her mail and make arrangements, and met Major Charles (Richard) Doughty-Wylie, the British official in residence. Almost at once she wrote to Domnul, “You know there is an English V. Consul here now, a charming young soldier with a quite pleasant little wife. He is the more interesting of the two, a good type of Englishman, wide awake and on the spot, keen to see and learn. Will you tell Willie T. [William Tyrell in the Foreign Office] I congratulate him on the appointment.”
After her work with Ramsay was finished, she returned to Konia and stayed with the Doughty-Wylies. Mrs. Wylie, a gracious host, took her to the bazaar to buy kilims and accompanied her to a church to measure the floor plan. But it was back at the consulate villa that Gertrude spent hours pleasuring a burgeoning friendship with the tall, blue-eyed officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Major Doughty-Wylie. The sympathetic vice-consul was the nephew of Charles Doughty, whose Arabia Deserta served as Gertrude’s bible. Meeting Doughty’s nephew was more than just good luck. It was a gift from heaven. The charming fellow—virile, funny, chivalrous—tantalized her with stories of his uncle and entertained her with heroic tales of his own, as both a soldier and statesman. Sitting under the trees in the big garden, they sipped tea and traded thoughts on the Turks, the Arabs and the East. By the time she left Konia, she pronounced the Doughty-Wylies “dears, both of them.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Women’s Rights
It would seem surprising, even ironic, that Gertrude Bell, an educated, well-read, well-informed woman who continually challenged herself with new experiences, was active in the anti-suffrage movement. And yet, for her and the women of England, the year 1908 marked a watershed.
For more than sixty years English women had been gaining the right to vote: first, for local boards administering money to the poor, then for school boards, municipal leaders, county councils; in effect, choosing the people who represented their interests as wives and mothers. Issues of local scope. That was enough. Demands for universal suffrage were brusquely turned aside. Queen Victoria herself had written in 1870, “This mad, wicked Folly of Women’s Rights … [is] a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself.”
In fact, a strong female current had been running against the right of women to vote in national elections. Led by Mrs. Humphrey Ward (oddly enough, long active in promoting women’s education at Oxford), they stated, in 1889, “The emancipating process has now reached the limit fixed by the physical constitution of women and by the fundamental difference which must always exist between their main occupations and those of men.” Women, said Mrs. Ward, can never provide the sound judgment to decide questions of “foreign or colonial policy, or grave constitutional change.” Those issues were not within the “necessary and normal experience” of women.
Still, the suffragist movement was gaining momentum. In 1903 Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, an organization pushing for universal suffrage. For five years, Mrs. Pankhurst struggled unsuccessfully. Then, in 1908, she tried more militant methods. With the help of her daughter Christabel, Mrs. Pankhurst led violent demonstrations: the suffragists burned more than a hundred buildings, set fires in hotels and churches, smashed store windows, bombed public areas, and besieged Parliament. “Votes for women!” they screamed as they chained themselves to the iron ledge of the Ladies’ Gallery.
But their shrieks created a backlash. The suffragists’ behavior shocked the public, especially people like Gertrude Bell, who valued tradition. To her, the harassment of public officials was nothing short of heresy. After all, they were among her closest friends and family.
The first committee meeting of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League took place in London during the summer of 1908. Gertrude, happy to lend her support, wrote to her mother that “all went well.” But demands on her time were not so pleasing. “We have Lady Jersey as chairman,” she said, and then went on, “I have been obliged to become honorary secretary which is most horrible.”
Nevertheless, she rallied to the cause. If it seemed odd for one who lived such an unconventional life to take such a conventional position, it was not: Gertrude’s independence only masked her roots. She was a daughter of the Victorian Age, bred in a world dominated by men concerned with nothing less than aggrandizing the Empire, raised in an era graced by women considered to be no less than the bearers and guardians of the English race. As boldly as she behaved in the East, at home she remained within the boundaries of tradition, and her tradition was that of the upper class, privileged, protected and not to be challenged by the impoverished, uneducated working class.
Gertrude had spent hours with Florence helping the wives and mothers of the Bell Brothers’ ironworkers. It only confirmed her view that, though women had the right to work in local government, they were not yet equipped to run the country. In the industrial town of Clarence she had spent mornings reading aloud to members of the magazine club, visiting one or another of the dingy row houses. A knock on the door was often answered by a woman of thirty who looked twice that age, her haggard face lined with years of drudgery, her thick figure ravaged by constant childbirth and miscarriages, her arms filled with infants crying for milk, while screaming toddlers crawled underfoot, the children only a few years away from being sent to work in the coal mines. In the squalor of the crowded flats, the odor of disease clotted the air, and thick soot from the factories coated everything from the bedclothes to the kitchen table. Every day was a struggle to exist. Exhausted and illiterate, these women and tens of thousands like them were in need of education to better their lives at home; they were hardly qualified to make decisions of state, the anti-suffragists said.
Gertrude saw herself as the equal of any man, but most women, she was firmly convinced, were not. Their votes would certainly be questionable; they could even prove to be dangerous. Like her mother Florence, or her father Hugh, or their friends Lord Curzon, Lord Cromer and Lord Robert Cecil, Gertrude argued that the female role was fundamentally different from that of the male: women were meant to rear children; men were meant to run the country. Furthermore, they all believed, only men had the sound judgment to rule the colonies, to determine foreign policy and to decide matters of the constitution; therefore, only men should have the right to cast a ballot. Rare was the woman knowledgeable enough to make a contribution to the affairs of state. Yet even as she promoted the agenda of the Anti-Suffrage League, Gertrude worked on her book about Byzantine Anatolia and yearned to penetrate the mysterious regions of the Arabian desert.
CHAPTER NINE
Lawrence
“There is a moment when one is newly arrived in the East, when one is conscious of the world shrinking at one end and growing at the other till all the perspective of life is changed,” Gertrude wrote as she started out, in the winter of 1909, on her first expedition from Syria to Mesopotamia. “Existence suddenly seems to be a very simple matter, and one wonders why we plan and scheme, when all we need do is to live and make sure of a succeeding generation.”
Her own ability to contribute to successive generations was becoming more doubtful as the possibility of marriage floated beyond her grasp. But as for planning and scheming, she could hardly resist, riding off onto dangerous paths, plunging into political whirlpools. Almost as soon as she arrived in Syria, she was swirling in local politics, promising to write to Domnul at The Times in London and keep him informed of the latest news, which, she hoped, he
would publish. (In Constantinople a group of reformers, the Young Turks, were threatening the Sultan with nationalist ideas, and the winds of change were blowing in Syria, too.) But the real reason for her trip was to do research for another book. The success of The Desert and the Sown stirred her on.
She had taken time, the previous winter, to study at the Royal Geographical Society, learning how to do surveying, make astronomical observations and apply the techniques of mapmaking. She had hoped to be able to use her knowledge on a trip to Central Arabia, but a meeting with Percy Cox in London had pushed the journey aside. The British Resident in the Gulf had cautioned her that, besides the usual, perilous raids and brazen thievery, war had broken out among the tribes; it was far too dangerous for anyone to cross the desert.
Redirecting her attention, she decided to map the uncharted sands of Mesopotamia. She began her journey in Syria, once again, to study the Roman and Byzantine churches, and to help David Hogarth, who had asked her to take casts of the stones of the Hittites, the ancient iron smelters, progenitors of England’s ironmasters. From there she would go on to Iraq.
Her trunk once again packed with pistols and with Maurice’s rifle from the Boer War, her saddlebags crammed with books and cameras, the forty-year-old Gertrude laid out a journey from Aleppo, across the Syrian desert to Iraq, then down alongside the Euphrates River, five hundred miles southeast to Baghdad, where she would regroup and travel along the Tigris, northward to Turkey.
In Aleppo she met up with Fattuh, her highly capable Christian servant, and arranged her belongings: her tents, a folding bed, mosquito netting, a canvas bath, a canvas chair, rugs, table, pots and pans, enough provisions to last at least a month, and linens, china, tea service, crystal and silver cutlery for proper dining. They hired seven baggage animals, a dozen horses and three muleteers—Hajj Amr, Selim and Habib. There were two servants, the round-faced Fattuh, in his striped shirt and Turkish pants, and his young brother-in-law Jusef; two soldiers; and herself. Riding dawn till dusk for two full days across the sweeping grassy plains, she thrilled to being in the open, untamed, yawning ocean of desert, unbound by drawing room constraints, free to be, to do, to say, to feel as she wanted. She wrote to Florence that she could “scarcely believe it to be true.”
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