In 1926, she turned her full attention to archaeology. With the frontier problem solved at last and the Treaty accepted by the Iraqi parliament, she concentrated on her next project: to get her museum lodged in appropriate premises, instead of the Ministry of Works where it had begun. The museum’s Babylonian Stone Room was opened by the King in June. As always, once she was committed to a project, she took on even the most uncongenial tasks. Alone or with a clerk, sometimes with an RAF officer who was a keen amateur archaeologist, she laboriously catalogued the finds from Ur and Kish. She sometimes got up at 5 a.m. to do the day’s work before midday—the heat in the fanless museum rooms could be overwhelming.
She was still taking on political work, still passionate about the metamorphosis taking place around her. When the League of Nations’ Boundary Commission had arrived in January 1925, finally to determine the border between Iraq and Turkey, it was Gertrude who had entertained and briefed the members. These were eminent men from Sweden, Belgium, and Hungary—accompanied, however, by a Turkish assessor and three Turkish “experts”: she told Dobbs she feared their expertise would include intrigue and intimidation. In due course, the Commission’s report was published. It recommended that the whole of the Mosul vilayet should come within the boundaries of Iraq, provided a new treaty kept Britain’s partnership with Iraq in operation for twenty-five more years. Britain and Iraq agreed, both sides hoping that Iraq would be an independent member of the League of Nations long before that time had elapsed. Meanwhile, the Turks resumed their atrocities against the Assyrians, and attacked thousands of Kurdish proindependents.
The Constituent Assembly having been democratically elected, the Organic Law, or constitution, was framed and passed. An electoral law was created so that legitimate political parties could take part in elections to the first parliament. With the assurance to Faisal of a British financial contribution sufficient to establish an effective defence force, voting began, and the results were in by June. On 16 July, Faisal would inaugurate the first genuinely democratic government in Iraq. In a worthy conclusion to that chapter, the British ambassador in Constantinople, working face-to-face with the Turks, managed to conclude a tripartite treaty between Iraq, Turkey, and Britain to bring some hope of a permanent peace on the borders.
It was time for celebration. On 25 June 1926, the King gave a state banquet to mark the signing of the treaty, at which he expressed his profound thanks to the British government and its representatives for all that they had done for Iraq. Henry Dobbs wrote afterwards: “Miss Gertrude Bell was one of the most prominent of the guests at this banquet and shared conspicuously in the general atmosphere of congratulation which marked the close of the first stage in the existence of Iraq. It was the last State function which she attended.”
Although her letters to her parents reveal her underlying, less positive, feelings at this period, Gertrude was still the spirited and stimulating woman that she had always been. In the early spring Vita Sackville-West came for the weekend. In her subsequent book A Passenger to Teheran, she has left an energetic description of Gertrude and her domestic life.
To reach Gertrude’s house, the visitor made her way through “a dusty jumble” of mean buildings and a quagmire:
Then: a door in the blank wall . . . a creaking of hinges, a broadly smiling servant, a rush of dogs, a vista of garden-path edged with carnations in pots, a little verandah and a little low house at the end of the path, an English voice—Gertrude Bell . . . here she was in her right place, in her own house, with her office in the city, and her white pony in a corner of the garden, and her Arab servants, and her English books, and her Babylonian shards on the mantelpiece, and her long thin nose, and her irrepressible vitality. I felt all my loneliness and despair lifted from me in a second . . . I found myself laughing for the first time in ten days. The garden was small, but cool and friendly; her spaniel wagged not only his tail but his whole little body; the pony looked over the loose-box door and whinnied gently; a tame partridge hopped about the verandah; some native babies who were playing in a corner stopped playing to stare and grin . . . Would I like breakfast first, or a bath? and I would like to see her museum, wouldn’t I? did I know she was Director of Antiquities in Iraq? wasn’t that a joke? and would I like to come to tea with the King? . . . and she must go to her office, but would be back for luncheon. Oh yes, and there were people to luncheon; and so, still talking, still laughing, she pinned on a hat without looking in the glass, and took her departure.
Gertrude had, she wrote, the gift of making everyone feel suddenly eager, of making you feel that life was full and rich and exciting; and it is clear that, whatever her state of health and mind, she utterly refused to languish or complain. She spoke as if the two of them might visit Ctesiphon together in the autumn.
As she worked on in the museum, Gertrude contemplated her existence, the smallness of her income if and when she retired, and the loss of all those friends who had already left Iraq. She wrote to Hugh:
I think it is extremely unlikely that I can afford to come back and out again this summer—it’s a very expensive business . . . I find myself really rather loose on the world. I don’t see at all clearly what I shall do, but of course I can’t stay here forever . . . I’m not at all necessary in the office . . .
But it is too lonely, my existence here; one can’t go on for ever being alone. At least, I don’t feel I can . . .
The afternoons, after tea, hang rather heavy on my hands.
On Sunday 11 July, having joined the usual afternoon swimming party, she returned home exhausted by the heat. She went to bed, asking to be woken at 6 a.m. or, perhaps, not to be disturbed before then. Perhaps she had said something unusual to Marie, or was looking ill again. In either case, Marie was worried about her, and looked in during the night. Gertrude was asleep, a bottle of pills beside her. Whether there were any overt signs of suicide, whether the bottle was empty, whether Marie at once called the hospital, is not known. What is known is that the day before, she sent a note to Ken Cornwallis to ask if he would look after her dog Tundra, “if anything happened to her.”
Gertrude had told Domnul, some years before, that death was no longer a thing she feared, that it had been robbed of its sting. “I wonder . . . what it will be like after, if there’s any sort of an ‘after’ ” she had said. Now, she had set out one final time into the unknown, and this time she would never wake up.
Her death certificate, made out by the director of the Royal Hospital in Baghdad, one Dr. Dunlop, stated that she had died from “Dial poisoning.” Dial was the name for a preparation of diallylbarbituric acid, or allobarbital, used at the time as a sedative and later discontinued partly because of its frequent use in suicide attempts. Dunlop writes that death had taken place in the early hours of 12 July. It was a couple of days before her fifty-eighth birthday.
Cornwallis did not look after Tundra. But Florence and Hugh must have asked Marie to arrange the dog’s passage home. It arrived at Mount Grace, where the Bells soon received a remorseful letter from Cornwallis, explaining that he had been unwell at the time of Gertrude’s death and had realized only subsequently the significance of the note she had sent him.
In her Letters Florence wrote that Gertrude’s death brought “an overwhelming manifestation of sorrow and sympathy from all parts of the earth, and we realized afresh that her name was known in every continent, her story had crossed every sea.” A legendary personality had emerged from the Gertrude that her family had known. One of the first letters to arrive from Iraq was from her friend Haji Naji, who wrote: “It was my faith always to send Miss Bell the first of my fruits and vegetables and I know not now where I shall send them.” George V wrote:
The Queen and I are grieved to hear of the death of your distinguished and gifted daughter, whom we held in high regard. The nation will with us mourn the loss of one who by her intellectual powers, force of character and personal courage rendered important and what I trust will prove lasting benefit to t
he country and to those regions where she worked with such devotion and self-sacrifice . . .
The Colonial Secretary Leo Amery paid her the rare tribute of a statement in the House of Commons. Sir Valentine Chirol wrote a moving portrait of her for The Times. Lawrence wrote a brilliant if characteristically cranky letter to Hugh from India. Seeking anonymity and isolation, he had enlisted in the RAF as Aircraftsman Shaw and obtained a posting far afield, near Karachi. He had not known of Gertrude’s death until Bernard Shaw’s wife had sent him Florence’s compilation of her letters. He wrote:
I think she was very happy in her death, for her political work—one of the biggest things a woman has ever had to do—was as finished as mine. That Irak state is a fine monument; even if it only lasts a few more years, as I often fear and sometimes hope. It seems such a very doubtful benefit—government—to give a people who have long done without. Of course it is you who are unhappy, not having Gertrude any more; but there—she wasn’t yours really, though she did give you so much.
Her letters are exactly herself—eager, interested, almost excited, always about her company and the day’s events. She kept an everlasting freshness; or at least, however tired she was, she could always get up enough interest to match that of anyone who came to see her. I don’t think I ever met anyone more entirely civilized, in the sense of her width of intellectual sympathy. And she was exciting too, for you never knew how far she would leap out in any direction, under the stimulus of some powerful expert who had engaged her mind in his direction. She and I used to have a private laugh over that—because I kept two of her letters, one describing me as an angel, and the other accusing me of being possessed by the devil—and I’d show her first one and then another, begging her to be charitable towards her present objects of dislike . . .
. . . her loss must be nearly unbearable, but I’m so grateful to you for giving so much of her personality to the world . . .
David Hogarth; Salomon Reinach, the editor of the Revue Archéologique; Leonard Woolley of the British Museum; and hundreds of sheikhs, British officers, and Iraqi ministers added their commiserations. In Baghdad King Faisal and his Cabinet designated one of the rooms in the museum the “Gertrude Bell Room,” and Henry Dobbs wrote on behalf of her friends there to say that they had commissioned a brass plaque, to be put up in the Iraq Museum:
GERTRUDE BELL
Whose memory the Arabs will ever hold
in reverence and affection
Created this Museum in 1923
Being then Honorary Director of Antiquities for the Iraq
With wonderful knowledge and devotion
She assembled the most precious objects in it
And through the heat of the Summer
Worked on them until the day of her death
On 12th July, 1926
King Faisal and the Government of Iraq
In gratitude for her great deeds in this country
Have ordered that the Principal Wing shall bear her name
And with their permission
Her friends have erected this Tablet
At the time of her death, Faisal was absent from Iraq. Amir Ali was acting as Regent. He immediately ordered a military funeral for her. She was buried the same afternoon in the cemetery outside Baghdad. Her body was driven in a “Health Service motor car” to the British cemetery from the Protestant church, her coffin draped with the Union Jack and the flag of Iraq and decked with wreaths from Faisal’s family, the British High Commission, and many others. The cortège drove slowly through streets lined with soldiers of the Iraqi army, and was followed on foot by the Regent, the Prime Minister, the High Commissioner, and other state officials, both civil and military. Enormous crowds had assembled from across the country to watch her coffin pass by and to pay her silent homage; Islamic leaders side by side with Jewish merchants, effendis alongside the poor and ragged. It was reported in the newspapers that “the whole population of the capital participated in the procession of burial.” At the cemetery gates young men of the High Commission, openly grieving, shouldered the coffin to its resting place. The British army chaplain performed the burial rites and senior British officials scattered handfuls of soil over it. Surrounded by “a huge concourse of Iraqis and British”—including Sir Henry Dobbs and the entire British staff, the Iraqi Cabinet, and many tribal sheikhs—the coffin was laid in the plain stone tomb. Word had gone out across the desert with the habitual mystifying speed, and the tribes had been pouring into Baghdad all afternoon: first the Howeitat and Dulaim, then sheikhs from near and far.
She had for the last ten years of her life [said Dobbs], consecrated all the indomitable fervour of her spirit and all the astounding gifts of her mind to the service of the Arab cause, and especially to Iraq. At last her body, always frail, was broken by the energy of her soul.
Her bones rest where she had wished them to rest, in the soil of Iraq. Her friends are left desolate.
The Times leader wrote of her capacity for work:
Some power in her linked the love of the East with a practical aim that became a dominating purpose . . . that she endured drudgery, was never dismayed by continual disappointment and never allowed her idealism to turn to bitterness, shows a strength of character rare indeed among those of the English for whom the East has become a passion. She was the one distinguished woman among them and her quality was of the purest English mettle.
The many obituaries paid tribute to the fact that, thanks to her, Iraq was better governed than it had been for five hundred years, calmer, more prosperous, and evidently more contented, the British and the Arabs working together in friendly collaboration. The Times of India obituary offered a masterly summing-up of her character and work. While the British appreciated her as author, traveller, and archaeologist, it said, they remained to the end ignorant of the “astonishing position she had built up for herself in Iraq, a position which has made her responsible, more than any other single individual, for the shape and appearance of modern Iraq as it stands today.” Recognizing that some readily criticized her, her aims, and her methods, the writer reflected:
so challenging a personality could hardly escape enemies . . . To match the almost passionate devotion which she inspired in her immediate circle, she had to face a hostility almost as strong on the part of those with whom she differed. To the ordinary outsider—particularly perhaps the journalistic outsider—she was offhand and even rude . . .
Her great design was
the creation of a free, prosperous and cultivated Iraq, the mainspring for a revival of Arab culture and civilization . . . It was Gertrude who advocated day in day out the granting of as complete a measure of local autonomy as was compatible with some British hold on the country—not . . . on the score of expediency, but on that of the natural right of the Arab race to its “place in the sun.”
She had persuaded the British Government to take on the financial risks of Iraq, and had convinced local Iraqi leaders that it meant well by them; and that there would be no return to colonial methods.
In The Times, Chirol wrote in his obituary: “With all the qualities which are usually described as virile, she combined in a high degree the charm of feminine refinement, and though only revealed to a few, even amongst her intimates, great depths of tender and even passionate affection.” For those who loved Gertrude most, Florence’s much earlier words remain unforgettable: “In truth the real basis of Gertrude’s nature was her capacity for deep emotion. Great joys came into her life, and also great sorrows. How could it be otherwise, with a temperament so avid of experience? Her ardent and magnetic personality drew the lives of others into hers as she passed along.”
Hugh and Florence, bowed under the blows that fate had dealt them, moved with Maurice into Mount Grace, while Rounton turned a desolate façade to the winds off the moors.
In time, there would follow inexorably the demolition of the showpiece house, now too big and too grand for the Bells. All too soon, the splintering crash of iron on
tiles and stone would silence for ever the Rounton chimes that had rung out on the quarter-hour from the stable bells, and turn to rubble the arched gallery where international affairs had been settled, and house guests had eaten eggs and bacon at midnight. Dead flies collected in the empty study where Gertrude and Professor Ramsay had once worked on The Thousand and One Churches. Out of the broken windows, the great rock garden that she had created sank back into dark woodland, the pond where children had iceskated turned green and stagnant, and the tennis court grew high with weeds.
Eddies of draught through the dining-room rippled the Morris and Burne-Jones tapestry of the Romaunt of the Rose, that allegory of a lover knight battling to overcome all dangers, all obstacles and scruples, at long last to be united with the hitherto unattainable rose. And at the top of the house, the wallpaper dampened and peeled in the room where Dick Doughty-Wylie and she had once lain together, holding hands in the dark.
*The name by which Ibn Saud’s sect the Wahabis were now known.
CHRONOLOGY
1807
Great-grandfather Thomas Bell, Jarrow alkali manufacturer, opens iron foundry with James Losh and George Wilson at Walker, near Newcastle upon Tyne
1816
Grandfather (Isaac) Lowthian Bell born to Thomas and Katherine (née Lowthian) at Washington New Hall, elder brother of John and Tom
1832
First Reform Act passed by British parliament
Gertrude Bell Page 51