Whenever Gertrude stayed at home too long, she would be drawn into Florence’s social work, summed up by Florence in her book At the Works. Factually exhaustive, exposing the suffering endured by the poorer working families and especially when they struck hard times, it poses no remedies. Capitalists and employers as the Bells were, Hugh saw no conflict between masters and men—he saw them as mutually dependent. He paid his men fairly according to the dictates of the day, he was active in Liberal politics, and he believed in the role of the new trade unions. As civic leaders and local benefactors, the Bells built assembly rooms, libraries, schools, and offices. They also opened a Middlesbrough center where exhausted workers could go and where Florence would play the piano and lead the songs.
At the time the vote, considered today to be a universal human right, was judged to be a serious business requiring education and political acumen. The government of the day was concerned with such issues as defense, Irish Home Rule, free trade, penal reform, the Reform Bill, and political corruption. What could a wife with a houseful of children know of these issues, asked Florence, and how could she find the time to learn to read if she was illiterate?
If anything tipped Gertrude into action, other than family pressure, it was the militancy of Christabel Pankhurst, who by 1904 was leading women against what she called “the noxious character of male sexuality.” The suffragettes were engaged in a war against men, employing methods tantamount to terrorism. They denounced marriage as legalized prostitution, and they attacked property, smashing windows and train carriages and slashing paintings of nude women in galleries. They assaulted random men who happened to resemble Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. They sent packages of sulfuric acid to his successor, Lloyd George, later attempting to burn down his house.
Gertrude joined the movement against women’s suffrage in 1908 and became a member of the Anti-Suffrage League. Being the person she was, she initially entered the fray with zest, and it was probably Gertrude who collected 250,000 signatures for the anti-suffrage petition of 1909; but soon her letters betrayed a lack of mission, which suggests she had taken on the work mostly to please Florence.
In Iraq, from 1915, she made few female friends. There were exceptions, but she made cutting remarks about the British wives of her colleagues in Baghdad. “A little woman” was one of her deadliest assessments. She conceded that her great friend Haji Naji, who regularly sent her fruit and vegetables from his garden, was “an odd substitute for a female friend but the best I can find.”
Later in life, her work for Muslim women would be considerable. In her earliest encounters with women of the harem, and particularly in Hayyil, Gertrude had heard their tragic stories and remained deeply impressed by their subjection. She heartily disliked the restrictions placed on Muslim women in the Islamic societies of the East and did what she could to help. She organized a series of health lectures by a woman doctor, which were well attended by the Muslim wives. She helped found the first girls’ school in Baghdad, and she led the fund-raising for a women’s hospital. Her regular Tuesday tea parties for women put her on a friendly footing with the chief families of Baghdad.
Gertrude was to become a supremely civilized and able woman. With no husband or children to preoccupy her, her abilities spanned the spectrum from poetry to administration, from pioneering adventure and sportsmanship to archaeology. She possessed a rare grasp of world history and contemporary political debate alongside a love of gardening and pretty clothes. She was proficient in six languages. And all of this was well grounded in the gentler human qualities: a deep sense of family, of landscape and architecture, and a love of life itself. Few have rivaled her in the sheer range of her capabilities. As a Person she came to fulfill the highest aspirations that John Stuart Mill had imagined possible for women.
Mount Carmel, Haifa, March 30, 1902
I am much entertained to find that I am a Person in this country—they all think I am a Person! . . . Renown is not very difficult to acquire here.
Damascus, February 27, 1905
I find the Government here has been in an agony of nervousness all the time I was in the Jebel Druze! They had three telegrams a day from Salkhad about me. . . . The governor here has sent me a message to say would I honour him by coming to see him, so I’ve answered graciously. . . . An official lives in this hotel. He spent the evening talking to me and offering to place the whole of the organisation of Syria at my disposal. He also tried to find out all my views on Druze and Bedouin affairs, but he did not get much forrader there. I have become a Person in Syria!
95 Sloane Street, London, March 28, 1913
Last night I went to a delightful party at the Glenconners’ and just before I arrived 4 suffragettes set on Asquith and seized hold of him. Whereupon Alec Laurence in fury seized 2 of them and twisted their arms till they shrieked. Then one of them bit him in the hand till he bled. When he told me the tale he was steeped in his own gore.
In 1917, Gertrude’s friend Sheikh Fahd Beg ibn Hadhdhal came to Baghdad on a visit early in the British administration of Iraq and described the powerful effect on him produced by one of her letters. She wrote home of what he said to her colleagues in the secretariat.
June 1, 1917
“I summoned my sheikhs” he wound up (I feeling more and more of a Person as he proceeded). “I read them your letter and I said to them, Oh Sheikhs”—we hung upon his words—“This is a woman—what must the men be like!” This delicious peroration restored me to my true place in the twinkling of an eye.
Of Religious Leaders and the Veiling of Women
. . . Their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don’t permit me to veil—I think I’m right there, for it would be a tacit admission of inferiority which would put our intercourse from the first out of focus. Nor is it any good trying to make friends through the women—if the women were allowed to see me they would veil before me as if I were a man. So you see I appear to be too female for one sex and too male for the other. [March 14, 1920]
Of British Women Abroad
As for the wife, why she comes abroad I can’t imagine for she has the meanest opinion of foreigners and their ways and their cooking. She dismisses the whole French cuisine at one blow:—they give you no potatoes. [April 23, 1893]
. . . The devil take all inane women. [September 6, 1917]
. . . A collection of more tiresome women I never encountered. [September 27, 1920]
I’m left without any female I can trouble to be intimate with and it’s a very great drawback. [October 13, 1921]
Of Some of the Wives of Her Colleagues
These idle women . . . take no sort of interest in what’s going on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (it’s also a very second-rate) English society quite cut off from the life of the town. I now begin to understand why British Government has come to grief in India, where our women do just the same thing. [Baghdad, June 19, 1921]
But she made good friends with Aurelia Tod, and much regretted her absence when the Tods left Baghdad.
I miss her dreadfully. She is the only intimate friend I have here; there isn’t one of the other women whom I care about or can talk to with complete frankness. It’s such a comfort to have someone to whom you can say everything! And besides she adds very greatly to the pleasure of life by making a centre for us where we can meet cheerfully and agreeably. [Baghdad, May 8, 1921]
Of Muslim Wives
They [the ladies of Baghdad] never see anything or go anywhere, think of it! Some of them remain quite human and cheerful but a great many are hysterical and nerve-ridden. They look like plants reared in a cellar. [Baghdad, May 4, 1918]
The poor thing never leaves the house or sees anyone. There are many families where the women are entirely secluded. I’m bound to say they hate it, and my heart aches with boredom when I think of them. [Baghdad, December 27, 1918]
Last night I dined
with Sir Aylmer* to meet Ja’far* and Nuri* and their wives! I doubted whether they would be bold enough to bring them, the wives I mean, but they were—it certainly is a great step forward. . . . They behaved perfectly, their complete absence of self-consciousness giving them a natural distinction which many great ladies might envy. [December 8, 1921]
Of the First Women’s Club Established in Baghdad
I’m wholly in favour of it—it’s the first step in female emancipation here—and yet wholly against it because it’s going to give me such a lot of trouble.
Aren’t we advancing Moslem women? There’s a quite considerable women’s movement going on.
Of Reactions to a Lecture She Gave to an Audience of Muslim Women
I discoursed to them on the ancient history of Iraq and modern excavation. Some of them listened and some didn’t—they haven’t got the habit of attention. But they’ll have to learn it. [January 30, 1924]
Of Her First Meeting with King Faisal’s Wife and Daughters
Just think of the life they’ve all led, imprisoned in the Mecca palace with a pack of women and slaves! Just to sit on their balcony and see the Tigris flowing must be wonderful to them. [December 23, 1924 ]
Gertrude much admired a Muslim woman who refused to submit herself to the usual Islamic rules.
She is an intrepid woman, holds her own against her men folk and goes about in Najaf scarcely veiled. . . . [December 5, 1920]
She is really a very remarkable woman, speaks English as well as I do and French better, and is quite free of the veil though a good Moslem. [October 12, 1922]
She wondered if the veiling of women might become a thing of the past, at least as a universal institution.
May 15, 1921
The women who have come back from Syria or Constantinople find the Baghdad social observances very trying. They have been accustomed to much greater freedom. As soon as we get our local institutions firmly established they will be bolder. They and their husbands are afraid that any steps taken now would set all the prejudiced old tongues wagging and jeopardize their future. Nevertheless these new men bring their wives to see me which is an unexpected departure from Baghdad customs, according to which a man would never go about with his wife. I welcome everything that tends in this direction but again one can do little but give sympathetic welcome to the woman. They must work out their own salvation and it wouldn’t help them to be actively backed by an infidel, even if the infidel were I who am permitted many things here.
THE MOUNTAINEER
During the 1899–1904 climbing seasons, Gertrude Bell became one of the most prominent women climbers in the Alps. While her traverse of the Schreckhorn was officially her most important ascent, she will always be remembered for the glorious failure of her attempt on the Finsteraarhorn. Her safe retreat under such conditions was a tremendous performance. “There can be in the whole Alps few places so steep and so high,” wrote Ulrich Fuhrer to her father, years later. “The climb has only been done three times, including your daughter’s attempt, and is still considered one of the greatest expeditions in the whole Alps. The honour belongs to Miss Bell. Had she not been full of courage and determination, we must have perished.”
Her achievements are all the more extraordinary because mountaineering was just one of her interests. Seen in the context of her whole life, her climbing was little more than a hobby she took up for a while, less important to her than traveling, learning languages, archaeology, or photography but more important, perhaps, than her rock gardening, hunting, or fencing.
From childhood, Gertrude had possessed an extraordinary vitality of mind and body. Small but strong and athletic, she needed considerable quantities of exercise, the harder the better. She hunted, danced, bicycled, played golf, shot, fished, fenced, gardened, and skated. She discovered climbing as a result of a family holiday in the French Alps. The first mountain she climbed was the snow-covered ridge of the Meije, which towered over the village of La Grave and the inn where the Bells were staying in August 1897. There Florence and her sisters sat on the balcony and drank hot chocolate, while Hugh and Gertrude got up early and bicycled or walked. They scrambled up a local peak together, the Bec de l’Homme, but Gertrude was soon going off by herself with the local mountain guides, Mathon and Marius, and beginning to climb minor peaks. Before she left, she went over the Brèche by the easy route and spent one night in the mountain refuge. It was enough to convince her of the thrill and danger of climbing, and as she ran down the last slope into the village, she resolved to come back and climb to the peak of the 13,068 foot Meije another year.
She fulfilled her promise a couple of seasons later, having been around the world in the meantime. She came on alone from Bayreuth, as much of a novice as she had been two years previously. It was not unusual at the time for male climbers, often British students on holiday, to tackle the Alps without any experience, as long as they could find good guides. Crampons would not be in use for nearly a decade, carabiners had not been invented, and without the benefit of nylon the ropes were thick and heavy, and even heavier when saturated. Women mountaineers were so rare that there were no “right clothes” for them. At first, Gertrude would take off her skirt and climb in her combinations. Later, she would wear a pair of men’s trousers tightly belted under her skirt. Eventually, she achieved a blue climbing suit with trousers into which she would change at the base hut. From a written request to her sister for “two gold pins for my necktie, and thick black garters,” it is clear that her trim and masculine appearance on the mountains set the fashion for the women skiers of the next few decades.
She met up with Mathon and Marius, and they started up the Meije. She was soon supporting her own weight and managing so well that she didn’t realize she had completed one of the trickiest maneuvers of the climb, the Pas du Chat. They reached the Grand Pic, fifteen feet of almost perpendicular rock, followed by a twenty-foot overhang and the summit. The way down was longer than the way up, and just as difficult. Arriving back at the inn, she went straight to bed and slept for eleven hours.
Now she set her heart on climbing the highest summit of the southern French Alps, the Barre des Écrins. They started at 1:10 a.m. in intense cold only three days later. Accidents happened that day. She fell onto her back on the ice but was caught on the rope by Mathon. Both cut their hands, he badly. She took photographs, her numb fingers fumbling with the camera. Bitter winds drove clouds of snow around them at midday, delaying the descent from the peak. On the way down, she twisted her foot painfully.
For the climbing season of 1900, Gertrude chose the Swiss Alps and met her new guides at Chamonix. Ulrich Fuhrer and his brother Heinrich would take her on all her major climbs thereafter. She had decided to tackle Mont Blanc. At 15,771 feet, it is physically demanding and the highest summit in the Alps. Only a year after her first mountain, she succeeded in climbing Mont Blanc and two other major peaks in the range, the Grepon and the Dru. Her fame as a mountaineer began to spread, and she became overconfident. She was riding for a fall, but she was so natural and agile a climber, combining such strength and courage, that it would be some time before the reckoning.
In 1901, she met Ulrich and Heinrich again, this time in the Bernese Oberland. Her first ambition was to climb the Schreckhorn, dominated only by the immense razor of the Finsteraarhorn. From her letter home she appears to have found the Schreckhorn easy, including even the two-thousand-foot rock tower at its crest. At the summit she announced to the Fuhrers her latest ambition: to climb the Finsteraarhorn by the unconquered northeast face.
Ulrich, whatever his private doubts, now put her through an intensive period of difficult climbing in preparation for this daunting challenge. Systematically, she climbed all the perpendicular peaks of the Engelhörner range. During the course of two weeks she climbed seven virgin peaks, one of which was named after her and remains in all the literature to this day as Gertrudspitze (Gertrude’s Peak). At her personal best
she undertook the most difficult ascent of the year, the unclimbed first-class traverse of the Urbachthaler Engelhorn. In a long letter to her family, she describes the key moments of what proved to be a horrific day’s climbing in bad weather, which involved Ulrich standing on Gertrude’s shoulders and then her upstretched hand in order to reach a small handhold. The ascent could have been fatal for all three and would have deterred almost any other climber, but in 1902 Gertrude returned to hold Ulrich to his promise to take her up the Finsteraarhorn.
She discovered that she had become famous when the train guard came to ask her if she were the same Miss Bell who had climbed the Engelhorn the previous year. However, she had rivals, and rather comically she ran into one of them, Fräulein Kuntze, in the same inn at Rosenlaui, and again when both were attempting the first ascent of the Lauteraarhorn-Schreckhorn traverse. There was, apparently, an acrimonious exchange between the two ladies, with Gertrude coming off best. Amused and on her mettle, she achieved the first ascent without much trouble, although, according to the Alpine Journal, the climb remains technically her most important climb.
Now she had truly earned her attempt on the Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain in the Oberland, approaching the summit by the new and difficult route that she and Ulrich had been working up to for a couple of years. Sharp as a blade, this remote and bad-tempered mountain rises perpendicular to a razor ridge at 14,022 feet, its steeple point visible for a hundred miles. It is notorious for bad weather and frequent avalanches, and many an experienced climber had turned away from the challenge that this thirty-five-year-old woman and her guide now set themselves. This was to be Gertrude’s most dangerous mountain exploit, and at her death it would still be regarded as one of the greatest expeditions in the history of Alpine climbing. It is clear from her vivid letter home afterward that she could have lost her life several times in the attempt, as the three climbers gave up the ascent in despair and struggled to descend the precipice at night in a raging storm.
A Woman in Arabia Page 7