A Woman in Arabia
Page 29
June 16, 1926
. . . It is too lonely my existence here; one can’t go on for ever being alone. At least, I don’t feel I can.
Gertrude had told Domnul, some years previously, 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.”
On Sunday, July 11, 1926, having joined the usual afternoon swimming party, Gertrude returned home exhausted by the heat. She went to bed, asking to be woken at 6 a.m.—or, perhaps, not to be disturbed until then. Perhaps she had said something unusual to Marie or was looking very ill. In any case, her maid was worried about her and decided to check on her 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, and whether Marie called the hospital or waited are not known. What is known is that on the previous day, she had sent a note to Ken Cornwallis, asking if he would look after her dog, Tundra, “if anything happened to me.”
Her death certificate, made out by the director of the Royal Hospital in Baghdad, 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. Dr. Dunlop wrote that her death had taken place in the early hours of July 12. It was a couple of days before her fifty-eighth birthday.
Cornwallis did not look after Tundra. Florence and Hugh must have asked Marie to arrange the dog’s passage to England. Tundra 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 not realized the significance of her letter.
In her Letters of Gertrude Bell, 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.”
In London there was a memorial service for her at St. Margaret’s Church in Westminster. In a condolence telegram, King George V wrote to Hugh and Florence that “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 the 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, stating that she was “perhaps the most distinguished woman of our day, in the field of Oriental exploration, archaeology, and literature and in the service of the Empire in Irak [sic].” T. E. 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. He had not known of Gertrude’s death until George Bernard Shaw’s wife had sent him Florence’s compilation of her letters.
In a condolence letter to her father, written on November 4, 1927, Lawrence 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 civilised, 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.
However, you won’t want to know what I think; 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, King Faisal was absent from Iraq. His brother Emir 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 cortege 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 spread across the desert with mystifying speed, and the tribes had been pouring into Baghdad all afternoon: first the Howeitat and Dulaim, then sheikhs from near and far.
Sir Henry Dobbs wrote:
She had for the last ten years of her life 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.
But let us not mourn, those who are left, even those who were nearest to her, that the end came to her so swiftly and so soon. Life would inexorably have led her down the slope—Death stayed her at the summit.
July 13, 1926, The Times editorial
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. . . . Miss Bell has left the memory of a great Englishwoman.
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, with 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 Gertrude as an author, traveler, 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.”
She had persuaded the British government to take on the financial risks of Iraq, and she had convinced Iraqi leaders that it meant well by them, and that there would be no return to colonial methods. Her grand 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 a ‘place in the sun.’”
But for those who loved Gertrude most, Florence’s words remain unforgettable. She wrote, “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.”
Index
Note: The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable. Additionally, page numbers in italics refer to maps.
’Abdul Qadir, 55
Acropolis, 43
aghas (Kurdish aristocrats), 100–101
agriculture in Mesopotamia, 186–87
Al Arab newspaper, xxxviii
al-Askari, Ja’far Pasha, 24
Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts, xxix
Alexander, the Great, 91, 92
Allenby, Edmund, 159, 207
al-Ma’rawi, Muhammad, 117, 119, 124
Al-Mutanabbi, 14
Alpine Journal, 29, 30
Alps, 26
al-Said, Nuri Pasha, 24
Amurath to Amurath (Bell), xii, xxxiii, xxxiv, 99–100
Anglo-Persian Oil Company, 187
antiquities work of Bell, xix, xxxii, xli. See also archaeological work of Bell
Anti-Suffrage League, xxxiii, 20
Arab Bureau. See Arab Intelligence Bureau
Arabia Deserta (Doughty), 106, 115, 121, 124
Arabian Diaries, 1913–1914 (O’Brien, ed.), xii
Arabian Nights, 128, 129
Arabic language
and Bagdad Public Library (Salam Library), 9–10
Bell’s difficulties with, 3, 4–5, 7
Bell’s fluency in, 9, 152
and Bell’s political paper, 182
and Bell’s relations with Arabs, xiv, 6–7, 8, 68
and Lawrence, 152
lessons in, 63
poetry in, recited by Bell, 68
Arab Intelligence Bureau, xii, xl, 151–66
and Arab Revolt, 153, 159
Bell’s assignment to, 151
and Bell’s demotion, 191
Bell’s role in, 153
and correspondence of Bell, 153
and the Intrusives, 153, 159
Lawrence’s criticism of, 162–64
mission of, 153
and self-determination for Arabs, 155, 159, 162, 166, 191
Arab Revolt, 78n, 153, 159, 206, 207
Arabs and Arab culture
and Balfour Declaration, xvi,
xviii, xxxviii
and Bedouin etiquette, xiv
Bell’s affection for, 152, 223
Bell’s expertise about, 71–72, 152
Bell’s relations with, xiv–xv
and Cairo Conference, 164–165
diversity in, 179
and English women, 23, 75
Lawrence’s affection for, 152
lines of heredity in, xiv
and provisional Arab government, xl
and raids, 76–78
and siege of Kut, xiii,
xxxvi–xxxvii, 158–59
tents of, 68, 98–99
and tribal call-to-arms, 77–78
tribal organization in, xv
See also self-determination of Arab people
Arab Tribes of Mesopotamia, The (Bell), xii, 166–75
archaeological work of Bell, xxxiv, 40–57
acquisitions for museum, 42–43, 54–56, 247
in Asia Minor, 96
Assyrian artifacts, 54
Babylonian artifacts, 54, 55, 102–3
in Binbirkilise, 47–50
Byzantine sites, xii, 41, 81
credentials for, 40, 41
and desert expeditions, 71, 102–3
and Director of Archaeology appointment, 42, 52, 54, 229
and field books, xi
and Gertrude’s Law of Excavations, 229
and looting, 42
and palace of Ukhaidir, xxxiii, xxxiv, 41–42, 50–52
and Prolegomena entry, 42
protection of sites and treasures, 52
training in surveying and mapmaking, xxxiii
See also Iraq Museum
archive of Bell’s works, xi
Ark of Noah, 102–3
Armenians, xxxiii
Ashur, 82, 83
Asia, 83–84, 95–96
Asia Minor
archaeological work of Bell in, 96
expedition through Syrian Desert to (1905), 63, 76–81
expedition to (1907), 81–82
scarcity of resources in, 70
Asquith, Herbert, 20, 22
Assaf, 90
Assyrian artifacts, 54
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, xliii
Athens, 43
athleticism of Bell, 26
At the Works (F. Bell), xi, 19
awards. See honors awarded to Bell
Baal, Temple of, 74
Babylon, xix, xl, 82
Babylonian archaeological artifacts, 54, 55, 102–3
Baghdad, xxxvii
and Bell’s fluency in Arabic, 9
Bell’s home in, xxxvii, 178
Bell’s travels to, xxxiii, xxxv
and British administration, 187
and expedition of 1911, 84
and expedition of 1913–14, 89
heat in, 188–89
and influenza pandemic, xxxix
insurrection in, 201–2
naqib of, 197–203, 208, 213, 222, 225, 227
schoo
l for girls in, 21
women and social observances in, 25
women’s club in, 24
women’s emancipation in, 24
women’s hospital in, xl, 21
and World War I, xxxvii
See also Iraq Museum
Baghdad Public Library (later Salam Library), xli, 9–10
Balfour, Arthur James, xvi
Balfour, Frank, xxxiii, 188, 224
Balfour Declaration, xvi,
xviii, xxxviii
Barre des Écrins ascent of Bell, 28
bazaars, 81
Bedouins
and coronation of Faisal, 214–17
and Damascus government, 21
language of, 6, 7
and rafiq’s role in desert expeditions, 65
Beirut, xxxiv
Bell, Ada (aunt), xxvii, xxx
Bell, Ada (sister), ix–x
Bell, Florence (née Cubitt), xxvi, 247
appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire, xxxix
and Bell’s education, x–xi
on Bell’s emotional depth, 255
and Bell’s failing health, 241–42
and Bell’s romance, 110–11
and Bell’s service in Baghdad, 189
and British Red Cross, xxxiv
and correspondence, xxiii, 67, 105
death of, xliv
and Doughty-Wylie’s death, 146–47
and family vacations, 27
financial difficulties of, 239
and mountaineering of Bell, 33
move to Mount Grace Priory,
xliii, 247
and pageant, xliv
and social work, 19
and women’s suffrage, 18, 20
At the Works (F. Bell), xi, 19
and World War I, xxxv
Bell, Gertrude
athleticism of, 26
awards (see honors awarded to Bell)
background of, ix
birth of, xxvi
childhood of, xi
competencies of, 21 (see also languages spoken by Bell)
death of, xliv, 250–54
education of, ix, x–xi, xxviii
expeditions of (see desert expeditions of Bell)
family life desired by, xx, 63
health issues of, xxxviii, 30, 188–89, 237–39, 240, 241, 245–46