Gertrude Bell — The Intrepid Explorer

She was a mountaineer, an archaeologist, an intrepid explorer, a daughter of the desert, a kingmaker, the uncrowned queen of Iraq

And she was so much more. Ever since I went to watch The English Patient at the cinema (where films should be seen), I was so angry and have wanted to write an article about Gertrude Bell ever since. It was the following exchange at the start of the film that set me off:

First officer: “But can we get through those mountains?”

Second officer: “The Bell maps show a way.”

First officer: “Let’s hope he was right.”

“He”? The ‘Bell maps’ were the only maps at the time that would show a way through the desert — but ‘Bell’ was a woman, not a ‘he’, she had created the maps for the Royal Geographic Society, and Lord Cromer, the former British Council General to Egypt, said of her in 1915:

“Miss Bell knows more of the Arabs and Arabia than almost any other living Englishman or woman”.

I shall say nothing more about the film, instead tell about this most incredible woman.

Photograph courtesy of the Gertrude Bell Archive: Gertrude Bell at the Arab shrine Qubbat Duris, Lebanon, June 1900 | The Gertrude Bell Library/Newcastle University

Who was Gertrude Bell?

• Born in 1868 to a wealthy family in Washington, County Durham (UK), to Sir Hugh Bell and his wife Mary, who died in 1871. Gertrude Bell grew up close to her father, a mill owner, an industrial capitalist who made certain his workers were well paid. Her stepmother, Florence Bell, arrived when Gertrude Bell was seven years old, another firm support in the home, ensuring excellent schooling for her and encouraging the clever child and adolescent to follow her intellectual development.
• Gertrude Bell was the first woman to earn a first-degree honours in modern history at Oxford, where she attended Lady Margaret Hall, one of a few colleges that accepted women.
• She was a passionate and skilled mountaineer, with ascents in both the French and the Swiss Alps, among the latter some of the virgin peaks in the Engelhorner range where one is named after her, Gertrudspitze. She was almost lost in a blizzard on Finsteraarhorn in 1902 but survived fifty hours hanging from a rope and later in 1904 went on to scale the Matterhorn.
• Her fascination with the Middle East started during a visit in 1892 to Iran, when she also visited what would become Iraq, and she went on to write several travel books, the first in 1894, Safar Nameh: Persia Pictures, and in 1897 her English translation of Poems from the Divan of Hafiz, one of the major poets in classical Persian literature along with Omar Khayyam and Rumi (Jalāl ud-Din Mohammad Rumi). His full name is Khwaja Shams-ud-din Mohammed Hafiz-e Shirazi and is known for the Divan as well as his exquisite love poems. Maybe I should add that she also fell in love in Teheran in 1892, with Henry Cadogan, but was not allowed to marry him when her father found out that he was deeply in debt. Cadogan died suddenly just a year later. Gertrude Bell never married.
• She was a passionate archaeologist since her first excavation in Melos, an ancient Greek city in 1899, and went on to go on archaeology-related travels, including her 1909 trek along the Euphrates River.
• She was a competent photographer and documented her travels with her own photos. The best examples are the 1907 The Desert and the Sown; Travels in Syria and Palestine, the 1911 Amurath to Amurath Euphrates journey, her collaboration with the archaeologist Sir William M. Ramsey, The Thousand and One Churches, documenting post-Classical monuments in Anatolia (1909).
• She spoke eight languages, among them Arabic, Persian, German, and French as well as a bit of Turkish and Italian.
• She was the first woman to work for British military intelligence, Major Miss Bell, from 1915.
• She founded and led the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, now known as the Iraqi Museum, by bringing in extensive collections of artifacts from the Babylonian empire. And she had been invited to speak at a promotional event for the public library in Baghdad in November 1919. She subsequently served as the President of the Library Committee from 1921 to 1924.

Gertrude Bell (Photo: A frame from the documentary ‘Letters from Baghdad’)

Bell played a major role in drawing up Iraq’s borders and choosing its ruler. Although imperialists wanted nothing to do with her, to the Iraqis, she was a queen and a mother.

She also earned names such as Daughter of the Desert, Mother of the Faithful, and more popularly, as the Uncrowned Queen of Iraq. In Iraq, they called her “khutan”, the “respected lady”.

When she negotiated self-governance for the Iraqis, British imperialists had to abandon their plans of maintaining their control over Iraq. To this day, she remains a hero after the 1921 feat, but in Britain, she left a more complicated legacy.

Unfortunately, not everyone in the West respected Bell’s efforts. Bell even drew the ire of British imperialists, who wanted to maintain their grip on the Middle East.

One such man, Sir Mark Sykes, had made a secret deal to divide up the Middle East with France and Russia. He said that Bell was a “silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-waggling, blethering ass!” Reference: https://thoughtnova.com/the-controversial-story-of-gertrude-bell-the-british-desert-queen-of-iraq

In May 1892, Gertrude Bell travelled to Tehran to visit her uncle Sir Frank Lascelles, the British ambassador to Persia. She narrated her experiences in her book Persian Pictures, published in 1894. As mentioned above, this was also where she met Henry Cadogan.

She travelled to the Middle East again in 1899. She wandered across the Arabian peninsula six times over the next 12 years. Her experiences in the Middle East were published in 1907 in the book Syria: The Desert and the Sown.

She travelled to the Ottoman Empire in March 1907, to work with the archaeologist Sir William M. Ramsay. Their excavations were documented in the book A Thousand and One Churches.

She left for Mesopotamia in January 1909. She travelled to the Hittite city of Carchemish where she met T. E. Lawrence, popularly known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, for the first time.

In November 1915, Bell was summoned to join the nascent Arab Bureau in Cairo. This is where she met T. E. Lawrence for the second time.

In 1915, both Bell and Lawrence were assigned to the Army Intelligence Headquarters in Cairo for war service, because of their extensive knowledge of the region and languages spoken therein.

She became a witness to the Armenian Genocide while in the Middle East. The horrors she witnessed had a profound effect on her. (For more on this, see Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation, 2005)

Gertrude Bell was opposed to the Zionist movement because she felt it was unfair for Jewish rule to be imposed on the Arab inhabitants of Palestine.

And she played an integral part in the administration of Iraq throughout the early 1920s. She also played a key role in designing the Iraqi national flag as we know it today.

Gertrude Bell in front of the Sphinx and Pyramids in Egypt; she is seated on a camel between Winston Churchill and TE Lawrence under the head of the Sphinx. She had advocated for self-rule in the 1919 Peace Conference and reported to the government in 1920. The photo was taken when she visited Cairo with Lawrence and Churchill to advocate for self-rule in Iraq.

Vita Sackville-West visited Gertrude Bell in Baghdad on her travels to Teheran to meet her husband, stationed there.

“I had known her first in Constantinople, where she had arrived straight out of the desert, with all the evening dresses and cutlery and napery that she insisted on taking with her on her wanderings; and then in England; but here she was in her right place, in Iraq, 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.” (Passenger to Teheran, 1926)

Four months later Gertrude Bell was dead.

Sheikh Mizhir and family with dogs in the garden of Gertrude Bell’s home in Baghdad where she died in 1926 (Gertrude Bell Photographic Archive, Newcastle University)

Notes:

Newcastle University hold an outstanding “Gertrude Bell Archive” with a huge collection of her photos from travels and excavations: http://gertrudebell.ncl.ac.uk/photos.php

Georgina Howell: Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (2006)

Documentary: Letters from Baghdad (2016) by Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum

Short overview: https://www.biography.com/news/gertrude-bell-biography-facts (good photos)

Gertrude Bell: The Desert and the Sown; Travels in Syria and Palestine (1907); the 1911 Amurath to Amurath Euphrates journey; and her collaboration with the archaeologist Sir William M. Ramsey, The Thousand and One Churches, documenting post-Classical monuments in Anatolia (1909).

And, do check Graham Fuller’s 2017 text on Gertrude Bell: “The Wisdom of Adventurer Gertrude Bell”: https://medium.com/the-omnivore/the-wisdom-of-adventuress-gertrude-bell-17f50d123385

Comment and warning: A film, do please avoid — here is a quotation: “There’s something in the underlying belief system of Werner Herzog’s execrable film about Gertrude Bell, ‘Queen of the Desert’, that is so flawed and lamentable that there aren’t enough rotten tomatoes in the world to throw at it.” (https://eleanorscottarchaeology.com/els-archaeology-blog/2018/10/10/gertrude-bell-amp-the-elusive-search-for-the-real-woman)