Gertrude Bell

Bell, aged 41, before her tent while visiting archaeological excavations in Babylon (1909).

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell CBE (14 July 1868 – 12 July 1926) was a British writer, traveller, political analyst, administrator in Arabia, and an archaeologist who mapped and identified Anatolian and Mesopotamian ruins. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1917.

Bell and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) helped to create the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan and define the outline of the modern state of Iraq. She had a role behind the scenes in the Arab revolt in World War I. At the conclusion of the war, she proposed borders within Mesopotamia to include the three Ottoman Empire vilayets that later became Iraq.

Early life

Bell was born in Washington Hall, County Durham, England, to a family of great affluence. She soon became a great British writer, discoverer and archaeologist. She was a granddaughter of industrialist Isaac Lowthian Bell. In her early years, she attended the new Queen's College, London. At age 17, she enrolled in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she gained a first class honors degree in history in only two years.

Travels and writings

Bell's uncle, Sir Frank Lascelles, was British minister at Tehran, Persia. In May 1892, after leaving Oxford, Bell travelled to Persia to visit him. She described this journey in her book, Persian Pictures. She spent much of the next decade travelling around the world, mountaineering in Switzerland, and developing a passion for archaeology and languages. She had become fluent in Arabic, Persian, French and German as well as also speaking Italian and Turkish.

In 1899, Bell again went to the Middle East. She visited Palestine and Syria in that year and in 1900 travelled to Jerusalem to look for the Druze. She reached Jebel Druze and befriended the Druze king Yahya Bey. In 1905, Bell was again in the Middle East and travelled widely, studying local ruins and staying with both the Druzes and Beni Sakhr and meeting many Arab chieftains, emirs and sheiks. She published her observations in the book Syria: The Desert and the Sown published in 1907 (William Heinemann Ltd, London). In this book she described, photographed and detailed her trip to Greater Syria's towns and cities like Damascus, Jerusalem, Beirut, Antioch and Alexandretta. Bell's vivid descriptions opened up the Arabian deserts to the western world. In March 1907, Bell journeyed to Turkey and began to work with the archaeologist and New Testament scholar Sir William M. Ramsey. Their excavations were chronicled in A Thousand and One Churches.

In January 1909, she left for Mesopotamia. She visited the Hittite city of Carchemish, mapped and described the ruin of Ukhaidir and finally went to Babylon and Najaf. Back in Carchemish, she consulted with the two archaeologists on site. One of them was T. E. Lawrence. Her 1913 Arabian journey was generally difficult. She was the second foreign woman after Lady Anne Blunt to visit Ha'il.

Anti-Suffrage League

Bell also became honorary secretary of the British Women's Anti-Suffrage League. Her stated reason for her anti-suffrage stand was that as long as women felt that the kitchen and the bedroom were their only domains, they were truly unprepared to take part in deciding how a nation should be ruled.

War and political career

At the outbreak of World War I, Bell's request for a Middle East posting was initially denied. She instead volunteered with the Red Cross in France.

Work in the Middle East

In November 1915, however, she was summoned to Cairo to the nascent Arab Bureau, headed by General Gilbert Clayton. She also again met T. E. Lawrence. At first she did not receive an official position, but, in her first months there, helped Lt Cmdr David Hogarth set about organizing and processing her own, Lawrence's and Capt. W. H. I. Shakespear's data about the location and disposition of Arab tribes that could be encouraged to join the British against the Turks. Lawrence and the British used the information in forming alliances with the Arabs.

On 3 March 1916, after hardly a moment's notice, Gen. Clayton sent Bell to Basra, which British forces had captured in November 1914, to advise Chief Political Officer Percy Cox regarding an area she had visited the most. She drew maps to help the British army reach Baghdad safely. She became the only female political officer in the British forces and received the title of "Liaison Officer, Correspondent to Cairo" (i.e. to the Arab Bureau where she had been assigned). She was Harry St. John Philby's field controller, and taught him the finer arts of behind-the-scenes political manoeuvering.

When British troops took Baghdad (10 March 1917), Bell was summoned by Cox to Baghdad and presented with the title of "Oriental Secretary." She, Cox and T. E. Lawrence were among a select group of "Orientalists" convened by Winston Churchill to attend a 1921 Conference in Cairo to find a way to reduce the expense of stationing British troops in its post-WWI mandates. Gertrude is supposed to have described T.E.L. as being able "to ignite fires in cold rooms", but so could she. Throughout the conference, the two worked tirelessly to promote the establishment of the countries of Transjordan and Iraq to be presided over by the Kings Abdullah and Faisal, sons of the instigator of the Arab Revolt against Turkey (ca. 1915-1916), Hussein bin Ali, Sharif and Emir of Mecca. Until her death in Baghdad, she served in the Iraq British High Commission advisory group there. Referred to by Iraqis as "Al Khatun" (a Lady of the Court who keeps an open eye and ear for the benefit of the State), she was a confidante of King Faisal of Iraq and helped introduce him to Iraq's tribal leaders at the start of his reign. He helped her to found Baghdad's great Iraqi Archaeological Museum from her own modest artifact collection and to establish The British School of Archaeology, Iraq, for the endowment of excavation projects from proceeds in her will. The stress of authoring a prodigious output of books, articles of correspondence, intelligence reports, reference works, white papers; of recurring bronchitis attacks brought on by years of heavy smoking in the company of English and Arab cohorts; of bouts with malaria; and finally, of coping with Baghdad's summer heat ... all took a toll on her health. Somewhat frail to start with, she became nearly emaciated.

Like T. E. Lawrence, she had attended Oxford and earned First Class Honours in Modern History. Bell spoke Arabic, Persian, French and German. She was an archaeologist, traveller and photographer in the Middle East before World War I. Under recommendation by renowned archaeologist and historian David Hogarth, first Lawrence, then Bell, were assigned to Army Intelligence Headquarters in Cairo in 1915 for war service. Both Bell and Lawrence stood hardly 5'5", yet both could ride with great determination and endurance through the desert for hours on end. Both died prematurely after recurring bouts of depression, burn-out and exhaustion. Her work was specially mentioned in the British Parliament, and she was awarded the Order of the British Empire. Some consider the present troubles in Iraq are derived from the lines Bell helped draw to create its borders. Perhaps so, but Gertrude's reports indicate that problems were foreseen, and that it was clearly understood that there were just not many (if any) permanent solutions for calming the divisive forces at work in that part of the world.

Creation of Iraq

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in late January 1919, Bell was assigned to conduct an analysis of the situation in Mesopotamia and the options for future leadership in Iraq. She spent the next ten months writing what was later considered a masterful official report. When her conclusion was largely favorable to Arabic leadership, her superior, A. T. Wilson, turned against her.

On 11 October 1920, Percy Cox returned to Baghdad and asked her to continue as Oriental Secretary, acting as liaison with the forthcoming Arab government.

Bell's influence led to the creation of a country inhabited by a Shi'ite majority in the south, and Sunni and Kurdish minorities in the centre and north respectively. By denying the Sunni Kurds a separate, autonomous area or state, the British tried to balance the heavy predominance of Shia in Iraq and keep control of the potential oilfields in their territory.

The British thought that Sunnis should lead the Iraqi nation, because the Shi'ite majority was regarded as too volatile to govern due to its largely tribal and nomadic base in Iraq, and hard to assimilate because of an unyielding religious bias for the "Ali" faction of the Muslim schism. "I don't for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority," Bell once wrote in a letter to her father. "Otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil."^[1]

The rivalries and differing religious attitudes continue to cause friction within Iraq.

Bell and T. E. Lawrence persuaded Winston Churchill and 1921 Cairo conferees to endorse Faisal bin Hussein (the son of Hussein, Sherif of Mecca), former commander of the Arab forces that entered Damascus at the culmination of the Arab Revolt and recently deposed by France as King of Syria, as the first King of Iraq, Faisal I. When Faisal arrived in Iraq in June 1921, Bell advised him in local questions, including matters involving tribal geography and local business. Bell also supervised the selection of appointees for cabinet and other leadership posts in the new government.

Faisal was crowned king of Iraq on 23 August 1921. Due to her influence with the new king, Bell earned the nickname, "the Uncrowned Queen of Iraq." Working with the new king was, however, not easy: "You may rely upon one thing — I'll never engage in creating kings again; it's too great a strain."^[2]

Baghdad Archaeological Museum

After the situation stabilized, Bell began forming what would later become the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, located at first within the confines of the royal palace.

She supervised excavations and examined finds and artifacts. Against European opposition, she insisted that excavated antiquities should remain in their country of origin, thereby ensuring that her museum would retain a collection of Iraq's antiquities. The museum was officially opened in June 1926.

Death

Bell briefly returned to Britain in 1925, and found herself facing family problems and ill health. Her family's fortune had begun to decline due to the onset of post-WWI worker strikes in the UK and economic depression in Europe. She returned to Baghdad and soon developed pleurisy. When she recovered, she heard that her younger brother Hugo had died of typhoid.

On 12 July 1926, Bell was discovered to have overdosed on sleeping pills. It is unknown whether the overdose was an intentional suicide or accidental. She had never married or had children. She was buried at the British cemetery in Baghdad's Bab al-Sharji district.^[3] Her funeral was a major event, attended by large numbers of people. It has been suggested that she was diagnosed with a terminal illness during her last visit to England in 1925 — given her heavy smoking, perhaps lung cancer — and with the logic with which she had always applied to her life, chose an overdose rather than experience the unpleasant closing stages of cancer which may have started to appear.^{[citation needed]}

A year after her death, in 1927, her stepmother edited and published two volumes of Bell's collected correspondence written during the 20 years preceding World War I.

Notes

References

• Goodman, Susan, Gertrude Bell (1985)
• Howell, Georgina , Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) ISBN 0374161623. Also issued as Daughter of the Desert: the remarkable life of Gertrude Bell (Macmillan, Basingstoke and Oxford, 2006) ISBN 1405045876.
• Lukitz, Liora, A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq (I.B. Tauris, 2006) ISBN 9781850434153
• Meyer, Karl E. and Shareen Blair Brysac, Kingmakers: the Invention of the Modern Middle East(W.W. Norton, 2008) ISBN 978-0-393-06199-4.
• Wallach, Janet, Desert Queen (1999)
• Winstone, H.V.F., Gertrude Bell (Barzan Publishing, England, 2004) ISBN 0-9547728-0-6.

Further reading

• Poems from the Divan of Hafiz English Translation by Gertrude Lowthian Bell, 1897

External links

• The Gertrude Bell Project based at Newcastle University Library
• Gertrude Bell Biography also Gertrude Bell on her translations of Hafiz
• Works by or about Gertrude Bell in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Archival material relating to Gertrude Bell listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• British "Queen of Iraq" rests in Baghdad cemetery
• Gertrude Bell, a Masterful Spy and Diplomat
• Gertrude of Arabia, 7 September 2006, The Economist, review of Daughter of the Desert: The Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell
• Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia, London: H.M. Stationery Office. I920
• Gertrude Lowthian Bell, Gertrude Bell (1907). Syria. http://books.google.com/books?id=K-QTAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1&dq=Gertrude+Lowthian+Bell&as_brr=1#PPR3,M1. 
• Gertrude Bell (1911, rep.1924) 'From Amurath to Amurath', complete text with illustrations.
• ebooks of works by Gertrude Bell at Project Gutenberg Australia