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Female Lawrence of Arabia' Helped Create the Modern Middle East

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Female Lawrence of Arabia' Helped Create the Modern Middle East (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/) Lifestyle Women › Lifestyle › Women › Life How the forgotten 'female Lawrence of Arabia' helped create the modern Middle East By Margarette Driscoll 6 APRIL 2017 • 4:00PM Gertrude Bell was at one time the most powerful woman in the British Empire n a picture taken to mark the Cairo Conference of 1921, Gertrude Bell (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/queen-of-the-desert/review/) I- characteristically elegant in a fur stole and floppy hat, despite being on camel back - sits right at the heart of the action. To one side is Winston Churchill, on her other TE Lawrence, later immortalised in David Lean’s 1962 epic, Lawrence of Arabia. Bell was his equal in every sense: the first woman to achieve a first (in modern history) from Oxford, an archaeologist, linguist, Arabist, adventurer and, possibly, spy. In her day, she was arguably the most powerful woman in the British Empire (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/activity-and-adventure/female-explorers-who-changed-the-world-forever/) - central to the decisions that created the modern Middle East and reverberate still on the nightly news. Yet while Lawrence is still celebrated, she has largely been forgotten. “I have had my first Persian lesson with a sheik, who is a darling” Gertrude Bell “Newspaper articles of the time show she was known all over the world. The minutes of the Cairo Conference record her presence at every key discussion but not one of the men mentions her in their memoirs. It’s as if she never existed,” says Sabine Krayenbuhl, co-director of a new documentary, Letters from Baghdad. “Even in the north of England, where she was born, we’d say to people ‘We’re researching Gertrude Bell, you must know her’ and so many didn’t. It was sad.” Letters from Baghdad aims to restore the so-called “Queen of the Desert” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/07/12/how-gertrude- bell-caused-a-desert-storm/) to her rightful place. The film is a bewitching mix of archive footage, some of it hand-tinted, that brings to life the magical Middle East of a century ago and tells Bell’s extraordinary life story in her own words, through extracts from letters and diaries read by Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton. Bell, granddaughter of Liberal MP Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell was born in 1868, in County Durham. She paid her first visit to the Middle East after Oxford when she went to stay with her uncle, who was minister (what we would now regard as ambassador) to Tehran, then in Persia. The city set her imagination alight. “I have landed in the Garden of Eden” she wrote to her father, adding “I have had my first Persian lesson with a sheik, who is a darling.” The trip resulted in her first book, Persian Pictures, and a lifelong love affair with the region began. “I never weary of the East and I never feel it to be alien,” she wrote a few years later. “I don’t expect to be in England again – inshallah.” There were brief visits home and a period of daring mountain exploits in the Alps during the 1890s, in which she climbed Mont Blanc and almost died after spending “forty-eight hours on the rope” in a storm. But her life from then on was largely spent in the deserts and cities of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). “She appeared out of the desert with all the evening dresses, cutlery and napery she took on her travels” She became known to the Sunni, Kurd and Shia tribes as “al-Khatun” (The Lady) and cut quite a figure as she roamed the deserts, recording and photographing ancient sites. The writer Vita Sackville West encountered Bell in Constantinople where she “appeared out of the desert with all the evening dresses, cutlery and napery she took on her travels.” “She never dressed in Arabic clothes,” says Krayenbuhl. “She felt very strongly that you have to meet the other person as who you are and have an honest exchange, not try to be one of them. One of the reasons men probably saw her as a threat was that she got on famously with the Arabs.” On an archaeological dig at Carchemish in Mesopotamia she met TE Lawrence, who later said “she was a wonderful person, not very like a woman” - something he presumably meant as a compliment. Bell had red hair, green eyes and a thoughtful, fine-boned face. Small in stature, she was nonetheless forceful in nature: intelligent, energetic and sometimes brusque to the point of rudeness. “In later life, especially, she was quite hawkish,” says Lynn Ritchie, who transcribed Bell’s correspondence for the Newcastle University archives. “Her letters are incredibly articulate and amusing but she could impatient, especially of other women. She must have made the lives of the embassy wives in Baghdad a misery at times, regarding them as silly.” In 1907, Bell published The Desert and the Sown, chronicling the Arabian desert and cities for a rapt audience. She photographed ancient sites like Palmyra and began working with archaeologists uncovering ancient treasures. “I’ve never felt the ancient world so close,” she wrote home. She gathered many such antiquities for her greatest achievement; founding the Baghdad Museum, (which was heartbreakingly looted after the 2003 invasion but has since reopened). But perhaps what resonates most strongly today is her assessment of the political situation. At the outbreak of World War One, Bell volunteered with the Red Cross in France but British Intelligence had other ideas: few could rival her intimate knowledge of the area, and she was asked to help soldiers find routes through the Middle Eastern deserts. It was the beginning of a new career that later saw her become a senior adviser to the military governor of newly-created Iraq. “Muddle through! Why yes, so we do – wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed” Gertrude Bell Being a woman in a man’s world was seemingly more difficult for Bell in British politics than among desert tribes. In 1920, she produced a white paper on the government of Iraq and was exasperated that her peers seemed more interested in its author than contents. She wrote: “The general line taken by the press seems to be that it’s remarkable that a dog should be able to stand up on its hind legs at all – i.e. a female write a white paper.” Consequently, it is difficult to gauge how much influence Bell actually had. Her star waxed and waned according to her superiors: some respected her opinions, others could not stomach working with a woman - especially one who knew so much more about the landscape than they did. She certainly took part in drawing the borders that created Iraq by merging the provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And she was partly responsible for selecting Faisal, the new king of Iraq, who was installed in 1921 following the Cairo Conference (though the monarchy was eventually overthrown). But Bell was a passionate believer in Arab self-determination and was all too aware of the problems the new set-up might hold. Some of her letters from the time have eerie echoes of recent history. Gertrude Bell died in 1926 “Can you persuade people to take your side when you’re not sure in the end you’ll be there to take theirs?” she asked at one point, noting that “we rushed into the business with our usual disregard for a comprehensive political scheme. Muddle through! Why yes, so we do – wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed.” What she never achieved was lasting love. On that first trip to Tehran, she fell for Henry Cadogan, a member of the foreign service staff. Alas, Cadogan had no fortune and though Bell travelled back to England to persuade her father to approve the match, she conceded, “Henry and I are not allowed to consider ourselves engaged”. She never saw him again; he died a few months later. The only other man she loved, Major Charles Doughty-Wylie, was already married. They exchanged passionate letters but accepted they could never be together. Bell was found dead in her room in Baghdad in 1926. Her family’s fortune had been ruined by the war and she suffered from pleurisy. It is believed that she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, though that may have been an accident: she left no note and had asked her maid to wake her. It was a fittingly mysterious end to an extraordinary and exotic life - one worthy of a film every bit as lavish as Lawrence of Arabia. Letters from Baghdad is in UK cinemas from 21st April..
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