The Lady of Iraq

Eighty-five-years after her death in Baghdad, adventurer Gertrude Bell is still remembered as the woman who built a nation.

By ALASDAIR SOUSSI
Gertrude Bell 311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Gertrude Bell 311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
T.E. Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, as he is more commonly known – may have hogged the limelight in early twentieth-century Britain as a swashbuckling campaigner in the deserts of Arabia. But his associate and contemporary, Gertrude Bell, was no slouch on matters Middle East either. Bell was a bona fide trailblazer, a woman of towering intellect and ability whose achievements in the Arab region led many to call her the “uncrowned queen of Iraq” following her involvement in the country’s uncertain beginnings as its architect and creator.
Aslender woman with red hair and piercing green eyes, Bell, who died 85 years ago last month, is today perceived as a figure who, far from accepting the traditional gender roles that made her era of post-Victorian England a distinctly male domain, pursued a life away from the bonds of marriage and the responsibilities of motherhood. Yet, when her immersion in the cut and thrust of Middle East realpolitik offered up the chance to build a stable and unified nation state, Bell exposed herself to an immense – some say, insurmountable – undertaking, one that continues to haunt the Middle East to this very day.
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was born into a family of wealthy iron masters in 1868 in northeast England. Her father, Sir Thomas Hugh Bell, was the son of Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, who was a major patron of the Arts and Crafts movement and friends with Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley. In 1886, Bell went to Oxford University, becoming the first woman to graduate with a first-class degree in modern history. In 1892, she traveled to Iran and published her first travel book, “Persian Pictures” (1894). By the end of the nineteenth century she was scaling the dizzying heights of the Swiss Alps, surviving a blizzard and some serious frostbite as she clung to a rope for 53 hours on the unclimbed northeast face of the Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain in the Bernese Alps, in 1902.
Having already taught herself Persian, Bell had begun learning Arabic in Jerusalem in 1897, and in 1913, this self-taught archaeologist traversed the Arabian Peninsula where she braved the Nejd desert and hostile Arabian tribes, and journeyed to the town of Hail in north-central Saudi Arabia. By 1914, she had resiliently covered 25,000 miles of the Middle East, much of it on camel and horseback.
In late 1915, Bell found herself in Cairo as the first woman officer ever to be employed by British military intelligence.
However, it was her 1916 appointment as a political officer in Basra, in southern Iraq, that thrust her into the political and diplomatic limelight. There, in the ancient land of Mesopotamia, she won the affection of Arab statesmen, founded a national museum and had significant input into the design and constitution of the new Iraq – established under a British mandate in 1920 from the Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. It was there, a decade after she arrived, that she died quite suddenly after overdosing on sleeping pills, either by accident or by design.
“Her combination of wealth, timing, education and ambition explain why her achievements were so extraordinary,” English historian, James Barr, author of the recently published book, “A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that shaped the Middle East,” tells The Jerusalem Report. “She was born into a very wealthy family – if you read the Alpine Club handbooks you see that she climbed with Swiss guides she had hired. She was climbing at a time when many of the routes up the big Alpine peaks were unclimbed – so the money and the timing were important factors in her fame. But it’s her education and ambition that made them important. She had the education that made her aware of what was possible and she chose to throw herself into overwhelmingly male-dominated activities at a time when there were sufficient unclimbed routes and blank spaces on the map of Arabia on which she was going to have an impact.”
INDEED, THAT SHE WAS AWOMAN, says Barr, adds considerable kudos to her achievements.
“She put it well in a letter she wrote aboard ship in 1916 when she observed that, ‘The cat and I are the only two people not in uniform on board,’” adds the historian, who is also author of “Setting The Desert On Fire: T.E. Lawrence And Britain’s Secret War In Arabia, 1916-18.”
“Women at that time made an immense contribution to the war effort – in munitions factories and as nurses especially – but Bell had carved herself a role as an intelligence officer in a wartime world that was overwhelmingly male. So, I think that makes her contributions hugely significant, and I think that was recognized at the time. She commanded a great deal of respect for her knowledge of the tribes of Arabia among the experts of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, for instance.
“But I wonder whether she would have seen it in the same way,” Barr continues.
“She can’t really be classed as an early feminist, given her vehement opposition to universal suffrage. But she certainly confounded the male view of what women were supposed to be: witness [British politician and diplomat] Sir Mark Sykes’s description of her – in a letter to his own wife – as a ‘silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging blethering ass.’” Yet, according to Rory Stewart, a former British governor of two Iraqi provinces in 2003-2004 and now a member of the Westminster Parliament in London, one should not overdo her achievements at the expense of her many equally worthy contemporaries.
“[Hers] was a striking resume,” wrote Stewart in The New York Review of Books in 2007. “It may have prepared her better for work in Iraq than a master’s degree in international relations and a career in a risk averse bureaucracy such as the State Department or the Department of Defense.
But it was not evidence of genius. Her translation of the Persian poet Hafiz is ponderous and prissy. Her expedition to the remote city of Hail yielded no significant anthropological or topographical data. Lady Ann Blunt had ridden to Hail forty years before Bell.
And such adventures were not exceptional among her colleagues in Iraq, many of whom were archaeologists, scholars, or amateur spies and all of whom had undertaken long solo journeys in remote regions.”
Bell’s involvement in literally drawing up the borders of Iraq – “I had a well spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of Iraq,” she wrote in late 1921 – inextricably linked her to the country’s subsequent fortunes. But, how much culpability should she assume for the shaky Iraq that followed? “She must take some responsibility as the architect of an unstable Iraq in the middle of an unstable Middle East,” wrote Stewart.
“Bell should never have acquiesced in the inclusion of the Kurdish-dominated province of Mosul in Iraq… Nor, probably, should she have acquiesced in making Iraq a British Mandate: for this status was neither powerful enough to bring the benefits nor weak enough to avoid the opprobrium of colonialism. It conveyed responsibility without power. A good political officer should be sensitive to local opinions and aspirations, firm in political principles, farsighted, rational, and persuasive. By all these standards, Bell was a less talented political officer than T.E. Lawrence and a dozen of her contemporaries.”
Barr is less critical, pointing to wider considerations.
“I don’t think we can burden her with the blame,” he tells The Report. “Broader factors, like the need to link the northern Mosul oilfields with Basra to the south and the Palestine Mandate to the west, ensured that Iraq has the shape it does. And the need to close ranks with the French led Britain to choose a more dirigiste style of government than it might have chosen otherwise had it not had to share the government of the region with the French. Bell recognized that this government – in which the Arabs were to have very little role – was going to be disastrous and spoke out against it but she was ignored. After the 1920 Iraq revolt she played an important part in shaping a government that lasted until 1958. The big problem was, as she and T.E. Lawrence both observed, that the country thrust together two very different groups of people – an urban Shiite majority and a Sunni minority – and of course the Kurds and Assyrians – and made the Sunnis masters of the Shia.”
YET, IN RELATION TO HER work in Iraq, most observers agree that Bell had an uncanny ability to document the grim realities of nation-building.
And that she did, candidly and without shirking her own responsibilities or that of her political masters, via descriptive letters home and diary entries. Witness the following observations in 1920, gleaned from letters she wrote and kept in the Gertrude Bell Archive at Newcastle University in England, which could easily be mistaken for the accounts of a besieged Western official in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, as the country fell into a state of insurgency.
“The country between Diwaniyah and Samawah is abandoned to disorder. We haven’t troops enough to tackle it at present.” (July 26, 1920)
“There’s no getting out of the conclusion that we have made an immense failure here.
The system must have been far more at fault than anything that I or anyone else suspected.
It will have to be fundamentally changed and what that may mean exactly I don’t know.” (August 23, 1920)
“The underlying truth of all criticism is… that we had promised self-governing institutions and not only made no step towards them but were busily setting up something entirely different.” (October 10, 1920)
“It’s difficult to be burning villages at one end of the country by means of a British army and assuring people at the other end that we really have handed over responsibility to native ministers.” (November 29, 1920)
And yet, as a figure of her times, Bell was not immune to indulging in a bit of self-grandeur.
“I’ll never engage in creating kings again; it’s too great a strain,” she wrote to her father in 1921.
And again, to her father in the same year, “As we rode back through the gardens of the Karradah suburb, where all the people know me and salute me as I pass, Nuri [Said] said, ‘One of the reasons you stand out so is because you’re a woman. There’s only one Khatun... For a hundred years they’ll talk of the Khatun riding by.’ I think they very likely will.”
LIKE STEWART, BARR BELIEVES that Bell was not as weighty a figure as Lawrence, who went on to become the most famous critic of British policy in Iraq. But comparisons with Lawrence, he says, should never obscure her relevance as an Arabist of some repute.
“She is not as significant [as Lawrence] – and this was something she herself had to cope with at the Paris Peace Conference, where she was sent to counter the influence that Lawrence was having. Had Lawrence not been involved, the outcome of the First World War – in terms of the Hashemites’ ascendancy after it and the boost it gave to Arab nationalism – would have been very different. Had Bell not been involved, I don’t think anything would have been any different. She failed to persuade [her superior in Baghdad] A.T. Wilson not to press ahead with a rather arbitrary system of government in 1919. But she was held in very high regard at the time as an expert on the region – and this should be remembered.”
On learning of her death, Lawrence wrote in The Atlantic, “That Irak [sic] 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.”
Bell is buried in Baghdad where she died on July 12, 1926, just two days shy of her 58th birthday. Her funeral was attended by thousands of Arabs who walked behind her coffin to the cemetery, in the full glare of the summer sun.


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