Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Margaret Lothian Bell (1868-1926) was an English author and adventurer who influenced the formation of Iraq, when, in 1932, that state gained independence from the United Kingdom. At a memorial service for her in 1927, at the Royal Geographic Society, she was called the most powerful woman in the British Empire after the First World War, the "uncrowned queen of Iraq", and possibly the brains behind T. E. Lawrence and the definer of Mideast policy for Winston Churchill.

"The best known traveler in the Middle East and Arabia in the years before World War I, the British intelligence bureau in Cairo hired her as an advisor on Arabia."

A 1921 photograph is informative in multiple ways.

It is 22 March 1921, the last day of the Cairo Conference and the final opportunity for the British to determine the postwar future of the Middle East. Like any tourist, the delegation makes the routine tour of the pyramids and have themselves photographed on camels in front of the Sphinx. Standing beneath its half-effaced head, two of the most famous Englishmen of the twentieth century confront the camel in some disarray: Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, who has just, to the amusement of all, fallen off his camel, and T. E. Lawrence, tightly constrained in the pin-striped suit and trilby of a senior civil servant. Between then, at her ease, rides Gertrude Bell, the sole delegate possessing knowledge indispensable to the Conference. Her face, in so far as it can be seen beneath the brim of her rose-decorated straw hat, is transfigured with happiness. Her dream of an independent Arab nation is about to come true, he choice of a king endorsed: her Iraq is about to become a country. Just before leaving the hotel that morning, Churchill has cabled to London the vital message "Sharif's son Faisal offers hope of best and cheapest solution."

There are eerie parallels to today's situation in Iraq "...Faisal, the protege of Bell and T. E. Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), was imported from Mecca to become the "roof." In early 2004, David Ignatiums wrote in the Washington Post about the offer of Prince Hassan of Jordan, the great nephew of Faisal, to mediate among Iraqi religions factions to bring them together and become a "provisional head of state."

Bell's life was unusual, and her accomplishments were unique for a British woman living during the reign of Queen Victoria. An accomplished equestrian, she spent years leading her own personal expeditions across the sands of Middle Eastern deserts - on either horse or camel. Reputedly a person of a forthright charm, she managed to befriend British men, including T.E. Lawrence, British women, including Vita Sackville-West, Iraqi and Bedouin men, including Faisal, and women. She was comfortable in the drawing rooms of the British upper class, the government offices of the British civil service, the mountains of the Alps, and the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, which she founded.

Early life

Her mother died when Gertrude was three, after her brother Maurice's birth. This increased her bonds with her father, Hugh. She was a literate child; in the first known letter, written when she was five, she told her grandmother, "My dolls have given me great amusement. You wer very good to get them for me." Her governesses found her a "handful". Her father remarried when she was eight, and she formed an excellent relationship with her stepmother, Florence Oliff.

She led her brother Maurice into endless adventures, with Maurice often falling from walls while Gertrude landed gracefully, a foretaste of her later mountaineering.

Unusually for a girl in the late 19th centure she went to Queen's College in Harley Street, first as a day scholar living with her maternal grandmother, and then as a boarder. She was emphatic about the studies she liked and disliked, and rejected music and Scripture.

Education

The Bell family had been growing in status during her girlhood, opening opportunities.

She enrolled at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1886.

She was the first woman to attain a "First" at Oxford, in Modern History. Within the culture of the time, however, she was an apparent failure, as no one had asked for her hand in marriage.

Romania

To correct her perceived failings, family friends, the Lascelles family, invited her to spend the winter season of 1889 in Bucharest, Romania. Whatever this may have done for her social life, it was her introduction to the diplomatic world, and to Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.

First exposure to the Middle East=

Travel was an acceptable second chance, in the times, to find a husband. In 1892, she journeyed to visit an uncle, who was then the British Ambassador to Persia, stationed in Tehran. She was impressed with a young diplomat, Henry Cadogan, with whom she had both an emotional and intellectual connection, with whom she could "talk vigorous politics." His income, however, was small. When he asked her father for her hand in marriage, but was refused. Cadogan died of cholera in 1893.

Advanced study

"In 1899 Bell studied Arabic in Jerusalem. During the spring of 1900 she went to visit the Druse in the mountains of southern Lebanon. Bell also visited Palmyra, the ruins of a Roman city in Jordan. She described it as "a white skeleton of a town, standing knee-deep in the blown sand." She then went mountain climbing in the Alps and took two trips around the world with her brother."

Search for new governance

By 1918, Britain was searching for a king or other acceptable ruler of the area that was to become Iraq. Russian revolutionaries had stirred the situation by releasing the Sykes-Picot Agreeement.