Laura Bush, in a recent CNN interview, disclosed that she was reading a biography of Gertrude Bell. It has yet to be revealed whether she passed the title on to the other side of the bed; but news of the First Lady’s book choice has prompted a slew of recent articles on Bell in the US press. They focus on placing the darkly prescient contents of Bell’s letters from Mesopotamia over 80 years ago into the murky context of western power involvement in the morass that is today’s Iraq.
It is Iraq that takes up the overwhelming part of Gertrude Bell’s story from 1910 to her death in Baghdad in the summer of 1926. It is not surprising that accounts and analyses of her round trip from Damascus into Northern Arabia to Hail and on to Baghdad in the winter of 1913-1914 have largely been eclipsed. This was her only overland foray into what is now Saudi Arabia and the recorded legacy and equally significant, lack of specific detail of her four-month counter-clockwise expedition offer revelatory insights into this remarkable woman and her multi-faceted involvement in the region.
Gertrude was a prolific writer: She filled sixteen volumes of diaries and fired off over 1,600 letters to her parents as well as penning numerous official and secret British government intelligence reports. Her diaries and letters are now transcribed and accessible online in the Gertrude Bell Archive of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne Library (www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk) providing valuable insights into the region at the time.
With the onset of winter in 1913, Bell received permission to make her journey to the city of Hail. This came from both the British Foreign Office and from the Ottoman powers via her friend, the British Ambassador, in Constantinople. Her subsequent letters and cables from Damascus describe preparations, along with financial arrangements and her quest for funding from her father.
She purchased seventeen camels costing thirteen pounds each including their gear and laid out 50 pounds for food, another 50 for gifts. These included robes and headscarves and agals — not much has changed on the shopping front since Saudis and Gulf Arabs still seek out these clothing items from the Damascene souks.
On the financial front arrangements were more complicated then: She took 80 pounds in cash and also made a payment of 200 pounds to an agent in Damascus — a Najdi merchant — which served as a letter of credit to enable her to draw the sum when she reached Hail.
She wrote to her father asking for money: “I hope you will not say NO. It is unlikely that you will because you are such a beloved father that you never say no to the most outrageous demands.” She added that she intended to recoup the sum: “I am practically using all my next year’s income for the journey, but if I sit very quiet and write the book of it the year after I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to pay it all back.”
Her writings reveal fascinating insights and details into period and locale. And they also show her talent at evoking her experiences and love of the desert.
“20 Dec 1913
I am writing this in the long afterglow of a cloudless sunset. Already I have dropped back into the desert as if it were my own place; silence and solitude fall round you like an impenetrable veil; there is no reality but the long hours of riding, shivering in the morning and drowsy in the afternoon, the bustle of getting into camp, the talk round Mohammed’s coffee fire after dinner, profounder sleep than civilization contrives, and then the road again. And as usual one feels as secure and confident in this lawless country as one does in one’s own village.”
Her desert journey from Damascus to Hail and on through Najaf to Baghdad returning to Damascus in April 1914 also reveals Bell’s consummate skill as a photographer. The photographs she took in trying conditions on this arduous and dangerous journey include desert scenes, unique images of Bedouin she encountered, accomplished studies of the then walled city of Hail, sensitively posed portraits of citizens in the desert stronghold and impressive compositions of the Nafud desert. The Newcastle Gerty archive has over 7,000 of her photographs online. Organized in folders by year and territories and without captions they provide a cyber-adventure, a chance to imagine her expedition and a priceless and unique glimpse at a lost world.
With her three-inch theodolite in hand the expedition also gave her a chance to hone her field surveying and map making skills. Her carefully annotated maps were to prove useful for British Military intelligence and Bell was to play a major part in drawing the borders of Iraq. In his biography of Gertrude Bell (reviewed in this issue), HVF Winstone writes: “Her drawing of frontiers more than any of her contributions to the new Iraq bore the mark of the colonialist, of the imperial regime that, however noble its intention, left a stain on the West’s relations with the Middle East that has had its severest repercussions in recent times.”
Archaeology was perhaps the true and enduring love of her life. On her Hail journey she spent time copying ancient inscriptions and examining ruins along her route. Bell was to go on to found the Iraqi National Museum and after her death, funds from her estate helped establish the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. (www.britac.ac.uk)
Bell reached Hail nearly two months after leaving Damascus. Bell was held captive for two weeks in the city unable to cash her credit she ran short of funds, exhausted her gifts and finally managed to secure her release. The story of Bell’s journey to Hail, her imprisonment and her account of what she saw became a legend back in her home country. “It was a favored topic for school essays in England until the 1930s when another legend swept everything before it,” writes Winstone, referring to what he contends was to become the overblown image of T.E. Lawrence.
Perhaps it is in what Bell does not reveal about her journey to northern Arabia that points to the essence of this influential woman often referred to by Arabs as “Mister Bell”. Just why did she set out on this dangerous overland trek on the eve of war with great powers vying for influence in the region? In the first few months of 1914 there was a dramatic build up of foreign personalities crisscrossing the region representing their home countries. French, Italians, British, Germans, Russians, Austrians and Turks came variously cloaked as archaeologists, surveyors, biblical scholars, explorers and horse dealers. Bell was just one of them, serving to promote British interests, vying against other powerful nations in a rapidly unfolding struggle in the Middle East.
The real underlying intentions behind Bell’s adventure across the desert to Hail at such a critical juncture in the region’s history remain shrouded and obscure. Winstone concludes: “At the moment of its completion the journey’s purpose remained as inexplicable as it had been in the beginning and has remained ever since”.
