Bell Gertrude Lowthian - A woman in Arabia : the writings of the Queen of the Desert

The phenomenal Gertrude Lowthian Bell came from a family of wealthy British industrialists in the north of England in the mid-nineteenth century. From sheep farmers and blacksmiths they had become the sixth-richest family in Britain. The Bells at their most powerful employed some forty-five thousand workers at their steel and chemical works and mines. They made the steel components, weighing fifty thousand tons, for the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the track for hundreds of thousands of miles of railways all over the world. They were intellectuals, Liberal voters, and anti-aristocracy, although they had begun to marry into the nobility. In childhood, Gertrude met the scientists, writers, and statesmen of the day as they visited her grandfather and her father in Yorkshire: men such as Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Morris. Even as a child, Gertrude was intimidated by no one, telling a divinity teacher that she didnt believe a word of it. She began her adult life at twenty, in 1888, by becoming the first woman to gain first-class honors in Modern History at Oxford University. After a life full of adventure and rule-breaking and exploration, she did something of unique importance: she founded a nation, the nation of Iraq.

Her father, Hugh Bell, was married at twenty-three to Mary Shield. A beautiful local girl, she was the daughter of a Newcastle merchant. Gertrude was their first child, born in 1868. Tragically, Mary Bell survived only three weeks after the birth of their second child, Gertrudes brother Maurice.

Hugh became for a time a poignant figure, working six days a week at the Clarence steelworks in Middlesbrough. His sister Ada moved in to run the house and look after the children. Hugh had to share his Sundays with his sister, a wet nurse, and some half-dozen servants. Through the matchmaking of his two sisters, he met and then married Florence Eveleen Eleanore Olliffe. She had been born and brought up in Paris, where her father was physician to the British Embassy. The good-hearted Florence, who now became Mother to Gertrude, adored children and domestic life. She wrote plays and novels, and became heavily involved in social work into which she would co-opt Gertrude whenever she was at home for long enough. Florence wrote a groundbreaking factual book, At the Works, the result of thirty years of interviews with the families of steelworkers, exposing the suffering they endured.

The bond between Hugh and the eight-year-old Gertrude was extraordinary. They were everything to each other and would remain so even when living on opposite sides of the world. Florence was to write a novel concerning the second wife of a man whose bond with his daughter was so strong as almost to exclude his wife. The deep mutual affection was to both the very foundation of existence until the day she died. Florence never tried to divide them, but she had difficulty with Gertrude, who was used to bossing the household and running rings around her unfortunate governesses. She was domineering and willful. She would climb on the greenhouse roof, she played the garden hose down the laundry chimney and flooded the fire, and she galloped about the countryside and beaches on her ponies while her small brother tried to follow her, coming home covered with cuts and bruises.

It was not long before Florence had her own children: Hugo, Elsa, and Molly. Gentle and forbearing as Florence was, she found the teenage Gertrude too much for her: scowling, noisy, argumentative, opinionated, bursting with energy, and thirsty for knowledge. And so, most unusually for a girl of her wealth and class, Gertrude was sent to school in London: to Queens College in Harley Street, and from there to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Having done that with brilliance, Gertrude came back to a Florence determined to get rid of her Oxfordy manner and turn her into a marriageable prospect. For a while, before becoming a debutante presented to the Queen at court, she was entrusted with housekeeping, care of her sisters and brothers, and bookkeeping. As a reward, she was given a wardrobe of wonderful clothes and sent on holiday to embassies in Bucharest, Tehran, and Berlin, where her uncle was British ambassador. She went around the world twice, once with her brother Maurice and the second time with her half-brother Hugo.