Macmillan £20 pp503
The myriad peoples of Mesopotamia called her simply Khatun, or Lady. But Gertrude Bell, the extraordinary English woman who can justifiably be termed one of the principal architects of modern Iraq, was not everyone’s cup of tea. The Arabist Mark Sykes fulminated against this “silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!” True, she had just outwitted him to mount an expedition from Jerusalem into the inhospitable Jebel Druze, and he was later to cross her by signing the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement that reneged on the British commitment to grant self-determination to her beloved Arabs following the Ottoman defeat in the first world war.
Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, the charismatic overlord of the southern Nejd (later king of Saudi Arabia), was also impervious to her charms. He used to amuse his Wahabi followers by mimicking Bell’s patter: “Abdul Aziz! Abdul Aziz! Look at this, and what do you think of that?” But his experience of women was limited to the harem, which makes her achievement in winning the confidence of Bedouin men-folk all the more astonishing. As Georgina Howell notes, Ibn Saud was probably the only important tribal chieftain that Bell met on western terms when he was treated to a show of British weaponry in Basra in 1916. Usually, she visited them in their desert tents where she won them over with her routine of flattery, useful gifts (the odd revolver did not go amiss) and intimate knowledge of their language and customs.
This was the technique that so impressed the influential Sheikh Fahad Beg ibn Hadhdbal in southern Iraq. When Faisal, the Hejazi prince whom the British painstakingly infiltrated as King of Iraq, came to be crowned in 1921, the sheikh affirmed pragmatically, “We swear allegiance because you are acceptable to the British government.” And for him this meant largely Bell, who brought order and justice to his people.
These events are part of the familiar narrative of Britain’s shaping of the modern Middle East. Bell’s role is not unchronicled, but it is useful to review it, particularly at a moment when, 80 years after her death in Baghdad (the exact role of the bottle of pills at her bedside still undetermined), her achievement in knitting together a viable Iraqi state is in danger of unravelling.
Like TE Lawrence, her ally in the Arab cause, Bell was a complex character, whose unflinching resolve reflected her family of wealthy Teesside industrialists. Intelligent, witty and wilful, she went to Oxford where she took a first in modern history. With no real need to do anything, she was presented at court and might have become one of the wifely appendages she despised. But her sociability did not lead to marriage. Driven by insatiable curiosity, she travelled to Tehran, where in 1892 she fell in love with Henry Cadogan, a British diplomat. But her father banned the engagement, leaving her with a sense of the east as a place of unfulfilled promise, which she sublimated on her return in a book of travel sketches and an outstanding translation of the Persian poet Hafiz.
Visiting Jerusalem eight years later, she took off on the trek among the Druze that whetted her appetite for desert travel. Over five further journeys she consolidated her knowledge of the tribes and personalities of the region, becoming an expert in Middle Eastern archeology — the spur to her first going to Iraq in 1909. Her most audacious expedition was to Hail, the remote walled capital of a contested region of central Arabia, where the unruly Rashids were under pressure from the aggressive British-backed Ibn Saud. Held captive for several days, she typically contemplated making a dash through the arid desert before being formally allowed to leave. In between desert trips, she became an intrepid Alpine climber. She would startle her guides as she discarded her skirt and, showing her courage, strength and agility, clawed her way up Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. She is commemorated in the Engelhorner range in a 2,632- metre peak, the Gertrudspitze.
Howell is keen to emphasise the softer, feminine side of her subject. There is no doubting, for instance, Bell’s unhappiness at failing to find lasting romance. After Cadogan, she fell in love with Dick Doughty-Wiley, a married army officer and nephew of Charles Doughty, whose book Travels in Arabia Deserta she treasured. But he would not leave the wife that Bell put down as a “pleasant little woman”. At one stage, their affair seemed about to be consummated, but Bell drew back from sexual contact and he wavered in his affection. Like Scheherazade, she tried to woo him with her accounts of her travels. She was later shattered to learn from a casual remark at a lunch party of his death at Gallipoli.
She was rescued from her grief by a request to join the Arab Bureau, the elite group of strategists plotting in Cairo how to use the Arabs against the pro-German Ottomans. With her unrivalled knowledge of local politics, Bell became the first woman officer in British military intelligence. Asked how they should treat her, a friend replied, “She’ll settle that.” Howell paints excellent pen portraits of these self-styled “Intrusives” including the impulsive Sykes, as they took on conventional wisdom and backed the “Frocks”, as the military derisively termed the Bedouin, against the failing Turks.
Bell subsequently moved to Basra and on to Baghdad, from where, with the Turks defeated and the Middle East taking its modern form, she cursorily telegraphed home: “Address Bagdad [sic].” As she worked tirelessly to overcome prejudices and forge a stable Iraq under King Faisal, she was heard to utter the refrain, “What I need is a wife.” Only once did the mask drop: forced to eat bully beef for the 14th day in succession, she burst into tears.
Howell sketches in the gradations of colour and emotion that have been lacking in hitherto monochrome versions of Bell’s life. She is equally adept at evoking the sparse elegance of a sheikh’s tent, the sights and sounds of the desert, and the magnificence of Bell’s wardrobe and jewellery. (This was an important part of her appeal. The Bedouin regarded her as a queen, an illusion that Bell’s wealth allowed her to carry off, giving her an entrée that even Lawrence lacked.)
Bell’s journeys are skilfully evoked and the unfolding of Middle East politics well paced. Ideally, Howell might have offered a more nuanced critique of the legacy of this ardent anti-feminist. But with women increasingly under pressure in the Arab world, it is good to have this exemplary account of one who made her indelible mark.
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