Marlene Wagman-Geller

Jul 12, 2025 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

 

“Few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel.” –Gertrude Bell

 

Cleopatra, the Queen of the Nile, left her mark as the femme fatale who seduced Roman greats Julius Cesar and Marc Antony. Gertrude Bell, the Queen of the Desert, contribution was to birth a country-no mean feat for a daughter of Queen Victoria’s empire.

In his poem, “The Soldier,” Rupert Brooke wrote, “If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England.” In a similar vein, Gertrude Bell’s raised tomb, surrounded by jasmine trees, lies in an Anglican cemetery in Iraq. A passerby might express surprise as to why a foreign woman’s grave lies in Tehran Square. What would further pique interest: the nineteenth century woman shared a historic connection with the twentieth century dictator, Saddam Hussein.  

Gertrude was born with the advantage of hailing from an England whose sun never set on its empire. Her family’s wealth-the Bells were the country’s sixth richest family- fortune had originated with her grandfather, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell: a baron, a member of the Royal Society, a founder of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, and the Mayor of Newcastle. The Bell factory produced a third of all the metals in the country, along with most of the railroad tracks and steel. Sir Isaac socialized with intellectuals Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and John Ruskin. His son, Sir Hugh, continued the family business that employed 40,000 men. As the director of the North Eastern Railway, it had a station at the rose garden of Red Barns, his fourteen bedroom estate.

Unimaginably, Sir Hugh’s daughter was to instigate a desert storm. Due to the family’s exalted status, The London Times heralded the July 14^th arrival of Gertude Margaret Lowthian Bell from Country Durham, Washington, England. Tragedy intruded when Gertrude, age two, lost her mother, Mary, who did not survive the birth of her son, Maurice. Bereft, Gertrude clung to her father who encouraged her interest in history. Her stepmother, Florence Olliffe, parents associated with writers Charles Dickens and Henry James. Florence read her stepdaughter books that whetted the child’s sense of enchantment: Alice in Wonderland, Ali Baba, Sinbad the Sailor, and Aladdin and his Magic Lamp. She treated Gertrude and Maurice with the same affection she showered on her biological children, Hugh, Florence, and Mary.

 

As a child, Gertrude showed she was in league with the horse of a different color when she declared her atheism. While most girls’ education came from a governess, Gertrude attended Queen’s College, a female school in London. During those years, she had tea with the daughter of William Thackeray, and literary lights Henry James, and Robert Browning. Taking advantage of Oxford University that had recently begun admitting women, she enrolled in Lady Margaret Hall whose first female principal was Elizabeth Wordsworth, grandniece of poet William Wordsworth. Miss Wordsworth’s main priority was to prepare her charges for matrimony as God intended women to be “Adam’s helpmeet.” What helped Gertrude navigate Oxford’s misogyny was fellow classmate Mary Talbot, a niece of Prime Minister William Gladstone. An announcement in The Times carried the news Gertrude Bell was the first woman to receive a degree in modern history. Due to her gender, her degree was only honorary. Despite her unorthodox education, Gertrude followed the upper-class ritual of presentation at court. Unlike the other debutantes, future matrons of manors, Gertrude’s world would be a world away.

Although Gertrude had progressive ideals, she was not empathetic to the plight of women. She looked down on her father’s female workforce who she viewed as illiterate and overly fecund. Feeling she was the exception to her gender, Gertrude served as the honorary secretary of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League.

For the next decade, Gertrude embarked on two world tours and indulged in her passion of mountain climbing. After conquering a peak in the Swiss Alps, the country named it Gertrudspitze. She survived fifty-three hours clinging to a rope on the Finsteraarhorn when her expedition encountered a blizzard. Although she suffered frostbitten hands and feet, she went on to conquer the Matterhorn.

When her Aunt Mary left for Tehran, (then part of Persia), to join her husband, Frank Lascelles, its ambassador, Gertrude accompanied her on the Orient Express. In a letter, she pronounced Persia a Paradise she likened to being “in the middle of the Arabian Nights.” The twenty-three-year-old also experienced romance when she fell in love with the decade older Henry Cadogan, an English diplomat.  He took her sightseeing to the Tower of Silence where the Zoroastrians discarded their dead, leaving them as carrion for the birds. Another date night entailed watching as servants released quails before setting loose hawks. More conventionally, he recited the poetry of Persian poet Omar Khayyam, “A book of verses underneath the bough/A jug of wine, a loaf of bread-and thou…” A future as Mrs. Cadogan beckoned: Parisian dresses, vacations on luxurious steamers, socializing with prime ministers, royals, residences in Damascus and Baghdad. However, although Henry was the grandson of the third Earl Cadogan, he did not possess inherited wealth, and Sir Hugh vetoed his daughter living on a diplomat’s salary. Heartbroken, Gertude returned to England in the hope her father would change his mind. Eight months later, a telegram arrived from Teheran- Henry had perished from pneumonia.

 

In the film, The English Patient, World War II soldiers, desperate for an escape through a mountain pass, pour over a Bell map, at which time one of them says, “Let’s hope he was right.” The producers had assumed that a desert explorer had to have been a male; they had never heard of Gertrude Bell. The English woman’s rendezvous with the history that mostly overlooked her began when the British bluestocking headed for Turkey where the amateur archaeologist excavated ancient ruins. She travelled wearing a “divided skirt” that permitted her to ride as did men. Often, she spent twelve hours a day under the burning desert sun, sometimes reduced to drinking stagnant water. During an expedition, Gertrude, on a hill in northern Mesopotamia, looked down on green crops and distant snow-covered mountains. As she stared upon the ancient land, the past superimposed itself on the present. She wrote of her imaginings of Alexander the Great riding at the head of his armies, lamenting he had but one world to conquer. One day she would become the region’s uncrowned queen. In her letters and book, The Desert and the Sown, she described camel caravans, dhows plying the Tigris and Euphrates, crumbling forts. In vivid prose she recounted encounters with sheiks, shocked at the pale-skinned woman with her ivory cigarette holder.  She hoodwinked belligerent Bedouins displeased with a lone British woman wandering throughout the Ottoman Empire. Her prickly personality caused Sir Mark Sykes, a fellow English expatriate, to write his wife, "Confound the silly, chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!" Part of his ire was borne from his Victorian sensibility that dictated it was unseemly for a female to muscle in on male territory. Gertrude had said, “I like to run my own show” something she did when surveying unchartered lands, photographing the desert, drawing up maps. So great was her knowledge of the territory that a sheik, when asked about the geographical boundary of his tribe, remarked her should pose the question to Bell. She would often bark out commands in English, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Turkish. The pioneer was the first woman to traverse the Syrian sands, was the first woman to receive a prize from the Royal Geographical Society.

With the Bell family fortune, rather than a gypsy vagabond, Gertrude made her way as a desert queen, replete with a retinue of servants and luggage that held parasols, silver candlesticks, crystal glasses, tin bath, Wedgwood dinner service, and pistols. Writer Vita Sackville West, after encountering Gertrude in Constantinople, wrote that she “appeared out of the desert with all the evening dresses, cutlery and napery she took on her travels.” By gifting the sheiks Zeiss binoculars and other goods, Gertrude gleaned knowledge concerning the politics of the Arab world. In contrast, while in Baghdad, Gertrude led the life of an upper crust Englishwoman of afternoon teas though her feet rested on Persian carpets, and bathing parties were in the Tigris River. 

In 1911, while part of an excavation on the site of the ancient city of Carchemish, (now on the border of Syria and Turkey), Gertude met Thomas Edward Lawrence, romantically remembered as Lawrence of Arabia. The two shared commonalities: British in the Mideast, Oxford degree in history, adventurer, archaeologist. He said of his female counterpart that “she was a wonderful person, not very like a woman, which he meant as a compliment. Gertude dismissed his team’s digging methods as “prehistoric.” A friendship developed in which Lawrence called her Gerty, and she referred to him as “dear boy.”

The man whom she considered far more than as a “dear boy” was Boer War veteran Major Charles Hotham Doughty-Wylie, the British envoy for Turkey.  Over lunch, where Gertrude joined Charles and his wife, Judith, he waxed eloquent of his travels in India, China, Africa, and Somalia, and discoursed on Islamic poetry. After receiving a medal for saving hundreds of lives in the Young Turks’ National Rebellion, Gertrude wrote Charles a letter of congratulation which began an epistolatory correspondence. Their relationship played out like the Middle Eastern French Lieutenant’s Woman: the proper Victorian man besotted with an exotic woman.  In 1912, Charles was in London for his position as the director of the Red Cross and spent time with Gertrude who was visiting her family. In a whirlwind four days, they attended parties, museums, and concerts where Gertrude was resplendent in her pearls, diamonds, and Parisienne gowns. Charles suffered his variation of Sophie’s Choice: his wife threatened she would kill herself if he left her; his lover swore the same. In a letter, Gertrude wrote, “It’s that or nothing. I can’t live without you.” Gertrude railed that he was only staying in his marriage as he dreaded the societal condemnation that would be engendered by a divorce.  While awaiting his decision, Gertrude departed on an expedition to Hail, Saudi Arabia, despite the danger that the area was the scene of warring tribes. At one point, she ended up in captivity and only escaped with the aid of the women in a harem. After Charles left for the battlefields of World War I, Gertrude was at a social gathering when a guest remarked that Major Doughty-Wylie had died as a hero in the Battle of Gallipoli. In 1915, soldiers observed a veiled woman lay a wreath on the wooden cross that marked Charles’ grave. As Judith was in Wales with her parents, suffering from a nervous breakdown at the loss of her husband, the assumption was the mourner was Gertrude Bell. With the loss of both her lovers, Gertrude drew a curtain over her heart.

What saved Gertrude’s soul was she found another passion. During World War I, although British intelligence was against entrusting a woman with a diplomatic post, they made an exception with the woman the Bedouins had dubbed “the daughter of the desert.” Their rationale was Gertrude’s extensive knowledge of the languages and landscape of the region made her an invaluable asset in turning the Arabs against Ottoman Turkey, Germany’s ally. As a measure of their trust, her adopted countrymen referred to as “Khatun” “Desert Queen.” Along with Lawrence, Gertrude worked as a spy in Cairo, and as an advisor to the British High Commission in Baghdad where her contacts with sheiks, tribal chiefs, and religious leaders enabled her to glean information. Although grateful for her services, the politicians’ found her a nightmare; on two occasions she disrupted meetings by galloping into venues on her black horse. Those in her social milieu sarcastically referred to a Bell afternoon tea as “the P.S.A.’s” pleasant Sunday afternoons.”

Nevertheless, her eccentricities and entitlement paled before her accomplishments. A photograph from the Cairo conference of 1921, showcases Gertrude-draped in fur coat- sandwiched between Sir Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence, astride camels, with the Great Sphinx of Giza and the Pyramid of Khafre as backdrop. A consequence of the conference was the transformation of Mesopotamia into Iraq. Lawrence and Gertrude arranged to make Faisal I of Mecca its king. Standing next to the newly anointed king on a dais alongside 500 tribesmen was Gertrude’s shing moment. 

As Gertrude stood beside Faisal on the dais with the tribal chiefs, 500 tribesmen came up to pledge their allegiance.  Gertrude Bell determined what she described as a “reasonable border” between the nascent Iraq and the territory controlled by Ibn Saud, the founder of the future kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She never imagined her lines in the sand would cause bloodshed decades later when Saddam Hussein violently contested them. She said of her role in birthing a country, “I feel at times like the Creator about the middle of the week. He must have wondered what it was going to be like, as I do.”

Apprehensive colonial authorities would ship the irreplaceable antiquities of Mesopotamia to the British Museum, Gertrude established the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. Another reason was she believed a storehouse filled with Iraq’s ancient items would provide the new state with a bridge to its past. Working in solitude as the authorities would not pay for an assistant curator, Gertrude secured and documented thousands of relics. Seventy-seven years later, looters made off with many of the 5,000-year-old-treasures during the United States led invasion of Iraq. The ransacking was one of the most egregious crimes ever perpetrated against a nation’s cultural heritage. Among the lost treasures Gertrude had amassed: a gold and lapis bowl from the royal cemetery at Ur, an eighth-century B.C. ivory lion, a head of the Assyrian King Sargon. Among the ravished artifacts was the country’s variation of Mona Lisa, the Lady of Warka, circa 3,100 B.C. face mask. What had preceded her absence was another missing Mesopotamian lady: the bust of Gertrude Bell as well as a plaque that bore the words: “Gertude Bell, whose memory the Arabs will ever hold in affection.”

In 1926, Khatun’s life was a steppingstone of what lay next on the horizon, was deeply depressed, suffering from pleurisy. Gertrude wrote to her friend, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis that if anything were to happen to her, he should take in her dog. She had drawn her fateful lines in the sand, had lost the two loves of her life, no further oasis beckoned. On a stifling hot Baghdad night, the woman who had written, “I go on, riding camels through my dreams,” never awoke.

Gertude left no note, but the last lines of the poem Henry had read to her under the desert stars can serve as her love letter to land that was her spiritual homeland, “Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow….

 

 

 

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