Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell (14 July 1868 – 12 July 1926) was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist. She spent much of her life exploring and mapping the Middle East, and became influential in British imperial policy-making as an Arabist due to her knowledge of the region and the contacts built up during her extensive travels there. She was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials such as High Commissioner for Mesopotamia Percy Cox, giving her great influence. She participated in both the 1919 Paris Peace Conference (briefly) and the 1921 Cairo Conference, which helped decide the territorial boundaries and governments of the post-War Middle East as part of the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Bell believed that the momentum of Arab nationalism was unstoppable, and that the British government should ally with nationalists rather than stand against them. Along with T. E. Lawrence, she advocated for independent Arab states in the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and supported the installation of Hashemite monarchies in what is today Jordan and Iraq.
Bell was raised in a privileged environment that allowed her an education at Oxford University, to travel the world, and to meet future influential policy-makers. In her travels, she became an accomplished mountain climber and equestrian. She expressed great affection for the Middle East, visiting Qajar Iran, Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia. She participated in archaeological digs during a time period of great ferment and new discoveries, and personally funded a dig at Binbirkilise in Asia Minor. She travelled through the Ha'il region in the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula during an extensive trip in 1913–1914, and was one of very few Westerners to have seen the area at the time. The outbreak of World War I in August 1914, and the Ottoman Empire's entry into the war a few months later on the side of Germany, upended the status quo in the Middle East. She briefly joined the Arab Bureau in Cairo, where she worked with T. E. Lawrence. She joined the British administration in Ottoman Mesopotamia in 1917, as a political officer and as the Oriental Secretary to three High Commissioners: the only woman in such high-ranking civil roles in the British Empire. Bell also supported the cause of the largely urban Sunni population in their attempts to modernise Iraq.
She spent much of the rest of her life in Baghdad and was a key player in the nation-building of what would eventually become the Kingdom of Iraq. She met and befriended a large number of Iraqis in both the cities and the countryside, and was a confidante and ally of Iraq's new King Faisal. Toward the end of her life, she was sidelined from Iraqi politics. Faisal appointed her the Honorary Director of Antiquities of Iraq, where she returned to her original love of archaeology. In that role, she helped modernise procedures and catalogue findings, which helped prevent unauthorized looting of artifacts. She supported education for Iraqi women, served as president of the Baghdad library (the future Iraq National Library), and founded the Iraq Museum as a place to display the country's archaeological treasures. She died in 1926 of an overdose of sleeping pills in what was possibly a suicide, although she was in ill health regardless.
Bell wrote extensively. She translated a book of Persian poetry; published multiple books describing her travels, adventures, and excavations; and sent a steady stream of letters back to England during World War I that influenced government thinking in an era when few English people were familiar with the contemporary Middle East.
Early life
Gertrude Bell was born on 14 July 1868 in Washington New Hall—now known as Dame Margaret Hall—in Washington, County Durham, England. Her family was wealthy, which enabled both her higher education and her travels. Her grandfather was the ironmaster Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, an industrialist and a Liberal Member of Parliament between 1875 and 1880. Mary Bell ( Shield), the daughter of John Shield of Newcastle-on-Tyne and Gertrude's mother, died in 1871 while giving birth to a son, Maurice Bell (later the 3rd Baronet). Gertrude Bell was just three at the time, and the death led to a lifelong close relationship with her father, Sir Hugh Bell, 2nd Baronet, a progressive capitalist and mill owner who made sure his workers were well paid. Throughout her life, Gertrude consulted on matters great and small with her father, her personal role model. In particular, Hugh shared his knowledge of government and access to highly placed officials with Gertrude.
When Gertrude was seven years old, her father remarried, providing her a stepmother, Florence Bell (née Olliffe), and eventually, three half-siblings. Florence Bell was a playwright and author of children's stories, as well as the author of a study of Bell factory workers. She instilled concepts of duty and decorum in Gertrude. She also recognized her intelligence and contributed to her intellectual development by ensuring she received an excellent schooling. Florence Bell's activities with the wives of Bolckow Vaughan ironworkers in Eston, near Middlesbrough, may have helped influence her step-daughter's later promotion of education for Iraqi women. Some biographies suggest the loss of her mother Mary caused underlying childhood trauma, revealed through periods of depression and risky behaviour. While this loss surely marked her, Gertrude and Florence had a positive and lifelong relationship.
From 1883 to 1886, Gertrude Bell attended Queen's College in London, a prestigious school for girls. At the age of 17, she then studied at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. History was one of the few subjects women were allowed to study, due to the many restrictions imposed on them at the time. She specialised in modern history, and she was the first woman to graduate in Modern History at Oxford with a first class honours degree, a feat she achieved in only two years. Eleven people graduated that year. Nine were recorded because they were men, and the other two were Bell and Alice Greenwood. However, the two women were not awarded degrees. It was not until decades later that Oxford treated women equally with men in this respect, retroactively awarding degrees to Bell and others in 1920.
Personal life Bell never married or had children. After graduating from Oxford, she spent two and a half years, from 1890 to 1892, attending the London social rounds of balls and banquets where eligible young men and women paired off, but failed to find a match. After arriving in Persia in 1892, she courted Henry Cadogan, a mid-ranking British diplomat in Tehran, but was refused permission to marry him after her father discovered that Cadogan was deeply in debt and not her social equal. Cadogan died in 1893; Bell received the news via telegram. She befriended British colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham on a visit to Singapore with her brother Hugo in 1903 and maintained a correspondence with him until 1909. She had a "brief but passionate affair" with Swettenham following his retirement to England in 1904. She had an unconsummated affair with Major Charles Doughty-Wylie, a married man, with whom she exchanged love letters from 1913 to 1915. Doughty-Wylie died in April 1915 during the Gallipoli Campaign, a loss which devastated Bell.
Travels and writings Bell's uncle, Sir Frank Lascelles, was British minister (similar to ambassador) at Tehran, Persia. Bell travelled to Persia to visit him, arriving in May 1892. She stayed for around six months and loved the experience; she called Persia "paradise" in a letter home. She described her experiences in her book Persian Pictures, which was published in 1894. She spent much of the next decade travelling around the world, mountaineering in Switzerland, and developing a passion for archaeology and languages. She became fluent in Arabic, Persian (Farsi), French, German, Italian, and Turkish. In 1897, she published a well-regarded translation from Persian into English of the poems of The Divān of Hafez; her work was later praised by Edward Denison Ross, E. Granville Browne, and others. Her horse riding skills, practised from a young age, would aid her in her travels.
In 1899, Bell again went to the Middle East. She visited historic Palestine and Syria that year and in 1900, on a trip from Jerusalem to Damascus, she became acquainted with the Druze living in Jabal al-Druze.
Between 1899 and 1904, she climbed a number of mountains, including the La Meije and Mont Blanc, and recorded 10 new paths or first ascents in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland. One Alpine peak in the Bernese Oberland, the Gertrudspitze, was named after her after she and her guides, Ulrich and Heinrich Fuhrer, first traversed it in 1901. However, she failed in an attempt of the Finsteraarhorn in August 1902, when inclement weather including snow, hail and lightning forced her to spend "forty eight hours on the rope" with her guides, clinging to the rock face in terrifying conditions that nearly cost her her life. She did some further climbing in the Rocky Mountains during a trip through North America in 1903, but eased up on her mountaineering in later years.
In 1905, she returned to the region of Syria. She met Mark Sykes, then a British traveller. The two quarrelled and shared a mutual dislike of each other that would last until 1912, when they made up. She concluded her trip visiting archaeological sites in Asia Minor and visiting Constantinople. She published her observations of the Middle East in the 1907 book Syria: The Desert and the Sown. In it she vividly described, photographed, and detailed her trip to Greater Syria including Damascus, Jerusalem, Beirut, Antioch, Alexandretta, and the lands of the Druze and of the Bedouin. The Desert and the Sown was well received in the western world; the book received positive reviews and was a success. A notable epithet of Bell's came from her trip to Syria, where one particular compliment from a Bani Sakher tribesman she recorded became part of her later public image: "Mashallah! Bint aarab." Literally, it meant "As God wills it, a daughter of the Arabs," but she translated it as being called a "daughter of the desert."
In March 1907, Bell journeyed back to Asia Minor (Anatolia) and began to work with Sir William M. Ramsay, an archaeologist and New Testament scholar. The pair and their staff performed excavations of destroyed buildings and churches that dated from the Byzantine era in Binbirkilise, which she funded and planned. The results were chronicled in the book A Thousand and One Churches.
In January 1909, Bell left for Mesopotamia. She visited the Hittite city of Carchemish, photographed the relief carvings in Halamata Cave, mapped and described the ruin of Ukhaidir, and travelled on to Babylon and Najaf. In Carchemish, she consulted with the two archaeologists on site, T. E. Lawrence and Reginald Campbell Thompson. She struck up a friendship with Lawrence, and the two would trade letters in the following years. Both Bell and Lawrence had attended Oxford and earned a First Class Honours in Modern History, both spoke fluent Arabic, and both travelled extensively in the Arabian desert and established ties with the local tribes. In 1910, Bell visited the Munich exhibition Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art. In a letter to her stepmother, she recounts how she had the research room to herself and spoke to some Syrians from Damascus who were part of the ethnographic section of the exhibition. She wrote a book on her journey and the archaeological work, Amurath to Amurath, as well as a journal article.