100 Facts About Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist.

Gertrude Bell spent much of her life exploring and mapping the Middle East, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making as an Arabist due to her knowledge and contacts built up through extensive travels.

Gertrude Bell participated in both the 1919 Paris Peace Conference 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.

Gertrude Bell was raised in a privileged environment that allowed her an education at Oxford University, to travel the world, and to make the acquaintance of people who would become influential policy-makers later.

Gertrude Bell expressed great affection for the Middle East, visiting Qajar Iran, Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and Arabia.

Gertrude Bell participated in archaeological digs during a time period of great ferment and new discoveries, and personally funded a dig at Binbirkilise in Asia Minor.

Gertrude Bell briefly joined the Arab Bureau in Cairo, where she worked with T E Lawrence.

Gertrude Bell supported the cause of the largely urban Sunni population in their attempts to modernise Iraq.

Gertrude Bell 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.

Gertrude Bell 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.

Gertrude Bell supported education for Iraqi women, served as president of the Baghdad library, and founded the Iraq Museum as a place to display the country's archaeological treasures.

Gertrude Bell died in 1926 of an overdose of sleeping pills in what was possibly a suicide, although she was in ill health regardless.

Gertrude Bell 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.

Gertrude Bell's family was wealthy, which enabled both her higher education and her travels.

Gertrude Bell's grandfather was the ironmaster Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, an industrialist and a Liberal Member of Parliament between 1875 and 1880.

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.

When Gertrude was seven years old, her father remarried, providing her a stepmother, Florence Bell, and eventually, three half-siblings.

Florence Gertrude Bell was a playwright and author of children's stories, as well as the author of a study of Gertrude Bell factory workers.

Gertrude Bell instilled concepts of duty and decorum in Gertrude.

Gertrude Bell recognized her intelligence and contributed to her intellectual development by ensuring she received an excellent schooling.

From 1883 to 1886, Gertrude Bell attended Queen's College in London, a prestigious school for girls.

Gertrude Bell 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.

Cadogan died in 1893; Gertrude Bell received the news via telegram.

Gertrude Bell 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.

Gertrude Bell had a "brief but passionate affair" with Swettenham following his retirement to England in 1904.

Gertrude Bell had an unconsummated affair with Major Charles Doughty-Wylie, a married man, with whom she exchanged love letters from 1913 to 1915.

Gertrude Bell travelled to Persia to visit him, arriving in May 1892.

Gertrude Bell stayed for around six months and loved the experience; she called Persia "paradise" in a letter home.

Gertrude Bell described her experiences in her book Persian Pictures, which was published in 1894.

Gertrude Bell spent much of the next decade travelling around the world, mountaineering in Switzerland, and developing a passion for archaeology and languages.

Gertrude Bell became fluent in Arabic, Persian, French, German, Italian, and Turkish.

Gertrude Bell's horse riding skills, practised from a young age, would aid her in her travels.

Gertrude Bell 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.

Gertrude Bell 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.

Gertrude Bell concluded her trip visiting archaeological sites in Asia Minor and visiting Constantinople.

Gertrude Bell published her observations of the Middle East in the 1907 book Syria: The Desert and the Sown.

In March 1907, Bell journeyed back to Asia Minor and began to work with Sir William M Ramsay, an archaeologist and New Testament scholar.

Gertrude Bell 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.

Gertrude Bell struck up a friendship with Lawrence, and the two would trade letters in the following years.

In 1910, Gertrude Bell visited the Munich exhibition Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art.

Gertrude Bell wrote a book on her journey and the archaeological work, Amurath to Amurath, as well as a journal article.

Gertrude Bell was only the second foreign woman after Lady Anne Blunt to visit Ha'il.

Gertrude Bell was held prisoner in the city for eleven days before being released.

Gertrude Bell's travels resulted in her being elected a Fellow of the Geographical Society in 1913; she was awarded a medal from them in 1914, then another in 1918.

Gertrude Bell's main focus was on meeting and knowing the influential in Arab society, the male shaikhs and leaders.

Coincidentally, Judith Doughty-Wylie, the wife of the man with whom Gertrude Bell was having an unconsummated affair, was stationed in Boulogne in this period.

Gertrude Bell asked Charles Doughty-Wylie in a letter to discourage his wife from any further meetings.

In November 1915, Gertrude Bell was summoned to Cairo in the British protectorate of Egypt; she arrived on 30 November.

Gertrude Bell's stay in Cairo was short; she was sent to British India, arriving in February 1916, likely at the suggestion of journalist-turned-diplomat Valentine Chirol.

Gertrude Bell joined the staff of Chief Political Officer Percy Cox as one of the few Westerners who knew the area.

Gertrude Bell travelled in the region between Basra and Baghdad, assessed the stance and opinions of the local inhabitants, and wrote reports and drew maps that would aid the British Army in their eventual advance on Baghdad.

Gertrude Bell was unpaid at first, but Lord Chelmsford arranged for her to be given a formal paid position in June 1916.

Gertrude Bell became the only female political officer in the British forces and received the title of Percy Cox's Oriental Secretary.

Gertrude Bell was given the honour of Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Cox and Wilson's wartime provisional government drew on British India for inspiration, replicating its legal code and bureaucratic structure, and Gertrude Bell's assessment was that this was keeping the Iraqi people content.

Gertrude Bell visited France and England in 1919, attending the Paris Peace Conference for a short time in Wilson's stead.

Gertrude Bell saw the provisional Hashemite government in Syria, while corrupt, seemingly return life to a peaceful normal state; meanwhile, affairs in Egypt saw the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 against the British.

Gertrude Bell believed that the "spirit of 1919" would spread to Mesopotamia as well if the British dawdled in honouring the promise of self-determination.

Gertrude Bell spent nearly a year writing what was later considered a masterly official report, "Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia".

Gertrude Bell blamed Wilson for the unrest in the region, saying his approach was insufficiently deferential to local wishes.

Cox asked Gertrude Bell to continue as his Oriental Secretary and to act as liaison with the forthcoming Arab government.

Gertrude Bell thought that Faisal's status as an outsider would enable him to hold together the new country of Iraq as someone not beholden to any one group, but rather a unifying symbol.

Gertrude Bell was influenced by a strain of British thought that romantically considered the desert Arabs of the Hejaz as "pure" Arabs, and thus naturally suited to possessing legitimacy and respect; the success of Faisal in the Arab Revolt at assembling a coalition of disparate tribes acted as proof to this school.

Gertrude Bell advocated for expansive Iraqi borders that would include all three of the Ottoman territories including Mosul.

Gertrude Bell wrote a letter in 1924 responding to an article likely from Arnold Wilson that argued Mosul would be happier under Turkish rule; Gertrude Bell argued that based on the elite representatives to the Constituent Assembly, Mosul still wished to be part of Iraq.

Lawrence would later write that he often feared and sometimes hoped that the over-large state Gertrude Bell had built would collapse.

Gertrude Bell opposed the Zionist movement; she wrote that she regarded the Balfour Declaration with "the deepest mistrust" and that "It's like a nightmare in which you foresee all the horrible things which are going to happen and can't stretch out your hand to prevent them".

Gertrude Bell served in the Iraq British High Commission advisory group throughout the 1920s and was an integral part of the administration of Iraq in Faisal's first years.

Gertrude Bell played the role of mediator between Faisal's government, British officials, and local notables.

Gertrude Bell took a special interest in public relations: arranging receptions, parties, and meetings; discussing the state of affairs with both the British and Arab elite of Baghdad; and transferring requests and complaints to the government.

Gertrude Bell suggested designs for both the flag of Iraq and Faisal's personal flag.

Gertrude Bell feared that Shia leaders would not respect the ideals of modernism nor secularism if put in positions of power in government, and would move toward a theocracy.

Gertrude Bell energetically promoted the library and subsequently served on its Library Committee as president from 1921 to 1924.

In 1924, Gertrude Bell personally invited Assyriologist Edward Chiera to conduct archaeological excavations in ancient Nuzi, near Kirkuk, Iraq, where hundreds of inscribed clay tablets had been discovered and deciphered, now known as the Nuzi Tablets.

Al-Husri slowed passage of the law, but Gertrude Bell's law passed in 1924 after revisions; it largely followed the standard model elsewhere in the world, but notably reserved extensive power to the Director to judge whether discovered antiquities would go in the national museum and stay as property of the state, or be allowed for export.

Gertrude Bell's law was a hybrid that bridged the gap between the chaos of Ottoman-era archaeology and later laws that would more directly enforce Iraqi sovereignty on the matter.

Gertrude Bell requested a dedicated building to act as a museum in March 1923, but was initially rejected.

Gertrude Bell briefly returned to Britain in 1925, where she faced continued ill health.

Gertrude Bell did take the opportunity to correspond with Lawrence, who sought her advice on his forthcoming book Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Gertrude Bell signaled an openness to a romantic involvement to the much younger Cornwallis, but was rejected, and their relationship stayed a professional friendship.

Gertrude Bell suffered psychologically from 1923 to 1926, and may have been depressed.

Gertrude Bell was no longer consulted by Faisal as much after his first year in office either, and he had not lived up to her impossibly high expectations.

On 12 July 1926, Gertrude Bell was discovered dead of an overdose of allobarbital sleeping pills.

Gertrude Bell had asked her maid to wake her in the morning, suggesting an accident, but she had requested for Cornwallis to look after her new dog in case anything happened to her the previous day, and had recently written a philosophical letter to her mother on how her lonely existence cannot extend forever, suggesting foreknowledge of her death.

Gertrude Bell was buried at the Anglican cemetery in Baghdad's Bab al-Sharji district the same day.

Gertrude Bell's funeral was a major event, attended by a large crowd.

Gertrude Bell was simultaneously an Iraqi nationalist and a British imperialist; Bell saw no contradiction in this, although fissures between the interests of the Iraqi state and the interests of the British Empire developed almost immediately.

From an early age, Gertrude Bell was outspoken and independent despite being raised in a deferential society; she was willing to verbally contest respected professors and experts during her schooling.

Gertrude Bell was willing to back down when sparring with fellow Arabists; T E Lawrence writes of one incident in 1911 where she criticized the methods used at the dig at Carchemish before being reprimanded and convinced otherwise by Lawrence and Thompson.

Gertrude Bell occasionally had a contrarian bent, seemingly enjoying supporting tough causes.

Gertrude Bell unsuccessfully attempted to convince her half-brother Hugo not to enter the Church as a clergyman.

Gertrude Bell was a founding member of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League in 1908 and was president of its northern branch.

Gertrude Bell appears to have softened on this stance later in her life after Parliament granted suffrage to women in 1918; Vita Sackville-West wrote that after visiting her in 1925, she had welcomed the move for women's rights, and had shifted from the Liberal views of her father to considering being a Labour voter.

Saad Eskander wrote that Gertrude Bell is more fondly remembered by Iraqi Arabs than Iraqi Kurds as a result.

Gertrude Bell proposed that many aspects of government be decentralized, both because it was the only feasible way to maintain a heterogeneous multi-ethnic and multi-religion state, and due to a certain degree of parochial romanticisation of classical Arab culture.

Later rulers would favor a strong, centralized government and find this decentralization intrusive; Gertrude Bell's law was later repealed by the new Iraqi Republic government after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958.

Gertrude Bell succeeded in advocating for a new law that revised Bell's 1924 law on Antiquities.

Many of Gertrude Bell's compatriots wrote admiring articles, reports, and lectures upon receiving news of her death, including Vita Sackville-West, Leo Amery, Arnold Wilson, Percy Cox, Henry Dobbs, and others.

Gertrude Bell blamed them for unleashing Arab nationalism in a region where it had been previously unknown.

In 1927, Florence published two volumes of Gertrude Bell's collected correspondence, albeit not including her more romantic letters out of propriety, as well as omitting material she thought might be embarrassing to the Iraqi government.