GERTRUDE BELL is probably the most remarkable woman ever to emerge from the Tees Valley.
She died 100 years ago this summer, but crammed more into her 58 years than most people manage in two lifetimes. Indeed so much that it feels as if she lived a double life.
At home, she was the daughter of a fabulously wealthy Middlesbrough ironmaster, riding horses on the beach, indulging in a bit of landscape gardening, attending balls in expensive gowns and salving her social conscience by worrying about the plight of the poverty-stricken employed in her family’s blast furnaces.
Abroad, she was a mountaineer and a spy, a campaigner for women’s rights and a nation builder who achieved things previously thought impossible for a woman.
Gertrude was the first woman to get a first class degree in Modern History from Oxford university. She became the first female British spy and in the run-up to the First World War was the most powerful woman in the British Empire.
Gertrude Bell, seated between underneath the Sphinx's face with Winston Churchill on her right and TH Laurence on her left
Having learned to ride horses on Redcar beach, she became the first European woman to undertake a 1,500-mile exploration of the uncharted Arabian desert on the back of a camel.
With two guides, she became the first person to summit one of the Alps which is now named after her – Gertrudspitz.
She was a photographer, cartographer, archaeologist, botanist, translator, mountaineer and writer. She created a nation and placed a king on a throne. She spoke Persian, Arabic, French and German. She could swim, fence, row, play hockey and withstand the harshest conditions when forced to camp for two nights in a thunder-blizzard on the side of an Alp.
Yet she was unlucky, and unhappy, in love and although her amazing CV should make her a feminist icon, on one point at least she was on the wrong side of women’s liberation: she campaigned for them not to get the Parliamentary vote.
In fact, she wrote in her diary how, when returning home to the family mansion at East Rounton, near Northallerton, she liked to catch a train from King’s Cross, choose a woman in a compartment to sit next to and by the time she got off at Darlington’s Bank Top, she liked to have converted that woman to the anti-suffrage cause.
Gertrude was born in 1868 in Washington Hall, in the north of County Durham, which was the home of her grandfather, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell. His works produced a third of Britain’s steel, could make everything from a needle to a ship, and employed about 47,000 men.
Red Barns in Redcar was being built in 1868 when Gertrude was born. It was designed by arts and crafts architect Philip Webb who made it an informal vernacular building, made with handmade local bricks and pantiles, rather than a grand industrialist's mansion
The Bells were the sixth richest family in England. Gertrude grew up at Red Barns, a mansion near Redcar, as her father, Sir Hugh, ran the Teesside steelworks and was thrice mayor of Middlesbrough.
Rounton Grange, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell's great arts and crafts country house was built in the mid-1870s and demolished in 1953
In 1866 Sir Isaac bought an estate just outside smoky Teesside at East Rounton which included Mount Grace Priory. It is said that as a young child Gertrude found archaeologists excavating the priory and it sparked her lifelong fascination with buried history.
In the early 1870s Sir Isaac had a very fashionable Arts and Crafts mansion, Rounton Grange, built on the estate by the most artistic craftsmen – architect Philip Webb and designer William Morris. It had 39 bedrooms and one bathroom (Sir Isaac only allowed the modern convenience to be added after much pressure from his family).Gertrude later laid out its pleasure gardens and parkland.
Landscape gardening was just one of her many talents.
Se was just three years old when her mother, Mary, died at Red Barns giving birth to her brother, Maurice. From this early age Gertrude had to be independent and she discovered immense inner strength and reliance which came to be the basis for her success.
At school she excelled at sport; at university she excelled at academia, rigorously studying seven hours a day and completing her degree in two years.
In the late 1880s, after graduating, she began her travels, touring the world on a steamship and starting her attempt to conquer the Alps – she became the first person to climb all the peaks in the Engelhorner range, including Getrudspitz, and, having already bagged Mont Blanc, she reached the summit of the Matterhorn in August 1904 to complete her mission.
She was also getting to intimately know Persia, Syria, Mesopotamia and the Middle East – understanding the language, the peoples, their customs and their history, surveying and excavating their past, advising on their future.
Gertrude Bell outside her tent in Babylon in what was then Mesopotamia but is now central Iraq
In 1915 she became the first female intelligence officer – effectively a spy – to be employed by the British military, but the Arabs upon whom she was spying regarded her so highly they called her the 'Mother of the Faithful'.
Others called her the 'Queen of the Desert'.
She was a close advisor to Winston Churchill on all matters involving the Middle East, was trusted by key tribal leaders and worked with TE Lawrence 'of Arabia'.
Gertrude Bell on horseback in the desert
After the First World War, Gertrude used her knowledge of the competing tribes to draw up the boundaries of Iraq. She wrote its constitution and installed its first king, Faisal, who made her the new nation’s first Director of Antiquities – she then collected Iraq’s historical treasures to go into her new national museum in Baghdad.
Despite these lengthy foreign explorations, Gertrude regarded Redcar as home, regularly and fondly referring to Red Barns in her letters.
When she had finished university she spent some time there, tutoring her sisters and helping her stepmother, Florence, with her philanthropic work among the poor of Middlesbrough – particularly those who worked in the Bells’ ironworks and ironstone mines in the Cleveland Hills.
Lady Bell and Gertrude were surprisingly close and had similar energies and outlooks. While Gertrude was immersing herself in Arabian culture, Florence dug deeply into the social issues of the early Teessiders to produce her great book, At the Works, which was published in 1907.
Sir Isaac, Florence’s husband and Gertrude’s grandfather, died in 1904 and as Sir Hugh inherited Rounton Grange, he moved the family seat there from Redcar.
It was as if Gertrude lived at least two separate lives in different parts of the planet. She considered home to be among the smoky blast furnaces of Teesside and in the comfortable mansions of North Yorkshire, yet she found fame in the Arabian desert, far from the beaches of Redcar.
In early adulthood she spent days helping to alleviate poverty in Middlesbrough only then to travel to London to be a big name socialite in the season’s balls – she had a keen interest in opulent fashion and became a daringly fashionable smoker.
The purpose of attending the balls was to make a match, but independent-minded Gertrude never found a husband. Her ill-fated infatuations with men became the subject of a slushy film in 2015 called Queen of the Desert in which she was played by Nicole Kidman.
A photograph, taken by Gertrude Bell in 1900, of the Temple of Ba'alshamin at Palmyra, in Syria, destroyed by Isis fighters in 2015
In 1892, she had wanted to become engaged to Henry Cadogan whom she had met in the British embassy in Persia. Her parents refused. Although Cadogan was the grandson of an earl, they doubted his financial security – quite rightly it would seem, as he died soon after their romantic disappointment and was found to be riddled with gambling debts.
Gertrude Bell had a big, some said unhealthy, interest in the latest clothes
Then she had a long-term relationship with Charles Doughty-Wylie, the British military vice-consul in Konya in Turkey. A distinguished soldier and linguist, he was married.
After he visited Gertrude at Rounton in 1913, they exchanged love letters but their emotional attachment was never consummated.
Doughty-Wylie was killed on April 16, 1915, leading British troops into battle at Gallipoli against the Turkish army. He had spent years studying the Turkish people, like Gertrude had the Arabs, and respected them so much he wouldn’t carry a weapon against them. In his last assault he was armed only with a walking cane when he went over the top and was hit in the head by a bullet.
He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for his gallant leadership, but his death was very hard for Gertrude. Not only had he been killed by the people he had come to love, but, as she was 47 and even though he had a wife, she thought it closed off her chances of personal happiness.
Her biographers say that his death pushed her to be even more single-minded in her work in the Middle East.
Gertrude Bell, centre, and King Faisal, left, enjoy a picnic at Ctesiphon in Iraq in August 1921
Another great duality in Gertrude’s life is her attitude towards women.
She helped Queen Huzaima, the wife of King Faisal I, set up a royal household and even advised her on fashion matters. She campaigned for the rights of Muslim women, whom were forced to spend most of their time indoors, arranging tea parties and lectures from female doctors.
Yet in Britain in 1908, just as the suffragettes were rising to prominence, Gertrude was a founder member of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League and even became president of its northern section.
The Women's National Anti-Suffrage League, of which Gertrude Bell was a founder-member
She wrote to The Times newspaper denouncing “the extraordinary and regrettable programme” of the suffragettes, and in 1909 she organised a petition, signed by 250,000 people, demanding that women should not get the vote.
As she explained to the women in that railway carriage, she thought that giving women the vote would turn the proper male-dominated order of society on its head and that would destabilise the country and weaken the British Empire.
She thought giving women the vote would distract them from their principal role at the heart of the family and felt it would prevent them from volunteering in schools and community organisations so their role in society would be diminished.
She deplored the violence of the suffragettes who were throwing stones, setting fire to buildings and slashing paintings.
Some biographers have attempted to say she was only briefly involved in this cause, but as late as November 1912 Gertrude was organising an anti-suffrage meeting in Middlesbrough.
She was a woman who broke down barriers in so many corners of the man’s man’s man’s world – from Oxford university to the Alps to the Middle East – and yet it’s almost as if, once over, she pulled up the drawbridge behind her.
She advocated women getting more greatly involved in local government, where their knowledge of health, education and welfare issues might be useful, but believed they should know their place was not in the ways of high finance, military operations and international diplomacy – even though that is the world in which she excelled.
A photograph taken by Gertrude Bell in Iraq in May 1909 showing High Priest of the Yezidis Ali Beg, seated, in front of her guide Fattuh at Ba'adri (Image: Unknown)
Her last years in the 1920s are tinged with unhappiness. She became estranged from the Iraqi royal family she had helped to create as the tensions in that country she had helped to create began to surface – tensions that are still very evident today.
She became infatuated with a high ranking British diplomat but her feelings were not reciprocated, and at home the economic depression hit the family so hard they had to shut up Rounton Grange.
She was in England on sick leave in 1925, probably suffering from depression.
She returned to Iraq where on the evening of July 11, 1926, she took an overdose of sleeping tablets. Her close friends, who were aware of her depression, thought it deliberate but there is no evidence to say it was.
How The Northern Echo reported Gertrude Bell's death in 1926 - on an inside page
She was buried in the British military cemetery in Baghdad on July 12, so even in death she straddles two parts of the planet: lying at rest alone in Iraq so far from her family at home in the Tees Valley.