Page 24 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

Society and Oxford

With the appearance of Florence, who was twenty-five when she
married Gertrude’s father, there was a perceptible change in the
life-style of the family. In 1875 Lowthian Bell had been elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society and Liberal Member of Parliament
for Hartlepool. The prestige of the Bells stood high and it was
common enough to see the family gathered in force aboard uncle
John’s yacht on a celebratory voyage from Saltburn, just south of
Redcar where it was moored, to Scarborough or some other
resort. On one occasion the Bells and other families of means in
the district gathered at the Yorkshire home of a prominent
manufacturing family. As they left the hostess was overheard
asking a relative sympathetically, ‘I wonder what they feel like
going back to their poky litde homes?’ The phrase was used from
then on to describe the several estates in Durham and Northum­
berland which the Bells owned. Hugh’s favourite pastimes were
those of the country gentleman, hunting, shooting, riding, and
Gertrude often accompanied him on one of her ponies. Dis­
cussion at Red Barns and Rounton Grange usually centred on
industry and politics and, of course, matters of science and
technology. Florence brought a new set of friends and precepts
with her. Reared in Paris in the days of the Second Empire, her
earliest recollections were of the illustrious men and women who
sought the companionship of her Irish father and her fascinating
mother, Laura, as they passed through the French capital.
Sir Joseph Ollifle was honorary physician to the British
Embassy. A man of learning and pronounced Irish wit, he had
devised an elaborate plan to redevelop the town of Deauville, in
collaboration with Count de Morny, when he and his family were
forced to flee Paris by the advance of the Prussian army in 1870.