Page 35 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)_Neat

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SOCIETY AND OXFORD 21
English history of France and, in later years, public adversary of
King Edward VII who neglected to confer a knighthood on him
in expected reward for writing the official version of the corona­
'
tion. The sovereign and Hugh Bell became the favourite targets
of his vitriolic tongue.
After university came a long-awaited holiday, walking in her
beloved Yorkshire, helping her young sisters Elsa and Molly
with their studies, and flirting with that inner circle of social life
in London to which admission was far fom being indiscriminately
open. The house in Sloane Street became Gertrude’s London
address again, as it had been in her first year at Queen’s College,
and she soon became a welcome and admired member of a circle
at the centre of which was her aunt Maisie’s mother-in-law, the
forthright Lady Stanley of Dover Street. She had been instru­
mental in founding Girton College at Cambridge, and Gertrude
entertained slight misgivings at having gone to the other place.
The matriarch had visited her at Lady Margaret Hall during her
first term. T felt rather guilty when I shook hands with her —
rather as if Fm not going to Girton were written on my forehead,
!
but she didn’t say anything.’ In fact, Gertrude seems to have had
a relatively easy relationship with the tiresome old lady, which is
more than can be said for her grandson Bertrand Russell, who
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found sanctuary from her worst conversational excesses in
Gertrude’s aunt Maisie and the witty Lyulph. ‘So long as I live
there shall be no chapel at Girton,’ she would announce with all
the force of her commanding personality. One of her favourite
sayings was that she always thought it not so bad to break the
seventh commandment as the sixth, ‘at any rate it requires the
consent of the other party’. If anyone left the room she could be
relied on to say ‘fools are so fatiguin’ ’. Her birdiday dinner
j
parties were always thirteen in number and she considered herself
very broadminded because she had allowed her son to marry into
‘trade’. ‘As Sir Hugh was a multi-millionaire I was not very
impressed,’ observed Bertrand Russell in later years.