Page 124 - Life of Gertrude Bell

no GERTRUDE BELL
to a book which Strzygowski was writing. There was a brief
diversion at this time caused by the highly publicised activities of
the suffragette movement. Gertrude would, of course, have been
a welcome addition to the ranks of those who sought women’s
suffrage, but she was totally opposed to the movement. She
neither sympathised with its aims nor approved of the methods
employed by her sex in attracting notice to their cause. In 1908
she had joined the movement against the extension of the franchise
to women, along with the Countess of Jersey, Mrs Humphry
Ward and others, and was a founder member of the Anti-suffrage
League, later absorbed into the ‘heterosexual’ League formed by
Lords Curzon and Cromer. Free Trade remained her political
cornerstone, and though she more and more flirted with a Fabian
brand of socialism, she was, like her father, given at heart to a
Spencerian notion of progress through competition and the
pursuit of excellence.

As Gertrude travelled in and around that fertile crescent which
sweeps from the Nile to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates,
she became ever more familiar with a group of fellow countrymen
who shared with her the means to travel at leisure and who were
drawn, much as she, by archaeological discovery and the infinite
mysteries of deserts and forbidden cities. Increasingly she found
herself enmeshed in the politics of the region, in that futile
attempt by westerners to move among tribal peoples and to
examine and categorise them with the aid of their own predilections
and their own divergent philosophies. They fascinated each other
almost as much as they were collectively fascinated by their Arab
hosts, all scribbling descriptive diary notes and letters home, so
that we are presented with a many-sided picture of the British
brigade in Arabia in the early 1900s. Gertrude was in many ways
the central figure, the least committed politically, the most widely
travelled and, though it was not a factor that entered into her
calculations, the lone woman. Most of the others were in govern­
ment service and, like their German counterparts throughout
these peripheral lands of the Ottoman Empire, they combined
the roles of travel and archaeology with that of ‘intelligence’ or,
in plain language, spying.
Perhaps the foremost among them was David George Hogarth,
now almost as well known to Gertrude as his sister Janet, a small
man with a goatee beard who wandered in Macedonia and the