Page 13 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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Early Days

Fifty years after her death the Victorian mansion in which Gertrude
Bell was born, the Hall at Washington in England’s northern
county of Durham, is a training centre for the National Coal
Board. Visitors arrive at the village from many parts of the world
but they usually come to see another house, the Old Hall, which
was built in the thirteenth century and became the home of the
de Wessingtons, George Washington’s ancestors. Few make the
journey of a hundred yards or so to the redbrick establishment
which was the home of three generations of the Bell family and
whose first owner, Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell (usually called
Lowthian), may be said to have done as much as any man to create
the industries that have sustained and tormented the north-east of
England to this day, and to foster the technical advances of the
late nineteenth century which made Britain rich beyond the
dreams of the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution. Those who
take the trouble to call at the other Hall may, by peering through
its stained-glass and leaded windows, just make out a wall plaque
and its legend which neatly sets out the essential facts of the life
of the industrialist’s grand-daughter:

GERTRUDE BELL
Scholar, historian, archaeologist, explorer,
poet, mountaineer, gardener,
distinguished servant of the state.
She was born here on 14 July 1868
and died in Baghdad 12 July 1926
It is necessary to go to the back of the house to find a tall, slender
tower with windows from bottom to top, each surmounted by a