Page 14 - Life of Gertrude Bell

2 GERTRUDE BELL
rather ugly gargoyle head, and topped by a copper vane pointing
an accusing linger to heaven, to discover that this monument to
the neo-Gothic ideal was the inspiration of one of England’s
great scientists and foremost ironmasters. ‘This tower,’ says a
barely decipherable inscription, ‘was erected by I. Lowthian Bell
in the years 1854 and 1857.’ If Gertrude was the most famous
daughter of a remarkable family he was its finest son and he is
denied a proper regard in history only for the fact that Iris private
and business papers were lost, or perhaps destroyed, after his
death. To him Gertrude owed her vital qualities of mind and and
will, and the vast fortune that was her sheet-anchor.

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, to give her all her names, has
been called a ‘child of fortune’, and it may be that if any of us
could choose the time and place of our birth, midsummer in the
year 1868 in the compact and beautiful county of Durham, within
one of England’s richest and most enlightened families, would be
a popular set of circumstances. But wealth and security are no
guarantees of protection from nature’s shocks.
Her father, Hugh Bell, with his good looks and intelligence, his
impeccable manners, tousled red hair and carefully trimmed
beard, must have been regarded as an eligible catch by many a
mother and daughter beyond his native heath. At the age of
twenty-three, however, he married a local girl, Maria, the daughter
of John Shield, a prominent merchant of Newcastle upon Tyne.
The wedding took place on April 23rd, 1867 at the Parish church
of Rothesay on the island of Bute in the Clyde, where the Shield
family maintained a summer residence. She was twenty-three years
old, delicate in health and, it is said, of frail beauty. Gertrude was
born in the July of the following year. Relatives were numerous
on both sides of the family and they descended on the Hall at
Washington in droves to admire the baby and embrace her
mother and father. Maria soon came to be known as Mary, some­
times as Mary Hugh, and at weekends she would stroll proudly
in the surrounding country or into the village with the infant
Gertrude, accompanied by aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces; at
other times they would take a carriage or train to Northallerton,
some twenty miles to the south across the north Yorkshire moors,
where grandfather Lowthian was building a new home, or to
Redcar on the coast where Hugh was also building a house for
his family, both establishments being designed by Philip Webb,