Page 180 - Life of Gertrude Bell

iGz GERTRUDE DELL
comfort and Captain Woolley, ex-digger at Carchcmish and head
of the Intelligence Department at Port Said came on board to
meet me. Next morning I came up here. Mr Hogarth and Mr
Lawrence (you don’t know him, he was also at Carchcmish,
exceedingly intelligent) met me and brought me to this hotel...
Mr Hogarth, Mr Lawrence and I all dined together; at our table
sit two Engineers, Col. Wright (brother of Hagberg) and very
nice and Major Pearson. Occasionally we have Mr Graves into
dinner—he was Tims Correspondent in Constantinople in
former days. I knew him there. Now you have my circle ... ’ One
of her first encounters in Cairo was with Lady Anne Blunt, her
famous predecessor at Hail, at her stables outside the city. She
also ran into her cousin Liz Lascelles. Hogarth was due to return
to London in a week’s time, ‘which will leave a terrible gap’. On
December 7th she wrote to her father, ‘I was so glad to have M’s
[Maurice’s] letter bless him I ... He is back by now in France ...
one looks on and half despairs of an end to it. But perhaps, after
all, the end will someday come with a rush and take us all by
surprise ... Mr Hogarth will come and see you when you are in
London and give you news of me ... ’
While Gertrude was working at her assessment of the Arab
tribes her friends in Cairo were in almost hourly communication
with London. On December 13th Lt-Colonel Gilbert Clayton,
the director of Civil and Military Intelligence in Cairo, wrote to
Sykes: ‘... I hope you have been able to do some useful work in
forwarding the various projects which we arc agreed upon as
advisable ... I have already started the nucleus of a Near East
Office, but so far I am confining myself to making it deal with
political suspects of all kinds, and pan-Islamic propaganda ...
Hennessy and Philip Graves are working at this at present, and I
am only waiting to hear from you, and to get another man or
two, to expand it... ’ Sykes replied in characteristic vein:

My dear Clayton. I am delighted to do anything to get the
closest co-ordination between all our intelligence. I am entirely
at your service in this matter ... I propose, if you concur, that
Hogarth shall come out again in January, as soon as he has got
his notes in order for printing. The WO and ourselves [Foreign
Office] are pooling our Intelligence ... By yesterday’s telegram
from C-in-C East Indies, Admiral Peirse, I see he has appointed
Lt-Cdr Mansell to work on staff of GOC Egypt. I am wridng

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