Page 41 - Life of Gertrude Bell

EUROPE AND LONDON 29
halcyon years as quickly as they made them and had gone into
oblivion. Sir Lowthian Bell owned Washington Hall (he gave it
away as an orphanage in 1891), Rounton Grange and ArnclifTe
Hall in Yorkshire, as well as a London home. There was also Red
Barns, while Lowthian’s brother John had a magnificent home
called Rushpool Hall at Saltburn, with a heated indoor swimming
pool and his yacht moored nearby, and a comparable house in
Algiers known as Mustapha Rais, which Lizzie Bell inherited on
his death. Lowthian’s family all enjoyed a standard of living of
that order, as did the Bolckows, Dormans and other iron-making
dynasties. The masters of the district were not above competition
in such matters as the size of their respective establishments, the
splendour of their carriages or the number of their mistresses.
When Florence had completed her programme of enquiry, over
a period of nearly thirty years, she called it At the Works and
dedicated it to Charles Booth, the author of Life and Labour of the
People of London, in recognition of his ‘wise and sympathetic coun­
sel’. One passage in particular defines her own attitude to life:
We move through a world filled with labels, and we are most
of us content to accept the mere name on the label for that
which it represents ... Commerce, Prosperity, Industry, the
Iron Trade, War, Peace —what do these all mean? I confess
that as I try to grasp them I can represent them to myself,
always and ever, in terms only of human beings: they all mean
the lives, the daily actions, of thousands of our fellow creatures.

The vapid social life of the salons and dining tables of London
still beckoned Gertrude during the three years between her first
European tour and her next journey abroad. By 1890 she had
become friendly with another family which was to play an
important part in her future life, the Mallets. Louis du Pan
Mallet, whom she met at the Russells’ Audley Square home along
with his father and namesake Sir Louis Mallet, had just joined the
Foreign Office. He was later to become precis-writer to Lord
Lansdowne, private secretary to Sir Edward Grey and Permanent
Under-Secretary, and ambassador at Constantinople. Gertrude
wrote to her stepmother on February 15 th, 1890 from Audley
Square, reporting on the latest society prank in which the
Mallets were playing a crucial part, the ‘Pessimist Society’ and
its associated magazine the Mausoleum, to which she was asked to
contribute. She went on, ‘It’s so nice being here!’ Dinner guests