Excerpt
Chapter One GERTRUDE AND FLORENCE mmm It is 22 March 1921, the last day of the Cairo Conference and the final opportunity for the British to determine the postwar future of the Middle East. Like any tourists, the delegation make the routine tour of the pyramids and have themselves photographed on camels in front of the Sphinx. Standing beneath its half-effaced head, two of the most famous Englishmen of the twentieth century confront the camera in some disarray: Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, who has just, to the amusement of all, fallen off his camel, and T. E. Lawrence, tightly constrained in the pin-striped suit and trilby of a senior civil servant. Between them, at her ease, rides Gertrude Bell, the sole delegate possessing knowledge indispensable to the Conference. Her face, in so far as it can be seen beneath the brim of her rose-decorated straw hat, is transfigured with happiness. Her dream of an independent Arab nation is about to come true, her choice of a king endorsed: her Iraq is about to become a country. Just before leaving the Semiramis Hotel that morning, Churchill has cabled to London the vital message “Sharifs son Faisal offers hope of best and cheapest solution.” By what evolution did a female descendant of Cumbrian sheep farmers become, in her time, the most influential figure in the Middle East? She was as English as English can be, which is to say that she was bred in the wuthering heights of Yorkshire. These northern farmers have acquired a very particular character ever since the eleventh century, when, alone among the English, they refused to submit to William the Conqueror. Physically and mentally tough, they are given to few words, unvarnished and bluntly delivered. Gertrude Bells great-great-grandfather was a Carlisle blacksmith, and her great-grandfather began the first alkali factory and iron foundry at Jarrow. Her famous and powerful grandfather Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, born in 1816, was a metallurgical chemist and perhaps the countrys foremost industrialist. Manufacturing steel on a huge scale, he produced one-third of the metal used in Britain and much of that used for railtrack and bridge construction in the rapidly developing Empire. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britains most distinguished scientific institution. Educated first as an engineer, he studied at Edinburgh University and at the Sorbonne in Paris, then in Denmark and the south of France. Author of The Chemical Phenomena of Iron Smelting, he was looked upon as the “high priest of British Metallurgy” and he was the first to identify the value of phosphorus fertiliser as a by-product of steel-making. Referred to as “Sir Isaac” or more familiarly as “Lowthian,” in 1854 he was elected Lord Mayor of Newcastle upon Tyne, then later be- came Liberal Member of Parliament for Hartlepool and High Sheriff of County Durham. He was a contemporary and friend of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, William Morris, and John Ruskin, men to whom can be attributed seminal advances in evolution and science, art, architecture, and social reform. Lowthian was president or vice-president of eight national engineering and chemical institutions, several of which he had founded. He was also the director of the North Eastern Railway. With Lowthians two brothers John and Tom, Bell Brothers owned collieries, quarries, and iron ore mines; factories and foundries whose furnaces, burning twenty-four hours a day, regularly reddened the night skies. His company and its associates employed more than forty-seven thousand men, and the family boast was that they would make anything “from a needle to a ship.” Besides the first iron and steel works in Newcastle, and the second at Port Clarence in Middlesbrough, he set up a chemical plant for the countrys first manufacture of aluminiumuntil then, a metal as valuable as gold. On the factorys opening day, he was driven in his carriage through the streets of Newcastle in an aluminium top hat, which he doffed to the crowd. He was the first British ironmaster to own a machine for making steel rope. Lowthian wrote several scientific books, but his most remarkable was a comprehensive and logical assessment of Britains prospects for competing with the world in steel production. He invested heavily in research into the process of steel-making, and was determined to push Britain into developing new technological industries. In the hope that all of British industry would follow his example, he advocated government support for scientific research and technical development. But in this, after a lifetimes work, he failed. As he had forecast, other countriesand particularly Germany with its Krupps armaments and Thyssen steelgrew in technical competence and productivity, outstripping Britain and building the wealth and power they were to wield in the First World War. A formidable giant of a man, a paterfamilias who would have almost sixty grandchildrenthe number is disputedLowthian and his wife, Margaret Pattinson, set a pattern for the Bells of comfortable rather than lavish lifestyle. Considering the huge scale of his enterprises, and his position as the Bill Gates of his day, he did not live extravagantly. This may have had something to do with Margarets influence: she came from a family of shopkeepers and scientists. His first house, Washington New Hallfour miles south of Newcastle upon Tyne, a stones throw from the home of the ancestors of George Washingtonwas not quite a mansion, and the house he built at the zenith of his power, Rounton Grange, was not quite a stately home. He toyed with Gothic, but settled for William Morriss humbler Arts and Crafts style, with its emphasis on traditional artisan skills as a panacea for the ravages wreaked by the Industrial Revolution. This would remain the characteristic style of the Bells private houses and public buildings. Unlike many heirs to great fortunes, Lowthians elder son Hugh, Gertrudes father, also lived modestly for a captain of industry. His own first house, Red Barns, at the fishing village of Redcar on the Yorkshire coast, a short train journey from Clarence, reflected this. After Lowthians death, the house he owned in London was sold, the money presumably divided between Hugh and his siblingsCharles, Ada, Maisie, and Florence. Lowthian was admired rather than loved, and appears to have been dictatorial and harsh towards his family. Gertrude and her sisters and brothers addressed him as “Pater.” An illustrated family alphabet they drew up for Christmas at Rounton in 1877, when Gertrude was nine, reflects the feelings of the children towards their abrasive grandfather. A for us All come to spend Christmas week B for our Breathless endeavours to speak C is the Crushing Contemptuous Pater . . . Elsa, Gertrudes younger half-sister, has added: “Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell” in pencil, lest it be thought that this description referred to the gentler and kindlier Hugh. A family story suggests the awe with which “Pater” was regarded by the Bells. Lowthian forbade anyone to use his horses. When one of his granddaughters fainted one evening at dinner from a riding inj