Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell

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11 minutes ago, michaeldr said:

Agreed

There is a quote from Sykes on Bell which qualifies as misogyny

 

     Complicated personal lives and sexual ambiguities seem a commonplace for the Britons in the Middle East of the Great War era. Goodness only knows what the locals made of it all.  The photograph of Bell with WSC  and co. near the Pyramids says it all-  Baking hot and still wearing a fur collared coat with some sort of dead mammal round the shoulders:

    

 

I suspect the locals would regard the Noel Coward song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" as a statement of fact rather than a musical whimsy.

[michaeldr]

As David mentioned early on here, there is a recognised table of equivalents for the ranks of the Civil and Armed Services. In his article Rory Stewart says that Gertrude Bell served in Iraq in a position with the equivalence to the rank of Major. That being so, then a CBE is very good indeed, and may have induced someone in the 1920s to say, 'enough'.

 

The honours system was and is to a large extent governed by the class system, of which it forms an integral part. For a near identical action on the 1917 battlefield, a ranker may have got the MM, while an officer was awarded an MC. At that time there was no pretence of democracy or a level playing field.

 

Gertrude Bell's name is on the 1920 white paper “Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia” despite the document frankly stating that HM's Government had asked the Acting Civil Commissioner for it: https://archive.org/details/reviewofciviladm00iraqrich/page/n2/mode/1up

But then the imperial civil service did not lack ambitious, single minded men, ever ready to use the brains of others for their own advancement. (Or 'Other Bu**ers' Efforts' as cited earlier in this thread.) Perhaps her name is on the paper so that someone else could hedge his bets; just in case the ideas did not get off the ground or something? Nevertheless, it is largely because of her authorship of this paper that today she is often considered to have been the midwife of Iraq.

 

So, despite her best efforts on behalf of the empire, she gained no further advancement in the British honours system, while others around her gained multiple knighthoods.

 

Many years before, another former civil servant wrote that “rank is but the guinea stamp” and his poem also includes the lines:

His ribband, star, an' a' that:

The man o' independent mind

He looks an' laughs at a' that.

 

And where are they now? Sykes, if he is remembered at all, may be recalled as one half of a pact with a M. Picot. And Cox? … … Who? These men and those like them, where are their numerous biographies? Where are the movies based on their lives? Where are they studied for their works on architecture, archaeology, or their translations of classic writings? Where is their photographic collection on display, and where are the libraries which treasure their diaries, numerous letters and correspondence. Where is the mountain which is named after them?

Edited 29 December , 2020 by michaeldr

[Guest]

35 minutes ago, michaeldr said:

And where are they now? Sykes, if he is remembered at all, may be recalled as one half of a pact with a M. Picot. And Cox? … … Who? These men and those like them, where are their numerous biographies? Where are the movies based on their lives? Where are they studied for their works on architecture, archaeology, or their translations of classic writings? Where is their photographic collection on display, and where are the libraries which treasure their diaries, numerous letters and correspondence.

 

    As Mr K  said in "Recessional"-Lo All Our Pomp of  Yesterday is but one with Nineveh and Tyre".  Ironic to note that Nineveh is in the modern creation of "Iraq"

    "Empire" is out of fashion- its proponents and administrators are long forgotten.  Gertrude Bell appeals to the feminist lobby and "wummuns history" (No bad thing)-  Her career seems exactly suited to a film with Emma Thompson in the lead role,rather than the "Queen of the Desert" stuff.  There have been Britons involved in virtually every nationalist movement of anybody else but all long gone- As you say, could we expect a film about Sir William Wedderburn and the Indian National Congress, Amirante Brown/Bernardo O'Higgins (admittedly Irish) or Frank Abney Hastings in Greece?  

    Its seems -again-ironic that the price of historical "fame"-regardless of activities or achievements may be measured solely in terms of the monetary value of current film rights.

[michaeldr]

Gertrude Bell appeals to the feminist lobby

 

I'm not at all sure about that, but then again, my gender suggests that I am probably not best placed to judge.

What I can say is that I suspect that Gertrude Bell poses problems for feminists. Earlier in this thread I quoted from Hogarth's obituary of her. That version was incomplete; the whole of his sentence is

“Not given to any sort of self-advertisement, she escaped, thanks to a lifelong indifference to what are called Feminist Movements, that advertisement by others which some distinguished members of her sex have suffered.”

Bell was a founder member of the northern branch of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League

 

On 29/12/2020 at 13:23, michaeldr said:

Where is the mountain which is named after them?

see https://www.myswissalps.ch/poi/468

[Guest]

1 minute ago, michaeldr said:

Bell was a founder member of the northern branch of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League

 

      Very much so. The fly in the ointment is that the feminist or sexual equality "heroes" of today's movements may not necessarily have been attuned to the same set of views themselves. For "equality", bashing ahead in a "man's" world, then GB is of interest. She was certainly very much a fish out of water. Thus, her work in a male dominated Arab world and a male dominated British "Establishment" put her up as a feminist icon-even if she eschewed such terms (not that they were fully worked through to levels of today's intellectual outlook.)

   A further feature-of which GB seems a good example- is that the advancement of women in society and/or economy did not always run hand in hand with the suffrage movement. I suspect that Bell commanded a strong presence in a male dominated world because of her family background of privilege and wealth. And this coloured her views re. suffrage rather than any formal ideology of feminism or anti-feminism. When all is said and done, IF GB had been male, then that person's achievements would still have been remarkable. So, we have a remarkable person-whose  gender merely adds another layer of complexity to the story.