Gertrude Bell Read online

  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, Gertrude’s 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 injury (a broken collarbone), everyone conspired to hide the truth: she had borrowed one of his horses and gone hunting with the gentry. The children’s grandmother Margaret could be as scathing as Lowthian. A teatime visitor once said to her hostess: “Your scones are lovely.” “So I see,” retorted the old lady. “Your hand has not been out of the dish since you arrived.”

  Some previously unknown stories about Lowthian emerged recently from papers found in one of the Bell houses, Mount Grace Priory, the ruined medieval abbey where Gertrude’s father and stepmother ended their days. English Heritage was renovating the house before opening it to the public when they found the papers hidden under the floorboards. Among them is a reference to a tragic event at Washington New Hall, where “in 1872 a seven-year-old sweep was suffocated in the Hall chimney.” If the little boy met his end in Lowthian’s chimney in 1872, the ironmaster had comprehensively broken the law. Parliament had forbidden the use of children as chimney-sweeps a full twenty-six years earlier. Sir Isaac may have known nothing about the presence of the chimney-sweep until it was too late; however, whether because he was deeply upset or because he wanted to escape a damaging association, he moved into the newly built Rounton Grange as soon as possible, and let Washington New Hall stand empty and unsold. Nineteen years later, he gave it away as a home for waifs and strays, on condition it was renamed “Dame Margaret’s Hall”; today, it is divided into pleasant apartments. Not perhaps unconnected with this story is the fact that many years later Hugh Bell successfully lobbied for a parliamentary bill to protect children from dangerous work. (In the 1860s, the Earl of Shaftesbury reported that children of four and five were still working in certain factories from six in the morning until ten at night.)

  The papers found under the boards also contained the sentence, “On one winter’s night [Sir Isaac] came out of the Hall to find his coachman frozen stiff on the box-seat of his carriage.” The facts remain mysterious. The unfortunate coachman may have had a heart attack rather than dying of exposure, and yet it emerges clearly that consideration for others was not, perhaps, Lowthian’s principal quality.

  The author of these papers, which contain many confirmable facts about Lowthian’s life and work, may have been Miss K. E. M. Cooper Abbs, a Bell relation who was the last tenant to live at Mount Grace. If she was moved to record Lowthian’s life, it may be because she was incensed that, whether by accident or intent, so many family papers and archives were burnt by members of the family after his death. There is to this day no biography of the man who was as famous in his day as Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

  A more lovable, more charming man, Gertrude’s father, Sir Hugh, led the Bell industries and inherited a vast fortune. Like his father, he was educated in Edinburgh, at the Sorbonne, and in Germany, where he studied mathematics and organic chemistry. He began work at eighteen at the Bell Brothers Ironworks in Newcastle, became director of the growing Port Clarence steelworks that dominated the grimy roofscape of Middlesbrough, and eventually ran the entire business and all its ramifications. He dug the ironstone from the Cleveland hills, worked the coal from Durham, brought the limestone from the backbone of England, lived on the Tees, and was a director of the North Eastern Railway, which brought the raw material to the steel foundry. His public works were second to none, especially after his second marriage to Florence Olliffe. He built schools and founded libraries, constructed meeting houses and workers’ terraces, made a community centre for staff and labourers at Rounton and paid for a holiday home for worthy families needing a country break from life at the works. He also constructed the famous Transporter Bridge, which is still used to ferry workers and tourists quickly and cheaply over the River Tees. In 1906 he became Lord Lieutenant of the North Riding, welcoming royalty and other VIPs whenever they ventured into the windswept Yorkshire landscape, and was three times elected Mayor of Middlesbrough.

  In supplying the Empire, the Bells brought a global view to British industry. Sir Hugh was an accomplished public speaker, delivering persuasive messages on such subjects as free trade, which he passionately endorsed, and home rule for the Irish, which he passionately opposed. You can hear in his published speeches the vigour and humour with which he captivated audiences of all types and classes. In his words:

  Free Trade is like the quality of mercy: it is twice blessed, for it blesses him that gives and him that takes, and I for one will do nothing to place any restriction upon it. The Free market is the greatest safeguard we have against the tyranny of wealth. I look forward with dread to the accumulation of great fortunes in single hands . . . There are millions of persons in this country depending upon weekly wages, upon work which may be discontinued at the end of any week. It is with them I am concerned, and about them that I am perturbed, and not about the class to which I belong.

  He welcomed the rise of the new trade unions, while warning that the writings of Karl Marx could lead socialists into revolutionary movements that would destroy British industry and employment in the competitive world that he endorsed.

  When Gertrude was born, Queen Victoria had been on the throne for thirty years. She was driven by Prince Albert’s relentless determination to replace the louche self-indulgence of Georgian Britain with Victorian industry and propriety. Britain, and particularly England, led the world in technical superiority—as evinced in that paeon to the Empire, the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851. The British army, able to call on troops from around the world, represented what was probably the greatest military power of all time; the British navy held control of the oceans and the trade across them, and kept the peace. If those other empires, the Russian and the Ottoman, were still in a state of feudal serfdom and of institutionalized corruption at every level, the British example, inspired by Victoria and Albert, brought at least a concern for moderation, philanthropy, and honest dealing. By the mid-nineteenth century, the concept of Empire was evolving from one of commercial exploitation to one capable of taking a pride in honest and benevolent government. Commercially aggressive but socially responsible, the Bells personified the new mood, and they enjoyed all the confidence of the right people in the right place at the right time.

  Hugh married Mary Shield when he was twenty-three, choosing a local girl who was the daughter of a prominent merchant of Newcastle upon Tyne. They were married on the Scottish island of Bute on the Clyde, where the Shields kept a holiday home. Their first child, Gertrude, was born in 1868 at Washington New Hall, the home of Hugh’s father. Family life centred on this larger-than-life industrialist who had made the Bells the sixth-richest family in England. He could not have been easy to live with, nor the house peaceful, and there are many intimations of his bombastic temperament and caustic wit. Although Hugh, his elder son, had an inclination for the political life, he had had it made brutally clear to him that his future lay in Middlesbrough, with the fastest-growing part of the iron business. Lowthian, based at the original works in Newcastle, would descend on the new Port Clarence steelworks at irregular intervals, to scrutinize and doubtless criticize every aspect of Hugh’s work.

  It would have been with great relief that Hugh and Mary moved with
their two-year-old daughter out of Washington New Hall for a quieter domestic life of their own. It was not to last long. Beautiful but delicate, Mary survived only three weeks after the birth of their second child, Maurice, in 1871.

  Hugh became for a time a poignant figure. When he had built Red Barns at Redcar, he had imagined a healthy and happy seaside life there for his family. Now, his sister Ada moved in to run the house and look after the children. Hugh was working six days a week at Clarence, and now had to share his Sundays with his sister, a wet-nurse, and some half-dozen servants. His moments of freedom were spent on the beach or in the countryside hand-in-hand with his lively little daughter—Maurice being as yet too young for walks—talking to her and searching her candid face for a likeness to her mother. From these early days the closest of loving father-daughter relationships developed between them, one that would last all her life.

  Hugh’s situation was appealing. A charming young widower whose wife’s death had left him with two motherless children, he would have been a catch even without being heir to a large fortune. His warm sense of humour and his mischievous yet kindly smile were particularly engaging. Nevertheless, daughters of the aristocracy would have regarded marriage to a Bell as a step down; and Hugh, in any case, was no snob. Maisie had overcome the resistance of Lady Stanley of Alderley in marrying her witty son Lyulph, later Lord Sheffield. This formidable woman was known for her habit of turning away from a conversation on one side to loudly remark to her neighbour on the other that “Fools are so fatiguin.” She was the grandmother of Bertrand Russell, and had been one of the founders of Girton College, Cambridge. For allowing the marriage of her son to Maisie, Lady Stanley considered herself very broadminded: the Bells, after all, were “trade.” “As Sir Hugh was a multi-millionaire, I was not very impressed,” Bertrand Russell was to say later.

  Ada, a pretty and gregarious young woman, missed London and doubtless resented being forced into the unappetizing role of spinster aunt, so well known to unmarried Victorian women. It was not long before she and her sister Maisie had someone in mind for Hugh, and they hatched a plot to bring the two together.

  They had met Florence Eveleen Eleanore Olliffe, twenty-two years old, through their shared interest in music. She was studying at the Royal College and sang in the Bach Choir. She had moved to London in 1870 from Paris, where her father, the distinguished and agreeable Sir Joseph Olliffe, had been physician to the British Embassy. Her Easter holidays had been spent at the Surrey house of her grandfather Sir William Cubitt, MP, sometime Lord Mayor of London. At other times she would stay with her great-uncle Thomas,* at his Hampshire estate, Penton Lodge. Summer holidays had been spent at Trouville or Deauville, fashionable seaside resorts for wealthy Parisian families. When, at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War, her father had suddenly died, the family had had to leave France fast. Florence was nineteen when she said goodbye to Paris and went to live far less glamorously at 95 Sloane Street in London, in a narrow, dingy house, all dusty red velvet and heavy furniture, with a lingering smell of tomcat. English society of the time, once described as “a series of shut doors,” must have seemed a painful contrast with the brilliant cosmopolitan world she had just left.

  Florence was tall and slim with blue, rather hooded eyes, and dark hair. She was very sociable, and spoke English with a slight and charming French accent. Maisie saw to it that when Hugh went up to London, Florence was included in family parties, while Ada invited her once or twice to visit her at Red Barns. After these visits the six-year-old Gertrude found herself under pressure from her aunt to write fond letters to Florence, signing herself “Your affectionate little friend.”

  Ada and Maisie’s plan almost misfired. They tried too hard to throw the two together, and it did not take Florence long to guess what they were up to. She would never marry an Englishman, she declared, and she said it with increasing force over the two years during which Hugh failed to propose. Hugh’s reaction to his sisters’ pressure to remarry was to tell Ada that he would never do so, and to dig himself deeper and deeper into his work. Yet Florence’s description of her first sight of Hugh, framed in a tunnel of roses in Maisie’s garden, suggests her heart was immediately engaged. She saw him “looking beautiful, but very sad . . . with thick curly hair and a beard of a bright auburn colour.”

  Part of Hugh’s difficulty, as he grew more interested in Florence, was in imagining that a woman brought up in the most sophisticated milieu of the most beautiful city in the world could settle down near Middlesbrough. One biographer of Gertrude described her own impressions of the city at the same period, when for the first time she visited an aunt who lived there: “The district round Middlesbrough and Tees side to the sea was caked with grime . . . For twenty miles the air smelt of chemicals and ash and soot, as the crowded houses smelt of cabbage, cheese and cat. Basements . . . were covered with black, gluey mud whenever it rained.” The term “day-darkness” was coined to describe the smog of industry; and in particular, Middlesbrough and Cleveland were said by a contemporary to “succeed in almost excluding daylight from the district.”

  Redcar, a cobbled village raked by the storm-force sea winds of North Yorkshire and soon to develop into a small town, was the dormitory where many wealthy Middlesbrough industrialists were building their new family homes. (The big house next door to the Bells, for instance, belonged to an eminent metallurgist.) Here they raised their children away from the soot and polluted atmosphere, forming an elite milieu still lagging some way behind the society to which Florence had been used.

  Life here was likely to be a daunting prospect for a young woman used to an hôtel particulier in the rue Florentin, its elegant courtyard secreted away behind decorative eighteenth-century gates. Born in 1851, the tumultuous first year of the Second Empire under Napoleon III, Florence had taken her daily walk with her nurse in the Jardin des Tuileries, where she could ride in decorated carriages, bowl her hoop, or buy barley-sugar twists and honey gingerbread from the stalls with their striped and scalloped awnings. Just around the corner from their house was the Place de la Concorde with its “jewelled cascades springing and spurting hilariously.” Much later, she was to write: “What a privilege to be born in Paris. To know Paris first, to know it all the time, to grow up in one of the most beautiful parts of it, to take it all for granted, to belong to it, and have it belong to me. Isn’t that enough?” Despite civic upheavals, she had had a very happy childhood, settling contentedly at a little tutorial cours that provided an education somewhere between that of a personal governess and a small private school, without learning much more than good manners and music.

  The woman that Ada and Maisie had picked for Hugh was, in fact, an extraordinarily appropriate choice. The daughter of a physician, Florence was neither “trade” nor aristocracy, and she harboured a couple of passions that outweighed all the disadvantages of Middlesbrough: she adored children and domestic life. There was a dispossessed aspect to this recent immigrant, adrift in London and still homesick for Paris. She longed for the security of her own household, and had already formed dozens of opinions on the education of children and the right and wrong ways of running a home. Life could hold no greater excitement than the gift of her own domain, wherever that might be.

  Hugh finally succumbed to his sisters’ scheme, and to Florence, on the night of the private staging of an opera that she had written. Blue-beard was performed by friends and relations on 4 June 1876, at Lady Stanley’s house in Harley Street. Ada and Maisie were to sing, and the pianist Anton Rubinstein was to play. Hugh afterwards asked if he might take Florence home. Descending from the coach at the front door of 95 Sloane Street, he escorted Florence into the drawing-room. “Lady Olliffe,” he told her mother, “I have brought your daughter home—and I have come to ask if I may take her away again.” In answer to this graceful speech, Lady Olliffe burst into tears.

  On 10 August, after their quiet wedding in the small church in Sloane Street, they spent an urbane honeymoon in Washingto
n, DC, as guests of Florence’s much-loved sister Mary and her husband, Frank Lascelles, then a secretary at the British Embassy. Returning to London, they took the train north. At this first homecoming Florence was trembling with emotion at what was to her, and perhaps would be to any new bride and stepmother, a truly momentous occasion. As the heirs of the director of the North Eastern Railway, the Hugh Bells were transport royalty. At Middlesbrough the stationmaster doffed his hat and ushered them onto the train to Redcar. Many years later, Florence’s daughter Lady Richmond was to remember an occasion when she was seeing her father off from King’s Cross, and he had remained on the platform so that they could talk until the train left. The packed train failed to leave on time. Remarking on its lateness, they continued to talk until they were approached by a guard. “If you would like to finish your conversation, Sir Hugh,” he suggested, doffing his hat, “we will then be ready to depart.” The train to and from Redcar had a personal Bell stopping place on a tiny platform inside the Red Barns garden. Hugh, returning from the works, could simply step out of the train and cross the rose garden by the fountain to reach his own back door. Gertrude, who was always waiting there, would greet him joyfully. When she was small, he carried her to the house on his shoulders, then when she was a little older she would seize his case of papers and run alongside him, talking at the top of her voice.