Gertrude Bell Read online

  On the couple’s return from their honeymoon, both children would have been washed and brushed and be waiting on the Bell platform to greet them. The staff would have been lined up behind them, ready to curtsy or bow. Florence, hoping to make a firm bond with them from the start, had intended, as soon as she arrived, to ask Gertrude and Maurice to show her into every corner of the house, from cellar to attic. However, to her dismay they had been joined at Middlesbrough by Hugh’s brother, Charles, who, with the kindest of intentions but no sensitivity at all, accompanied them to Red Barns. Hugh, equally unromantic, went straight to his office on the ground floor and started to go through his papers. Abandoned with Charles in the drawing-room, and passionately wanting him to go, Florence made distracted conversation while her new brother-in-law sat solidly in an armchair, also stuck for something to say.

  A contented Ada departed for London, and a new life began for eight-year-old Gertrude and five-year-old Maurice. Since children of that age do not naturally assume that their parents have a life independent of their own, they must have been shocked to hear that their father had married Florence. Talking about their new stepmother later, it was Maurice’s guess that she was eighty, but his sister thought that she might be quite a bit younger. Perhaps, she suggested, Florence was sixty. Poor Florence was actually twenty-four, eight years younger than Hugh.

  And so came into Gertrude’s life the good-hearted woman who would influence and form her more than any other, sometimes in opposition but chiefly in fundamental and positive ways. Florence had many talents. She had a keen appreciation of music and literature; she wrote books, essays, and plays; she was able to get on with all kinds of people; and she was deeply interested in sociology and the education of children. Everything she did remained within the limits of the roles she considered the most important for a woman, those of wife and mother. She gave herself unstintingly to her family while achieving a body of work in the community that would earn her public recognition, and eventually make her a Dame of the British Empire. The drawing-room dramas and comedies she liked to write were initially for the children to perform at Christmas and other family gatherings. In time, through the intervention of theatrical friends, she would have three plays put on in the West End. Characteristically, she chose to remain anonymous.

  Florence was nonplussed at first by northern manners. As soon as she met her neighbours, she began to institute an “at home” on Tuesdays, when she hoped couples would drop in for light refreshments (nonalcoholic). She was mystified to discover that Yorkshiremen did not accompany their wives on this sort of occasion. Her biographer Kirsten Wang writes that when one lady turned up at the Bells’ with her husband she disconcerted Florence by whispering: “I managed to bring Mr. T with me. I had such a work to make him come!” Apparently believing there was safety in numbers, the women would arrive together, then seat themselves as far apart as possible, after which a silence would fall. A desperate Florence, offering them chairs closer to the fire, would meet with the response: “Thank you, I am very well where I am.” In one of her books Florence writes of her heroine, a teacher who had newly come north: “The girl was ill at ease with the downright Yorkshire women who surrounded her . . . In that class of life when people have nothing to say they say nothing; their rough blunt manner, when they did speak, alarmed her still more. Nevertheless, the women after their fashion, were not unkind to her.” The new Mrs. Bell persevered, and before long her “entertainments” were obligatory events in the life of the town.

  But Florence was far more interested in cementing her relationship with Hugh’s children. The eight-year-old observed her in speculative fashion. This stranger who had burst into their family life had something about her that the child would not have recognized: a Parisian polish in both her manner and her dress. Although Florence was essentially serious and inclined to the moralistic, she never criticized an individual’s interest in her appearance or derided a love of clothes as frivolous. Her carefully considered opinions on this and other subjects were often expressed obliquely. She was an intensely private person and preferred to give her views in the form of stories or essays. In one, she wrote of the heroine:

  Ursula had what the French call “genre” . . . The nearest English equivalent to the expression is “style,” but that . . . suggests being dashing and assertive; “genre” is a grace inherent in the wearer, and does not depend upon clothes, but upon the way they are put on. And the reason there is no word for it in English, is that the thing is so rarely found that it is unnecessary to have a term on purpose.

  From Florence’s example, Gertrude, in turn, would acquire genre, so that people meeting her for the first time would comment on her “Mayfair manners and Paris frocks.” But Florence never followed fashion. She continued to wear Edwardian clothes all her life because she felt they suited her, even in the 1920s when every other woman was in a short skirt. Her granddaughter remembers being with Florence when she slipped and fell one day on a London pavement. The child was amazed to see that under Florence’s skirts was a pair of normal legs. Tending to primness, Florence wore grey silk gloves most of the time, indoors and outdoors, and even to play the piano.

  Gertrude was growing up fast, a wilful child used to competing with her aunt Ada, her governess, her brother, and the numerous household staff for her father’s attention. Florence could so easily have made an enemy of the child. On the contrary, she was an affectionate step-parent, always gentle, encouraging, and sympathetic. She was attentive to both children, inquisitive and humorous. Lively herself, she liked them to be similarly busy: when they were not doing something active, she liked them to be reading and not “loafing around.” She would always have a story or two ready to read aloud to the youngest. Maurice, who was rather deaf, cannot have had any memory of his own mother, but took to Florence immediately.

  Gertrude was divided in her opinion of her new stepmother, whom she was encouraged to address as “Mother.” Her father would undoubtedly have done his best to encourage her to make Florence feel welcome, and to do whatever she was asked, but the child must have smarted at the introduction into their close relationship of a woman that she must have seen initially as an interloper. Hugh and Gertrude’s bond was extraordinary. They were all-in-all to each other, and would always remain so, even when living on other sides of the world. As Florence was to write, “The abiding influence in Gertrude’s life from the time she was a little child was her relation to her father. Her devotion to him, her whole-hearted admiration, the close and satisfying companionship between them, their deep mutual affection—these were to both the very foundation of existence until the day she died.” Florence’s words about Gertrude also reveal the woman’s noble and generous instincts: she never gave way to jealousy, never tried to divide the devoted father and daughter.

  The artist Sir Edward Poynter, RA, painted a double portrait in 1876. The subject is not, as might be expected, a wedding portrait of Hugh and Florence, but the eight-year-old Gertrude, red curls falling onto the shoulders of her lace-trimmed pinafore, being ushered forward by a proudly smiling Hugh. Having had his first wife, Mary, painted at their marriage, Hugh may well have had the idea of commissioning a portrait of Florence when she became his second wife. It would have been typical of the thoughtful Florence to suggest the change of subject.

  Whether Gertrude would have appreciated this tactful gesture is another question. Florence was too kind and discreet to betray the fact that she was having a difficult time with her stepdaughter, but there are plenty of clues that this was in fact the case. Angela, a play she published in 1926—significantly, perhaps, after Gertrude’s death—tells the story of the second marriage of a Yorkshire industrialist in which his new wife tries to cope with the exceptionally strong bond already formed between father and motherless daughter.

  “Gertrude was a child of spirit and initiative,” wrote Florence in her introduction to The Letters of Gertrude Bell. Sometimes this spirit and initiative were too much for her: />
  Full of enterprise, [Gertrude] used to lead her little brother, whose tender years were ill equipped for so much enterprise, into the most perilous adventures, such as commanding him, to his terror, to follow her example in jumping from the top of the garden wall nine feet high to the ground. She used to alight on her feet, he very seldom did.

  On one occasion, a crash and an ominous tinkling brought Florence running from the drawing-room to the greenhouse. Gertrude had led Maurice on a climbing expedition along the ridge of the roof. She had made her way deftly and rapidly along while her little brother, sick with fear, had stumbled after her. Gertrude had clambered down safely, but Maurice had put his boot through the roof and followed it to the ground, landing in the broken glass. On another occasion, she played the garden hose down the laundry chimney and put the fire out. When Florence on this occasion lost her temper, Gertrude and Maurice collected all the hats from the hall and threw them at their stepmother. Gertrude stopped only when one of Florence’s hats found its way into the fire. “Even as a child, Gertrude took a great interest in clothes,” one of the family told me.

  For most of her eight years, Gertrude had been used to bossing the servants and running rings around her governess. She bitterly resented discipline, and liked to goad people to distraction. Miss Ogle had departed in dudgeon, but Florence hoped for better from Miss Klug. This German lady stayed much longer, but Florence was periodically irked by having to placate the new governess over Gertrude’s misdeeds.

  The house where Mrs. Bell was establishing her new domain was a raw brick Arts and Crafts building, an early and rather confused Philip Webb experiment with the local vernacular. Webb had designed William Morris’s own Red House, and he copied many elements into this second commission, Red Barns. Morris had decorated the interior, and his charming botanical wallpapers were used throughout. The house was solid and small in comparison with the elegant homes of Florence’s youth, but it would expand as the family expanded. There was a porch giving onto Kirkleathan Street, which led to a large square of terraced Georgian houses around a bleak green. It was a short walk from Red Barns to Redcar’s long beach, stretching from Coatham southward to the Saltburn cliffs. Around its featureless crescent of sand, where the clinker-built fishing boats were beached at low tide, there were striped bathing huts in the summer, and donkeys for children’s rides. The countryside around was flat, and not especially pretty. But Florence had always thought that children should be brought up in the countryside, and there was no doubt that Gertrude and Maurice loved the place.

  Given a constant succession of ponies, the children virtually grew up on horseback. Gertrude’s fearless exploits often led, inevitably, to Maurice’s coming home covered in bruises from trying to follow his sister’s lead. Among her contemporaries, she became known as the most courageous of riders, and her letters to aunts and cousins were full of boasts about her prowess. “My poney behaved like a brute, kicking all the time. If she does that with mother, I am afraid mother will come strait off,” she wrote to her cousin Horace.

  Hacking about, galloping along the beach, or out hunting, girls rode side-saddle in the appropriate habit, consisting of a black jacket and buttoned apron skirt over breeches. “Yesterday I rode like a circus boy,” wrote Gertrude, meaning that she had that day ridden astride. The Bell children would trot along the sands under the supervision of the stableboy, the nurse, or the governess. If accompanied by the anxious Miss Klug, once out of sight of the house Gertrude would kick her pony into action and gallop off into the distance, leaving the governess to run hopelessly after her, calling her name. After taking the children for a beach walk one day, Miss Klug returned alone and burst into Florence’s literary reverie in floods of tears. When she had told them to come back to the house for tea, she reported, they had run away and hidden among the fishing boats, from which she had been trying to chivvy them for an exhausting and fruitless thirty minutes.

  Domineering and wilful, Gertrude was always demanding attention and expecting her father to spend his every domestic moment entertaining her. Hugh, preoccupied at the works, was often at home for only one day a week. Florence, naturally, wanted some time alone with her husband, and her Victorian insistence on domestic order and routine, though hardly onerous, was bound to interfere with the children’s freedom. Gertrude found that she could not be sure of bending the will of her stepmother as she could her father’s. The child’s way of counter-manding Florence’s dictates was to wait until her father came home, and then try to cajole him to her defence.

  It was not long before Florence’s own children were born—Hugo in 1878, Elsa in 1879, and Molly two years later. A two-storey wing was added at Red Barns, with bedrooms, bathroom, and schoolroom, as well as a stable block. Already an intrepid tree climber, Gertrude thought scaffolding a brilliant addition to the house. Once, when she used it as a climbing frame, Florence, spotting her from a window, came dashing into the garden and ordered her to come down at once. Gertrude chose not to hear, and so Florence ran for Hugh and sent him up after her. She returned to the house to watch from the window and was horrified to see her husband climbing a ladder to the upper floor to join his daughter—with a small child under each arm.

  Hugh was a wonderful father and not too fastidious about the children hurting themselves. As Elsa was to remember late in life, he would accompany them on Sunday scrambles among the sandhills and “suddenly crook his walking stick round our ankles so that we should fall off the top of a precipice.” She remembered him “running along the hard sand with a child in each hand, and then clapping us together in front.” To Gertrude’s questions he would provide ample answers to which she would attend closely. In this she was different from her siblings. If any of them should idly muse, “I wonder what makes the tide come up” or “What is bi-metallism?” they would immediately shout, “Don’t tell me!” Hugh would laugh and say, “You naughty children!”

  Life had gradually got better for Hugh, and there came a moment when he realized that he had a happy home again, that it had been no mistake to ask Florence to marry him. A revealing letter of Florence’s to Molly tells of the occasion early in her life at Red Barns when she and Hugh reached the turning point.

  I remember as if it were yesterday the coming at Redcar, when we were about your ages—when your father could have got in [to Parliament] with almost a walkover at Middlesbrough and was frantically anxious to do it and go in for politics, for you know how much he cares and always has cared. That was all his head was in. His father (this is a very private letter!!) was against it and quite without sympathy in it—as always he was, and trade wasn’t good, and we walked up and down the gravel path talking it over and finally decided to give it all up and do nothing but Middlesbrough. You know how he then threw himself into that. But it was . . . a lifelong renunciation and a lifelong regret and we knew it was at the time. And then he felt afterwards what it would have been to him if he had to do it alone—and what a joy it was to care so much and be so close to each other. What a huge difference it makes in the whole aspect of life to be married—that there is some one who cares as much for the thing that happens to one as one does oneself!

  As far as Gertrude was concerned, life at Red Barns was perfect, and she too came to realize that Florence’s arrival had only improved their family life. The children were outdoors all summer, and had their own garden plots. Gertrude was finding that she loved flowers and had a natural skill with plants. In an early diary entry, in careful italic script, she writes: “We now have out some yellow crocus and primroses snodrops and primroses.”

  Spelling, music—of which Florence was so fond—and cooking were three fields in which she had no interest and therefore did not excel, in spite of her stepmother’s efforts. On the other hand, Gertrude’s nose was never out of a book. She would read anything she could get hold of: The Days of Bruce by Aguilar was a favourite, as was Green’s History of the English People, which she perused every day before breakfast. “I am reading a
very nice book called The Tower of London . . . all full of murders and tortures.”

  When Florence was mysteriously “unwell”—in other words, pregnant—Gertrude and Maurice were sent off to stay with large groups of cousins, to a gentler southern seaside or to Scotland, where they picnicked and learnt to climb rocks and to fish.

  My dear Mamy,

  We are having such fun here. Yesterday we caught an alive eel. Every morning we go to the rocks in our wading suits, our game is to jump off the rocks into the pool, we call it taking headers, it is such fun. Give my love to Papa.

  From your loving child, Gertrude

  Her favourite companion was Horace Marshall, her first cousin and the son of her mother Mary Shield’s sister, Mrs. Thomas Marshall. Then there were the Lascelles boys and their sister Florence, called after her stepmother, some years younger than Gertrude but always one of her favourite friends. Gertrude used her pocket money to buy birds’ eggs for her collection, competing with Horace—“5 Jackdaws, 2 Golden Crested Wrens, l Greenfinch, 2 Brown Linnet,” she wrote in her diary—or to buy as many pet animals or birds as Florence would allow. In the garden shed lived the pet raven, Jumbo, to be kept for ever out of the way of the excitable cat they called “the Shah.” When, in the course of time, these died, Gertrude would assuage her grief by laying on lavish funerals, complete with cortège of family and staff, cardboard coffins, crosses, and flowers.

  Beyond the Red Barns garden and the railway track was a large enclosed private park (now turned into a public garden) in which the children could ride their ponies and play on their own, almost within view of the house. Laid out around a pond were pathways through the trees where they could ride, or walk on stilts, until the gong rang out for midday “dinner,” or “teatime” (their last meal before bed). Sometimes on a Sunday, Hugh would take the two oldest children out into the country around Redcar or along the beach, all of them on horseback, with a picnic tea packed by Florence. Gertrude would lay out the sandwiches on a checked blanket, and play hostess to Hugh and Maurice.