Gertrude Bell - "The most powerful woman in the British Empire"
The conservative historian David Pryce-Jones says that “those who marched in European capitals to demonstrate against the war with Saddam Hussein were Gertrude Bell’s heirs, even if they have no idea who she might have been”. It is not a compliment coming from him. The quote is from his book, “The Treason of the Heart” which devotes several chapters to those English colonial arabists of the nineteenth and early twentieth Century, many of them influential at the highest echelons of the colonial establishment (TE Lawrence ("of Arabia") and others) who, he argues, hated their own country, romanticised the other in an absurd orientalist ideal, and did their best to mess up the serious business of the pursuit of Britain’s national interest in the Middle East.
“Letters from Baghdad”, a beautiful and deeply moving film of Gertrude Bell’s life - magnificent and adventurous, but ultimately desperately tragic - suggests a very different and much more nuanced view. One thing the film makes clear is that Pryce-Jones is unlikely to have been right even in the central barb, that she hated her own country : just before her death, Bell is weak, depressed and emaciated. She returns to the Yorkshire family home – Rounton – that she clearly loved and sees family to whom she is also deeply attached.
