July 14, 2018 • 19 mins
This classic revisits an episode from Sarah and Deblina, talking about Gertrude Bell, the first woman to graduate with a First in Modern History from Oxford. Instead of marrying young, she went to Persia. Inspired, she traveled across the Middle East on numerous exploratory treks. But would it last in a time of war?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, Happy Saturday. Your Trude Bell was born a
hundred and fifty years ago today, so this seemed like
a great time to revisit the two part episode on
her life and work from our podcast archive. These episodes
originally came out in November of featuring past hosts Sarah
and Deblina. Also, if you have not checked out our
new daily podcast This Day in History Class, today's episode
(00:25):
of that show is also about Gertrude Bell. You can
hear a much quicker look at her life over there
as well. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
(00:46):
the podcast. I have Deblaney Chalk re bording and I'm
Sarah down And if you listen to this podcast regularly,
you know we've covered our share of explorers and adventure travelers,
people like Freya Stark, who traveled into uncharted territory with
see meanly little regard for their own safety and bring
back useful info to enlighten those of us who are
(01:06):
less ambitious to say the least. Yeah, I haven't made
any desert tracks lately. You are, in particular very fond
of explorer stories, though I do really love explorer stories,
and um, it's interesting sometimes when you when you do
subjects who are kind of in the in the same
vein to see what they have in common with each other.
And for a Stark you just mentioned her, she actually
(01:28):
has a lot in common with the subject of today's podcast,
Who's Gertrude Bell, especially in terms of where they traveled specifically,
which was the Middle East, And you might find a
few other little parallels throughout their stories too. However, unlike Stark,
Bell's involvement in the areas she explored went far beyond
documenting them and publishing works about them. Bell also did
(01:51):
some archaeological work in there, but was a mountain climber too,
but she's best known for a loftier sort of thing.
Working with the British government, she got involved in Middle
East politics, pitched in on some spy work, and is
largely credited with the founding of modern Iraq. And it
said that at one time she was the most powerful
woman in the British Empire. So that really piqued our
(02:14):
curiosity and we wanted to find out how did this
well healed English gal otherwise expected to become a proper
Victorian lady get to go pretty much where no lady
had gone before and have the sort of influence that
none other had had. And so that's what we're going
to look into a little bit today, and a lot
of the answer seems to Lee and how she started out.
(02:36):
She was born Gertrude Margaret Loithan Bell on July fourteenth,
eighteen sixty eight, and a really well to do family.
According to an article in Smithsonian by Janet Walack, her
family friends included people like Henry James and John Singer Sargeant.
Her father, who was named Isaac Lothan Bell, was a
prominent industrialist and as such he had a lot of
(02:58):
important connection ends, and because of those connections, he was
able to get Gertrude into Oxford at a time when
not very many young women attended, and she excelled there.
In in eighteen eighty seven, she became the first woman
to graduate from there with the first in modern history,
which was the university's highest honor in modern history. Even
(03:19):
at that age, though she wasn't shy about voicing her opinions,
Walac writes that she shocked professors by challenging their ideas,
maybe because she was so opinionated and outspoken, though she
didn't have a lot of luck in the love department
around this time, around the time that she finished school,
which made her stand out from other women around her
(03:41):
age because most women married around this time. But because
of her outspokenness, as we said, because she was sort
of snobbish almost about her intelligence, she had a hard
time finding suitors. So at age twenty, she was sent
off to stay with an aunt and uncle in Romania.
Her uncle was a British ambassador there and it was
(04:01):
in the hopes that she would find a husband. I
guess the Oxford guys just couldn't handle Gertrude right. So
she didn't find any suitors in her time in Romania,
but she did realize that she just loved to travel,
and so in EO she arranged a visit to Tehran
in modern day ran. It was Persia at the time,
(04:21):
where her uncle, Frank Lassell was British minister, and it's
there that she got her very first glimpse of the desert,
and she just loved what she saw. This reminded me
a little bit of Louise Boyd getting her first glimpse
of ice. Each each explorer has their own passion. Right.
But according to an article by Carrie Ellis in History
(04:42):
Today and a piece about Belle and All Things Considered,
in her first letter home, she wrote, quote, Oh the
desert around Tehran, miles and miles of it, with nothing,
nothing growing, ringed in with bleak bear mountains, snow crowned
and furrowed with the deep courses of horrence. I never
knew what desert was till I came here. It is
(05:04):
a very wonderful thing to see. So I mean that
speaks clearly how enchanted she was by something so different
from what she was used to. Right, she was smitten
with this area of the world. But while she was
in Persia, she also became smitten with something else, a guy,
a young British diplomat named Henry Cadduggan. According to Walax article,
(05:26):
Bell described him as quote a very thin, agreeable, intelligent,
a great tennis player. I like him immensely, so he
apparently liked her too, and they spent a lot of
time together, exploring the desert, going on picnics, reading poetry.
But there was one problem about their relationship continuing any further,
(05:47):
and that was that Henry was very poor and again,
according to walax article, Bell's father refused to let them
get married at all. He didn't think that Goduggan earned
enough to support his daughter or in the manner in
which she'd become accustomed to um Plus, Henry had a
gambling habit, and so Bell went home to England to
(06:08):
try to convince her father in person that this was
the guy for her. But she was not successful, and
just a few months after she returned home, she got
worried from Persia that Kadugan had fallen into an icy
river while fishing and had died of pneumonia. And she
was just completely heartbroken uh and devastated to hear about this.
(06:30):
So Bell spent the next ten years or so in
England writing and including some writings about her experiences in Persia,
and she also traveled around Europe. She traveled to France,
Italy and Germany. And this is also around the time,
in the late eighteen nineties or so that she started
to earn her chops as a climber by climbing unexplored
peaks in the Alps. Walax article recounts one particularly heroine
(06:53):
experienced Bell had in the Alps, and which she and
her guides were trapped by an avalanche, a thunderstorm, and
blinding snow, anyone of which would have been enough to
deter me, but that that all sounds bad. They were
basically huddled, all roped together in a crack between some
rocks on a peak for more than a day, and
Bell later said that she thought, quote, it was on
(07:15):
the cards, we should not get down alive. But she
kept her cool and they did make it down. And
that's really something she was known for two as a climber.
Later one of her guides said that out of all
the amateur climbers that he had worked with, including males
as well as females, no one could rival Bell in
terms of quote, coolness, bravery, and judgment. And I mean
(07:37):
that seems like something that serves her well later in
her career too, not just on the mountains. Yeah, And
I just loved to picture her doing this, huddling in
between the crack and the rocks, braving out the storm,
right and even what you know, what she might have
looked like at the time, because there weren't any dedicated
climbing clothes for women at this time, at least when
(07:58):
she started out timing and Belle was doing her climbing
in a skirt. I mean, she wasn't wearing like decked
out an ari I gear or whatever that we would
expect today, obviously color tech, nothing like that. Yeah, a
skirt would make things considerably more difficult, it would seem.
But it didn't. It didn't stop her. I mean, none
of that released stopped her, and she decided that she
(08:20):
wanted to start racking up some climbing accomplishments to like
some real goals. She wanted to be the first person
to climb all the peaks of the angle Herner Range
in the Swiss Alps, and actually accomplished that goal in
nineteen o one. One of the mountains, Gertrudge Spitze was
named after her. But even with all the adventures that
(08:48):
Europe had to offer, Gertrude still longed for the desert.
She was drawn in particular to the mystery of the
Arabian Desert, and so around the turn of the century
she moved to Jerusalem to study Arabic and to gather
as much information as she could about the tribes that
were roaming around the desert. With her new know how,
she didn't waste any time in exploring. She rode from
(09:09):
Jerusalem to Jericho to Damascus, and according to Ellis's article,
one of her most notable early adventures involved dressing like
a Bedouin man and writing about hundred miles northeast of
Jerusalem in search of the Drews, which was a secretive,
militant Muslim sect that was at odds with the ruling
Ottoman Turks. And surprisingly she got along quite well with
(09:31):
the Drews when she found them. Ellis writes that the
territory the Drews were living in was at the time
uncharted by Westerners, but Bell managed to evade the Turkish authorities.
This part reminds me of Phray of Stark a little
bit a lot Um and finally get to the Bell
Drew's mountains, where she just charmed the Drew's king entirely.
(09:53):
They ate together, they talked together, and since um Bell
had become fluent in Arabic, this was something she it
really really do with ease. They even became friends, and
the king apparently asked someone later referring to her, have
you seen a queen traveling? So she made an impression yeah,
And it was apparently a good question to ask because
(10:14):
Bell did spend the next few years traveling around the
Middle East, studying Rome, the Roman and Byzantine ruins there,
and also studying the Drews and various Bedouin tribes more
in depth. She learned a lot about the Arabs and
about the Ottoman Empire on her journeys, and she took
copious notes while she was doing that. A lot of
her observations made it into her nineteen o seven book,
(10:35):
The Desert and the Zone. And it also seems that
she impressed more than just the Drews king. According to Walach,
the Arabs pronounced Bell quote a daughter of the Desert
and made her a quote honorary man. But in addition
to racking up these great titles and making all these friends,
she was really learning her future trade too. We mentioned
(10:58):
her studying the Roman in business in ruins, which is
significant because it's during these years that Bell started getting
more and more involved in archaeology. She studied under the
French archaeologist Solomon Reinick in the early nineteen hundreds, and
in March of nineteen o seven she went to Turkey
to work with William Ramsey on some excavations there, and
(11:20):
the work they did actually resulted in a joint publication
in nineteen o nine book called A thousand and One Churches, which,
according to Ellis, really solidified Bell's standing as a quote
serious archaeologist. So she's not a lady explorer anymore. She's
somebody who's out there doing real work with well respected
archaeologists and becoming well respected in her own right. In
(11:43):
January of nineteen o nine, Gertrude set out from Mesopotamia,
which included what is today Iraq, as well as Syria, Turkey,
and Iran. Her goal was to map out uncharted territory.
So walk outlines a few of the things that Bell
took along for the ride. And I just have to
mention this were explorers. Yeah. It says so much about
(12:05):
the time, it really doesn't, and so much about what's
important to the person. I think so. So we'll just
quote this from from Walac's work. She says, her trunks
packed with pistols, her saddle bags crammed with books. She
was accompanied by an entourage of male servants, baggage animals, horses,
and a plethora of equipment cameras, tents, a folding bed,
(12:27):
and a canvas bath mosquito netting, rugs, provisions for a month, quinine,
camphor cigarettes, an entire set of wedgewood china, crystal and
silver for proper dining. And this reminded me so much
of the Champagne safari that was before you were a
co host, but before my time. It was a similar
(12:49):
packing list, bringing things that again I mean, she may
not have had the ri I gear for her climbing
and special high tech fabric for desert wear, but she
wasn't dining with like tin plates either, was she. So
with all of this equipment, with all of these luxuries prepared,
she set off on a journey that lasted about seven months,
(13:12):
and the land she traveled across was so brutally dry
that her party often had to stop and seek refuge
with local tribes and as their guests. Sometimes they would
eat things that maybe they weren't expecting to see on
their wedgewood china um, really bitter coffee out of the
cups if they had wedgewood comes into sheep's eyes and
(13:35):
their plates. Things that we're probably welcome if they were
looking for refuge in the in the desert, but also
real traveler stuff. In March, she came across an amazing
and as yet undocumented ruin a sixth century stone and
wood castle known to Arabs as uka deer. I hope
I'm saying that correctly. I'm not sure. Bell spent hours
(13:57):
and hours of painstakingly photographed thing measuring and sketching these ruins.
She even got down on the ground and her petticoat
to make sure that she was taking very precise measurements.
And she was taking this so seriously because since the
ruins hadn't been documented before, if she were the one
to come out with this discovery and have it so
documented and write about it first, it would be this huge,
(14:21):
big win for her, something that would establish her archaeological
reputation beyond a shadow of a doubt. She didn't exactly
rush off quite yet though, with her finding. She went
on to Babylon and wrote about Babylon saying it was
(14:42):
quote the most extraordinary place I've seldom felt the ancient
world comes so close. From there, she went on to Baghdad,
which was about five hundred miles from her starting point
just give you a sense of of how far she
roamed on this. On this trip, there she met the
nick Heab, which was the city's one of the most
(15:03):
important Islamic figures in the city, who rarely spoke to women,
and again just sort of like the King of the Drews.
She really charmed this guy. He ended up inviting her
to meet his family. So from Bagdad she went on
to Constantinople and that's where she got some really bad news.
She found that a French archaeologist had scooped her on
(15:24):
the Kadir find, and she was upset about this, but
because she had at least spent so much time documenting
it in the form of drawings, her name was at
least going to be associated with the discovery. The French
archaeologists had written about it first, but she had all
of this information, all these pictures to really back up
(15:45):
the find. Just eighteen months later, she went back to
the desert again. She wanted to visit a friend, David Hogarth,
who was working on an excavation in the ancient city
of Carchomish for the British Museum. When she got there, though,
Hogarth had left and as two assistants, two young British
archaeologists were waiting for her instead. They were Campbell Thompson
(16:06):
and a twenty three year old graduate student named Thomas
Edward Lawrence. And that name may sound kind of familiar
to you, and that's because it's the same Lawrence that
would later be known as Lawrence of Arabia. And these
guys were eager to impress Bell with the work they've done.
It started out rocky for them, though, according to Ellis,
Bell took a look at their excavations and immediately called
(16:28):
their methods quote prehistoric. She then proceeded to tell them
how a dig should be done, but they eventually won
her over with their conversation, in which they showed off
substantial local knowledge, something that always appealed to Bell, and
knowledge of architecture, among other things. She ended up calling
Lawrence quote an interesting boy. He is going to make
a traveler very on point. Gertrude just an interesting side
(16:53):
note because this group they sort of seemed like an
odd couple, don't there, or an odd group of three.
But apparently the locals who didn't know what to think
about a woman traveling alone like Gertrude Bell often did,
and knowing that Lawrence was a bachelor, originally thought that
Belle had arrived to be his bride, even though she
(17:16):
was at this point, something like twice his age. It
just seemed like the most logical solution to to explain
this party. Sure, why not? Also interesting to note about
this independent lady traveling alone, she had been active in
the anti suffrage movement back home in the early nineteen hundreds.
She was actually the honorary secretary of the Women's Anti
(17:36):
Suffrage League, according to Ellis, and apparently she believed that
she was the equal of any man, but didn't think
the same was true of all women anyway. We just
thought that was worth a mention for those who look
up to her as a feminist role model. It's not
totally black and white here. You can't expect her to
to be the perfect role model, I guess right, as
(17:59):
with any historical figure or figure of any kind. But
as we'll learn in the second part of this podcast,
there were others who also thought that Bell was a
singular kind of lady and allowed her to be part
of what was perhaps the ultimate all boys club right
the military at a time when it really mattered too.
Because in the next part of this podcast, we're about
to go to war World War One and talk about
(18:21):
Bell's political influence in the Middle East. The stuff that
she's probably best known for. There is a little bit
of romance in there too, though, because we haven't talked
about Gertrude's second notable love affair yet, and we'll also
talk a bit about how she made a lasting impression
on Iraqi culture. So all sorts of things to come
(18:42):
in our second part of this Gertrud Bell story. Thank
you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now, so here's our current contact information. We
(19:02):
are at History Podcasts at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Hey, everybody, Happy Saturday. Your Trude Bell was born a
hundred and fifty years ago today, so this seemed like
a great time to revisit the two part episode on
her life and work from our podcast archive. These episodes
originally came out in November of featuring past hosts Sarah
and Deblina. Also, if you have not checked out our
new daily podcast This Day in History Class, today's episode
(00:25):
of that show is also about Gertrude Bell. You can
hear a much quicker look at her life over there
as well. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
(00:46):
the podcast. I have Deblaney Chalk re bording and I'm
Sarah down And if you listen to this podcast regularly,
you know we've covered our share of explorers and adventure travelers,
people like Freya Stark, who traveled into uncharted territory with
see meanly little regard for their own safety and bring
back useful info to enlighten those of us who are
(01:06):
less ambitious to say the least. Yeah, I haven't made
any desert tracks lately. You are, in particular very fond
of explorer stories, though I do really love explorer stories,
and um, it's interesting sometimes when you when you do
subjects who are kind of in the in the same
vein to see what they have in common with each other.
And for a Stark you just mentioned her, she actually
(01:28):
has a lot in common with the subject of today's podcast,
Who's Gertrude Bell, especially in terms of where they traveled specifically,
which was the Middle East, And you might find a
few other little parallels throughout their stories too. However, unlike Stark,
Bell's involvement in the areas she explored went far beyond
documenting them and publishing works about them. Bell also did
(01:51):
some archaeological work in there, but was a mountain climber too,
but she's best known for a loftier sort of thing.
Working with the British government, she got involved in Middle
East politics, pitched in on some spy work, and is
largely credited with the founding of modern Iraq. And it
said that at one time she was the most powerful
woman in the British Empire. So that really piqued our
(02:14):
curiosity and we wanted to find out how did this
well healed English gal otherwise expected to become a proper
Victorian lady get to go pretty much where no lady
had gone before and have the sort of influence that
none other had had. And so that's what we're going
to look into a little bit today, and a lot
of the answer seems to Lee and how she started out.
(02:36):
She was born Gertrude Margaret Loithan Bell on July fourteenth,
eighteen sixty eight, and a really well to do family.
According to an article in Smithsonian by Janet Walack, her
family friends included people like Henry James and John Singer Sargeant.
Her father, who was named Isaac Lothan Bell, was a
prominent industrialist and as such he had a lot of
(02:58):
important connection ends, and because of those connections, he was
able to get Gertrude into Oxford at a time when
not very many young women attended, and she excelled there.
In in eighteen eighty seven, she became the first woman
to graduate from there with the first in modern history,
which was the university's highest honor in modern history. Even
(03:19):
at that age, though she wasn't shy about voicing her opinions,
Walac writes that she shocked professors by challenging their ideas,
maybe because she was so opinionated and outspoken, though she
didn't have a lot of luck in the love department
around this time, around the time that she finished school,
which made her stand out from other women around her
(03:41):
age because most women married around this time. But because
of her outspokenness, as we said, because she was sort
of snobbish almost about her intelligence, she had a hard
time finding suitors. So at age twenty, she was sent
off to stay with an aunt and uncle in Romania.
Her uncle was a British ambassador there and it was
(04:01):
in the hopes that she would find a husband. I
guess the Oxford guys just couldn't handle Gertrude right. So
she didn't find any suitors in her time in Romania,
but she did realize that she just loved to travel,
and so in EO she arranged a visit to Tehran
in modern day ran. It was Persia at the time,
(04:21):
where her uncle, Frank Lassell was British minister, and it's
there that she got her very first glimpse of the desert,
and she just loved what she saw. This reminded me
a little bit of Louise Boyd getting her first glimpse
of ice. Each each explorer has their own passion. Right.
But according to an article by Carrie Ellis in History
(04:42):
Today and a piece about Belle and All Things Considered,
in her first letter home, she wrote, quote, Oh the
desert around Tehran, miles and miles of it, with nothing,
nothing growing, ringed in with bleak bear mountains, snow crowned
and furrowed with the deep courses of horrence. I never
knew what desert was till I came here. It is
(05:04):
a very wonderful thing to see. So I mean that
speaks clearly how enchanted she was by something so different
from what she was used to. Right, she was smitten
with this area of the world. But while she was
in Persia, she also became smitten with something else, a guy,
a young British diplomat named Henry Cadduggan. According to Walax article,
(05:26):
Bell described him as quote a very thin, agreeable, intelligent,
a great tennis player. I like him immensely, so he
apparently liked her too, and they spent a lot of
time together, exploring the desert, going on picnics, reading poetry.
But there was one problem about their relationship continuing any further,
(05:47):
and that was that Henry was very poor and again,
according to walax article, Bell's father refused to let them
get married at all. He didn't think that Goduggan earned
enough to support his daughter or in the manner in
which she'd become accustomed to um Plus, Henry had a
gambling habit, and so Bell went home to England to
(06:08):
try to convince her father in person that this was
the guy for her. But she was not successful, and
just a few months after she returned home, she got
worried from Persia that Kadugan had fallen into an icy
river while fishing and had died of pneumonia. And she
was just completely heartbroken uh and devastated to hear about this.
(06:30):
So Bell spent the next ten years or so in
England writing and including some writings about her experiences in Persia,
and she also traveled around Europe. She traveled to France,
Italy and Germany. And this is also around the time,
in the late eighteen nineties or so that she started
to earn her chops as a climber by climbing unexplored
peaks in the Alps. Walax article recounts one particularly heroine
(06:53):
experienced Bell had in the Alps, and which she and
her guides were trapped by an avalanche, a thunderstorm, and
blinding snow, anyone of which would have been enough to
deter me, but that that all sounds bad. They were
basically huddled, all roped together in a crack between some
rocks on a peak for more than a day, and
Bell later said that she thought, quote, it was on
(07:15):
the cards, we should not get down alive. But she
kept her cool and they did make it down. And
that's really something she was known for two as a climber.
Later one of her guides said that out of all
the amateur climbers that he had worked with, including males
as well as females, no one could rival Bell in
terms of quote, coolness, bravery, and judgment. And I mean
(07:37):
that seems like something that serves her well later in
her career too, not just on the mountains. Yeah, And
I just loved to picture her doing this, huddling in
between the crack and the rocks, braving out the storm,
right and even what you know, what she might have
looked like at the time, because there weren't any dedicated
climbing clothes for women at this time, at least when
(07:58):
she started out timing and Belle was doing her climbing
in a skirt. I mean, she wasn't wearing like decked
out an ari I gear or whatever that we would
expect today, obviously color tech, nothing like that. Yeah, a
skirt would make things considerably more difficult, it would seem.
But it didn't. It didn't stop her. I mean, none
of that released stopped her, and she decided that she
(08:20):
wanted to start racking up some climbing accomplishments to like
some real goals. She wanted to be the first person
to climb all the peaks of the angle Herner Range
in the Swiss Alps, and actually accomplished that goal in
nineteen o one. One of the mountains, Gertrudge Spitze was
named after her. But even with all the adventures that
(08:48):
Europe had to offer, Gertrude still longed for the desert.
She was drawn in particular to the mystery of the
Arabian Desert, and so around the turn of the century
she moved to Jerusalem to study Arabic and to gather
as much information as she could about the tribes that
were roaming around the desert. With her new know how,
she didn't waste any time in exploring. She rode from
(09:09):
Jerusalem to Jericho to Damascus, and according to Ellis's article,
one of her most notable early adventures involved dressing like
a Bedouin man and writing about hundred miles northeast of
Jerusalem in search of the Drews, which was a secretive,
militant Muslim sect that was at odds with the ruling
Ottoman Turks. And surprisingly she got along quite well with
(09:31):
the Drews when she found them. Ellis writes that the
territory the Drews were living in was at the time
uncharted by Westerners, but Bell managed to evade the Turkish authorities.
This part reminds me of Phray of Stark a little
bit a lot Um and finally get to the Bell
Drew's mountains, where she just charmed the Drew's king entirely.
(09:53):
They ate together, they talked together, and since um Bell
had become fluent in Arabic, this was something she it
really really do with ease. They even became friends, and
the king apparently asked someone later referring to her, have
you seen a queen traveling? So she made an impression yeah,
And it was apparently a good question to ask because
(10:14):
Bell did spend the next few years traveling around the
Middle East, studying Rome, the Roman and Byzantine ruins there,
and also studying the Drews and various Bedouin tribes more
in depth. She learned a lot about the Arabs and
about the Ottoman Empire on her journeys, and she took
copious notes while she was doing that. A lot of
her observations made it into her nineteen o seven book,
(10:35):
The Desert and the Zone. And it also seems that
she impressed more than just the Drews king. According to Walach,
the Arabs pronounced Bell quote a daughter of the Desert
and made her a quote honorary man. But in addition
to racking up these great titles and making all these friends,
she was really learning her future trade too. We mentioned
(10:58):
her studying the Roman in business in ruins, which is
significant because it's during these years that Bell started getting
more and more involved in archaeology. She studied under the
French archaeologist Solomon Reinick in the early nineteen hundreds, and
in March of nineteen o seven she went to Turkey
to work with William Ramsey on some excavations there, and
(11:20):
the work they did actually resulted in a joint publication
in nineteen o nine book called A thousand and One Churches, which,
according to Ellis, really solidified Bell's standing as a quote
serious archaeologist. So she's not a lady explorer anymore. She's
somebody who's out there doing real work with well respected
archaeologists and becoming well respected in her own right. In
(11:43):
January of nineteen o nine, Gertrude set out from Mesopotamia,
which included what is today Iraq, as well as Syria, Turkey,
and Iran. Her goal was to map out uncharted territory.
So walk outlines a few of the things that Bell
took along for the ride. And I just have to
mention this were explorers. Yeah. It says so much about
(12:05):
the time, it really doesn't, and so much about what's
important to the person. I think so. So we'll just
quote this from from Walac's work. She says, her trunks
packed with pistols, her saddle bags crammed with books. She
was accompanied by an entourage of male servants, baggage animals, horses,
and a plethora of equipment cameras, tents, a folding bed,
(12:27):
and a canvas bath mosquito netting, rugs, provisions for a month, quinine,
camphor cigarettes, an entire set of wedgewood china, crystal and
silver for proper dining. And this reminded me so much
of the Champagne safari that was before you were a
co host, but before my time. It was a similar
(12:49):
packing list, bringing things that again I mean, she may
not have had the ri I gear for her climbing
and special high tech fabric for desert wear, but she
wasn't dining with like tin plates either, was she. So
with all of this equipment, with all of these luxuries prepared,
she set off on a journey that lasted about seven months,
(13:12):
and the land she traveled across was so brutally dry
that her party often had to stop and seek refuge
with local tribes and as their guests. Sometimes they would
eat things that maybe they weren't expecting to see on
their wedgewood china um, really bitter coffee out of the
cups if they had wedgewood comes into sheep's eyes and
(13:35):
their plates. Things that we're probably welcome if they were
looking for refuge in the in the desert, but also
real traveler stuff. In March, she came across an amazing
and as yet undocumented ruin a sixth century stone and
wood castle known to Arabs as uka deer. I hope
I'm saying that correctly. I'm not sure. Bell spent hours
(13:57):
and hours of painstakingly photographed thing measuring and sketching these ruins.
She even got down on the ground and her petticoat
to make sure that she was taking very precise measurements.
And she was taking this so seriously because since the
ruins hadn't been documented before, if she were the one
to come out with this discovery and have it so
documented and write about it first, it would be this huge,
(14:21):
big win for her, something that would establish her archaeological
reputation beyond a shadow of a doubt. She didn't exactly
rush off quite yet though, with her finding. She went
on to Babylon and wrote about Babylon saying it was
(14:42):
quote the most extraordinary place I've seldom felt the ancient
world comes so close. From there, she went on to Baghdad,
which was about five hundred miles from her starting point
just give you a sense of of how far she
roamed on this. On this trip, there she met the
nick Heab, which was the city's one of the most
(15:03):
important Islamic figures in the city, who rarely spoke to women,
and again just sort of like the King of the Drews.
She really charmed this guy. He ended up inviting her
to meet his family. So from Bagdad she went on
to Constantinople and that's where she got some really bad news.
She found that a French archaeologist had scooped her on
(15:24):
the Kadir find, and she was upset about this, but
because she had at least spent so much time documenting
it in the form of drawings, her name was at
least going to be associated with the discovery. The French
archaeologists had written about it first, but she had all
of this information, all these pictures to really back up
(15:45):
the find. Just eighteen months later, she went back to
the desert again. She wanted to visit a friend, David Hogarth,
who was working on an excavation in the ancient city
of Carchomish for the British Museum. When she got there, though,
Hogarth had left and as two assistants, two young British
archaeologists were waiting for her instead. They were Campbell Thompson
(16:06):
and a twenty three year old graduate student named Thomas
Edward Lawrence. And that name may sound kind of familiar
to you, and that's because it's the same Lawrence that
would later be known as Lawrence of Arabia. And these
guys were eager to impress Bell with the work they've done.
It started out rocky for them, though, according to Ellis,
Bell took a look at their excavations and immediately called
(16:28):
their methods quote prehistoric. She then proceeded to tell them
how a dig should be done, but they eventually won
her over with their conversation, in which they showed off
substantial local knowledge, something that always appealed to Bell, and
knowledge of architecture, among other things. She ended up calling
Lawrence quote an interesting boy. He is going to make
a traveler very on point. Gertrude just an interesting side
(16:53):
note because this group they sort of seemed like an
odd couple, don't there, or an odd group of three.
But apparently the locals who didn't know what to think
about a woman traveling alone like Gertrude Bell often did,
and knowing that Lawrence was a bachelor, originally thought that
Belle had arrived to be his bride, even though she
(17:16):
was at this point, something like twice his age. It
just seemed like the most logical solution to to explain
this party. Sure, why not? Also interesting to note about
this independent lady traveling alone, she had been active in
the anti suffrage movement back home in the early nineteen hundreds.
She was actually the honorary secretary of the Women's Anti
(17:36):
Suffrage League, according to Ellis, and apparently she believed that
she was the equal of any man, but didn't think
the same was true of all women anyway. We just
thought that was worth a mention for those who look
up to her as a feminist role model. It's not
totally black and white here. You can't expect her to
to be the perfect role model, I guess right, as
(17:59):
with any historical figure or figure of any kind. But
as we'll learn in the second part of this podcast,
there were others who also thought that Bell was a
singular kind of lady and allowed her to be part
of what was perhaps the ultimate all boys club right
the military at a time when it really mattered too.
Because in the next part of this podcast, we're about
to go to war World War One and talk about
(18:21):
Bell's political influence in the Middle East. The stuff that
she's probably best known for. There is a little bit
of romance in there too, though, because we haven't talked
about Gertrude's second notable love affair yet, and we'll also
talk a bit about how she made a lasting impression
on Iraqi culture. So all sorts of things to come
(18:42):
in our second part of this Gertrud Bell story. Thank
you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete now, so here's our current contact information. We
(19:02):
are at History Podcasts at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.