A Woman in Arabia (38 page)

departure of,
194
–
95

and insurrection in Iraq,
194

knighthood of,
192

and self-determination for Arabs,
191
,
232

Wilson, J. M.,
53
,
54
,
55
,
56
,
246
,
248
,
249

Wilson, Sir Arnold, xxxviii,
xxxix, xl

Wilson, Woodrow, xxxiv, xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxix,
159
,
195
–
96

women,
18
–
25

Arabs' attitudes about,
232

Bell on the Arabian experience for,
121
,
129

Bell's perspectives on,
20

British women abroad,
23
,
75

female friends of Bell,
20
,
23

as mountaineers,
27

Muslim women,
20
–
21
,
22
,
23
–
24
,
25

and “Personhood,”
18
,
21

political participation of,
180
–
81

and social work,
19

travels of,
96

veiling practices of,
22
,
25

women's club in Baghdad,
24

women's suffrage, xxxiii, xxxviii,
18
–
20
,
22

and World War I,
136

Women's National Anti-Suffrage League, xxxiii

Woolley, Sir Leonard,
53
,
54
,
55

and the Cairo Bureau,
149

and death of Bell,
252

and grave of Doughty-Wylie,
152

World War I, xxxv–xxxix,
132
–
49

conditions at the front,
141

declaration of war,
133

and depression of Bell,
138

and Doughty-Wylie's death,
146
–
47

Joint War Committee Report by Bell,
137

and Wounded and Missing Enquiry Department,
134
–
42
,
145
–
46
,
147

World War II, xlv

Wounded and Missing Enquiry Department of the Red Cross (W&MED),
134
–
42
,
145
–
46
,
147

writings of Bell, xx.
See also
correspondence of Bell; publications of Bell

Yamseh, Ferideh,
5

Yorkshire Regiment, Volunteer Service Company of, xxx

Young Turks, xxxiii,
108
–
9

Zionism, xvii

Ziza, ruins around,
88

Zoroastrianism,
90
,
93
–
94

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*
Ferideh Yamseh, a schoolteacher who helped Gertrude with her Arabic.

*
Ultimately called the Salam Library.

*
General Sir Aylmer Haldane, chief of the British army.

*
Ja'far Pasha al-Askari, Iraq minister of defense, ambassador to Great Britain (later became prime minister of Iraq).

*
Nuri Pasha al-Said, brother-in-law of Ja'far (later became prime minister of Iraq).

*
Herodotus, Greek historian of the fifth century, known as the “Father of History.”

*
M. Massignon, with whom Gertrude corresponded later in the year.

*
Her beloved servant whom she had taken on in Adana in 1905, and who was to accompany her throughout most of her desert journeys.

*
One of its provisions was that there should be a fifty-fifty division of all finds between Iraq and the excavators. Gertrude represented Iraq.

*
Later Sir Leonard Woolley, he had worked at Carchemish with T. E. Lawrence and was now heading a joint expedition organized by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania to dig Ur of the Chaldaes.

*
J. M. Wilson was the architectural adviser to the Ministry of Public Works.

*
Arab headdress.

*
Governor of the town, in this case Arab, but working for the Turkish authorities.

*
Sir Mark Sykes was a bombastic Catholic landowner and close neighbor of the Bells in Yorkshire. Gertrude had quarreled violently with him at a dinner in Haifa in 1905, when he called the Arabs “animals” who were “cowardly,” “diseased,” and “idle.” Later, he accused her of tricking him in order to get to the Jebel Druze first, which she had. She had let slip to a governor in Damascus that Sykes was highly connected, ensuring he would not be allowed permission to travel without Turkish soldiers. He wrote to his wife, “Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!” Sykes became principal adviser to the British government on its wartime relations with the Arabs. In 1916, he made an agreement with François Georges-Picot that divided up Arabia between the French, British, and Russians: it nearly stopped the Arab Revolt in its tracks. The Sykes-Picot Agreement—or disagreement, as Gertrude called it—would form the basis of the San Remo Pact of 1920, which settled Arabia under British and French mandates.

*
The nearest Turkish authority authorized to issue permissions for travel.

*
The Desert and the Sown
, originally published in New York by E. P. Dutton, was republished in 2001 by Cooper Square Press.

*
Amurath to Amurath
, originally published by Macmillian in 1924, was republished by Gorgias Press Reprint Series, 2002.

*
Turkish police officer.

*
New Sinai Press, 2007, edited by Dale A. Johnson.

*
Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol was a distinguished British journalist and traveler, a family friend who would later become foreign editor of the
Times
of London. Gertrude had met him as a debutante in Bucharest in 1888, where he had become a friend of the Lascelles, the aunt and uncle with whom she was staying. Sixteen years older than the twenty-year-old Oxford graduate, he was highly amused by her independent mind, and she was soon in regular correspondence with him. Gertrude would write to her “Dear Domnul” all her life, often of the sufferings and dangers she did not mention to her parents, for fear of upsetting them.

*
Cavaliere Filippo de Filippi, author of many publications in Italian, English, and German, had invited Gertrude to join him in this scientific expedition to the Karakoram in 1913–14. In 1928, he became general secretary of the International Geographical Union.

*
God willing.

*
Camping place.

*
The prince's representative.

*
Gerald Leachman, an officer famed in the desert for bravery and ill-temper, was murdered in Iraq in 1920. Gertrude Bell disapproved of him.

*
Quote means: “How great is God! We have come to hell.”

*
The Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, or a man who has participated in it.

*
Palace.

*
Deputy to the absent emir.

*
The Muslim religious scholars.

*
Agar wood incense.

*
A strip of eastern Arabia adjacent to the Persian Gulf.

*
Reception room.

*
Recalled by Janet Courtney in an article on Gertrude in the
North American Review,
December 1926.

*
The date of the landing is vague. Captain Eric Wheeler Bush, DSO, DFC, RN, author of
Gallipoli
, which was published in 1975, says that on the date Carlyan mentions boat landing was impossible because of serious storms.

*
She was forty-two at the time.

*
The celebrated author of
Arabia Deserta.

*
Interview by Elizabeth Robins, September 17, 1927.

*
John had hired a studio in Paris to paint the portraits of key figures attending the conference.

*
Sir Arthur Hirtzel was an academic and senior adviser at the India Office.

*
Lord Alfred Milner was the colonial secretary.

*
Turkish name for high schools.

*
A court comprised of tribal elders to hear arguments and make rulings.

*
Sir Aylmer Haldane, General Officer Commanding.

*
Later Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, Faisal's personal adviser and soon a great personal friend of Gertrude's.

*
Muslim scholars of Sharia law.

*
The third daughter, an invalid from birth, never appeared in public.

*
Pauline Trevelyan, her sister Molly's daughter, now Mrs. John Dower.

*
Gertrude's old friend, the Honorable Mildred Lowther.

*
Her father's sister, Lady Sheffield.

*
One of the family of Mr. John Talbot.

*
Zaid ibn Hussain, a younger brother of Faisal, an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford.

*
Brigadier Sir Iltyd Clayton, a good friend of Gertrude's since 1919.

*
J. M. Wilson, architectural adviser to the Ministry of Public Works; a former pupil of Sir Edwin Lutyens.