Gertrude Bell (13 page)

On her world trip with Hugo after the durbar in 1903, she stopped in Tokyo long enough to meet Reginald Farrer, “who is a great gardener.” Farrer delighted in the restrained beauty of Japanese gardens, disparaging the popular English “imitations” of the time. Born with a hare lip and having great difficulty in speaking, he covered this deformity with a large black moustache. He came from Clapham in North Yorkshire, not far from the Bells' family estate. He was destined to become one of the world's great plant collectors; he favoured a natural kind of gardening and wrote about it in Wildean prose. He had fallen in love at Balliol with Aubrey Herbert, son of the Earl of Carnarvon. Herbert was now attaché to the British Embassy in Tokyo, and Farrer was one of the Oxford
friends he had invited to join him. Farrer had a house there, and travelled with Gertrude and Hugo into rural Japan and Korea. In a letter of 28 May she described him as coming down from Mount Fuji carrying a “rose pink cyprodium [cypripedium].” “Reginald Farrer, the Colliers, and Mr. Herbert all came to see us, and carried Hugo off to a tea house to spend the evening in the company of geisha! I wonder how he comported himself.”

The contrast between Gertrude and a geisha was very pronounced, and in his book published the following year,
The Garden of Asia
, Farrer includes a chapter on the lives of Japanese women—no doubt a subject for lively conversation between him and the Bells. The double standard applied to Japanese women—they were either geishas or wives—threw into sharp relief his conclusions about his own countrywomen, who were either boring, in which case suitable as wives, or not boring, in which case not suitable. Gertrude, unmarried at thirty-five, with all her radiant curiosity and energy, was perhaps the catalyst for this idea, with which he remained intrigued all his life.

Gardening before the twentieth century was rather different from gardening as we know it today. The emphasis was on the use of glasshouses, which forced thousands of plants into bloom and enabled the gardens of stately homes and municipal parks to be filled with brightly coloured blocks of flowers in geometric designs, living carpets in borders that could run to hundreds of feet long. In 1877 two million plants cultivated in glasshouses were planted out in London's parks. The champion of hardy-plant gardening—the more natural gardening of today—was the gardener and writer William Robinson, who set up a press for the denunciation of carpet bedding. Robinson, working with Gertrude Jekyll, filled borders with herbaceous perennials, and planted flowers in drifts: producing effects known to this day as “English garden.”

Farrer was one of the first rock gardeners. Gertrude wanted a rock garden for Rounton, where she would set it around the lake and plant it with the Alpine flowers she had loved on her mountaineering trips. Farrer's and Gertrude's rock gardens were no suburban mounds of rubble with sickly, prickly plants struggling up between the stones. They had both been brought up around areas of limestone quarries, and conceived of something massive, like a natural rockface in whose fissures and crevices flowers blossomed as they did on mountains in the spring. Farrer's
My Rock Garden
was published in 1907, four years after their meeting, but Gertrude had established Rounton's two years previously. Using huge lumps of stone from the quarries in the Cleveland Hills, displaced in the collecting of iron ore, she must have commandeered the services of Rounton's entire garden and stable staff, village helpers included, to build a massive necklace of rocks around the little lake. She then planted them up with quantities of flowers interspersed with clumps of flowering bushes, in which azaleas are particularly apparent in the Bells' family album. She wrote to Chirol in April 1910: “I have spent most of the afternoons in the rock garden which is a vision of beauty in spite of weather that passes belief for cold and rain. Still, the world is wonderfully beautiful and no matter what the weather I really think there is no such marvel in the world as England in Spring.”

A couple of years later, she was constructing a water garden at another part of the lake. “If you look with the eye of faith you can see irises blossoming over the stones and mud heaps. It will be lovely,” she told him.

In the summer of 2004, London's National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibition of portraits of pioneering women travellers called “Off the Beaten Track.” Gertrude's corner contained a watercolour of her as a teenager by Flora Russell, a map, and the beautiful little theodolite given to her with the Gill Memorial Award by the Royal Geographical Society in 1913. She was the first woman ever to be awarded a prize by this august institution. It was given for her many expeditions and exploratory journeys. The short four-line caption—all that was devoted to her—stated: “Despite her own achievements she actively opposed British women being given the right to vote.” Technically correct, the statement is nonetheless a crude assessment of her ultimate intentions and one that takes no account of the complex politics of the times, or her position as a daughter of the Industrial Revolution. This oversimplification is often levelled against her and has been partially responsible for the way in which her achievements have been undervalued.

Female suffrage was the moral and intellectual debate of the age, and from the moment of being allowed to join the adults for meals, Gertrude would have heard the issue being discussed passionately, and from all
points of view. Hugh and Florence were opposed to it for cogent reasons, but some of their friends, and notably the actress Elizabeth Robins, were adamant in its support. All the Bells agreed with John Stuart Mill, the greatest proponent of women's emancipation of his time, that it was vital for a woman to be a “Person”: it became a family joke that the women seldom felt themselves to be quite enough of a Person.

Florence has been criticized for coming to no conclusions in her book
At the Works
. On the contrary, she arrived at one mighty conviction: “There will never be more than a certain proportion of women who can carry the immense burden allotted to the working-woman by the conditions of today.” By “working-woman” she meant the wives of the working-men, and in those twenty-six words lay much of her argument for anti-suffrage.

If Florence influenced Gertrude in anything, it was in the latter's endorsement, strange to us, of the movement against women getting the vote. She had seen for herself, as she accompanied her stepmother on her visits to the working families of Middlesbrough, that these women were already at the limit of their capabilities. Without wives who gave themselves unstintingly to the round-the-clock demands of home and family, that family, and the social structure, fell apart. Many women, as Florence and Gertrude saw, fell by the wayside, many families starved and died, and many men drank themselves to death. Weren't these issues, asked Florence, just as important as parliamentary bills and reforms? How could a Clarence wife leave her children in order to vote, or find the time to read—or, being illiterate, learn to read—so that she could understand the political questions of the day? What could a Clarence wife know of the issues on which she would be asked to vote—Free Trade, the Reform Bill, political corruption, penal reform, Home Rule? These were the questions with which the government of the day was concerned, and the vote, considered today to be a universal human right, was then judged to be a serious business requiring a degree of education and political acumen.

Matters such as health, schooling, men's leisure activities, social services, the Poor Laws, subsistence benefit, the workhouse and almshouses were dealt with by local government, and in these issues Florence and most of the middle-class women she knew were involved up to the hilt. They dreaded a reaction to the demands of the suffragists—who kept
within the law—and the suffragettes—who broke it—that would bring swift retribution and destroy the advances that women had already made.

If anything tipped Gertrude into action, other than family pressure, it was the militancy of Christabel Pankhurst, who by 1904 was leading women against what she called “the noxious character of male sexuality.” The suffragettes were engaged in a sex war, and employed methods tantamount to terrorism. Pankhurst's supporters attacked property, smashing windows and train carriages, trampled flowerbeds, and slashed paintings of nude women in galleries. They denounced marriage as legalized prostitution, rioted, and worked in gangs, tearing the clothes off their male victims and horse-whipping them. They poured tar and acid into letterboxes and sent packages of sulphuric acid to Lloyd George, later attempting to burn down his house. They assaulted men who happened to resemble the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. On 28 October 1908 Gertrude wrote: “Last night I went to a delightful party at the Glenconners' and just before I arrived (as usual) 4 suffragettes set on Asquith and seized hold of him. Whereupon Alec Laurence in fury seized two of them and twisted their arms until they shrieked. Then one of them bit him in the hand till he bled . . . When he told me the tale he was steeped in his own gore.” She evidently regretted missing the drama, but perhaps it was providential. Disdaining violence though she did, one wonders whether she might have been tempted to join the fray and break a vase over the head of a suffragette. In any scuffle, the publicity could only have been damaging for her.

Apart from Florence's concerns about the strains on the wives of working-men, and the damage being done to the women's cause by the militant suffragettes, there were sound reasons for the Bells to resist the demands of the noisy campaign for all women to have the vote. For all that the Reform Bill of 1832 and its successors had increased voters from a paltry 500,000 to 5 million by 1884, the vote was still limited to men of property, so that only a quarter of the men in Britain had the vote. When the franchise was denied to so many men, Parliament could not have contemplated giving the vote to all women.

The solution might seem to be clear—to give the vote to all adults, regardless of sex or property. But this would have swamped the system with voters who paid none of the taxes and would demand most of the benefits. There was much discussion about the possibility of giving the
vote only to women of property, but under the current law, the possessions of wives automatically became their husband's property on marriage. So married women would be denied the vote, while much of the franchise would have been granted to widows, spinsters, and prostitutes.

As independent and rational women such as Florence Nightingale felt, women's suffrage could not be addressed until the property laws were transformed. The sticks and stones of the suffragettes would be as nothing to 20 million working-men marching to retain their property rights. To Liberal reformers such as the Bells, there were more pressing social issues than the lengthy battle to redress the franchise balance of the nation.

Gertrude joined the movement against women's suffrage in 1908 and became a member of the Anti-Suffrage League. This became her first work, and being the person she was, she could do nothing by halves. She entered the debate with the zest for winning the argument that she had exercised at Oxford, and given her talent for effective administration it is likely that it was Gertrude who organized the first collection of 250,000 signatures for the anti-suffrage petition of 1909. But she nonetheless betrays a lack of “mission” in the affairs of the anti-suffrage movement that suggests she had taken on the work largely to please Florence. Of the first meeting of the League, she wrote:

We have Lady Jersey as chairman . . . I have been obliged to become honorary secretary which is most horrible . . .

Life was nearly wrecked for a month by arranging an Anti-Suffragist meeting in Middlesbrough on the largest scale. We did it and made a great splash . . . It was very interesting but it took an appalling amount of time and meant hours of letter writing and canvassing.

Later in life, in Iraq, her work for Muslim women would be considerable. She helped found the first girls' school in Baghdad, led the fund-raising for a women's hospital, and arranged the first series of lectures for a female audience by a woman doctor. Gertrude was to look back on her anti-suffrage days with mixed feelings: her old friend Janet Hogarth commented that Gertrude was “amused by her own attitude” at that former time.

Her involvement in the movement had played itself out by the end of the decade. New all-absorbing interests were about to take her over: she was becoming obsessed by archaeology as a motive for her desert adventures, and she would soon be deeply in love. The gauche student had become a supremely civilized and able woman; she was wealthy, she was single, she had no children to preoccupy her. Her abilities spanned the spectrum, from poetry writing to administration, from pioneering adventure and sportsmanship to archaeology. She possessed a rare grasp of world history and contemporary political debate alongside a love of pretty clothes. She spoke six languages, and could write a good letter or hold a discussion in any of them. And all of this was well grounded in the gentler human qualities: a deep sense of family, of landscape and architecture—a love of life itself. Few have rivalled her in the sheer range of her abilities. As a “Person” she had come to fulfil the highest aspirations that John Stuart Mill had envisaged for women.