Daughter of the Desert by Georgina Howell. Pan Books, 2006

The title's 'daughter of the desert' was Gertrude Bell, an ironmaster's daughter from the North-East of England. The book itself was a birthday present from my daughter, Pippa. We are both interested in Gertrude's life and achievements having first met her in a novel based around the Cairo Conference, 1921 when she met with Churchill, T.E. Lawrence and others to negotiate the governance of Mesopotamia, the region we now refer to as Iraq. The origins of present-day Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine also come into Gertrude Bell's story.

What was Gertrude doing there? Well, it is a great story. She explored the Arab areas and made friends with the sheikhs and other Arabs who worked for her on her expeditions.  Remarkable, given attitudes towards women in this region. She learned Arabic and several dialects. She respected and loved their culture and became a major source of information about it.

She came from a very close family and before she went to the Middle East she had been the first woman to gain a double first at Oxford - not many women even got to university then. She became an intrepid mountaineer known to and respected by the male guides and climbers of her day. The climbing episodes I personally found a bit boring but the account of her life as an expert on the Arab world throws a great light on why and what the military are doing there now. The British and French, for example, last century, as allies fought a war in the area against the Turks. Oil for the British Navy was a strong interest. At the time of the First World War 1914-18, the Turkish Empire which controlled the area, was gradually being eased out by force and politics.



Gertrude Bell would have been horrified
by the British/American attack on Iraq in 2002 as she would have been about the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein before it. She was against using force in her time when her knowledge of the Arab areas told her it was the wrong way to solve the many problems amongst the tribes and their Muslim faith, and in an area where Shia, Sunni and Wahabi had to live side by side. I wonder how much of this history our leaders had studied before the British and American attack on Iraq. Gertrude's story is also a great love story. This element alone would make a great film and it would not surprise me at any time to hear that is was being done.


A lively, feisty personality, not afraid of working to exhaustion on projects she cared about or simply that fell to her because of her nature and knowledge. She must have been one of the great personalities of her generation. She took enormous risks in her explorations in the region and later as an official of an often unpopular nation. I did not know about the nature of her death and fully expected that I would read of her murder as an end to her story.

During Gertrude's early life the Bells had a house, Red Barns (now a hotel) in Redcar. The steelworks at Port Clarence where Hugh, her father, spent his working day managing his part of the family business was not far away. The family business also controlled the The North-Eastern Railway Company. Red Barns had its own little platform at the end of the garden where the local train would stop to deliver Hugh Bell back home each day. I loved this detail. Probably because I would love to have lived on Coast Road, Redcar, not far away where I visited as a child.
Follow the link to a photo of  Red Barns, Arts and Crafts in style, the interior was designed by William Morris for Hugh Bell. An inspiring read, 10 out of 10.