The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 14: Issue 6: 7th May, 2024: Gertrude Bell, the Desert Queen and other books

This contribution looks at three books read over recent weeks.  I’ve included some parts of professional reviews together with my own brief comments.

• Desert Queen by Janet Wallach;
• The Wartime Book Club by Kate Thompson; and
• Milat by Clive Small & Tom Gilling

21^st April

I recently watched a 2015 movie about this lady, which encouraged a search for a book about her.  Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Advisor to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia, by Janet Wallach, 1^st published in 1996; 419 pages. The book was ordered from England, and arrived some three months later.

As ‘Goodreads’ describes it – ‘What makes this book remarkable is that it teaches both history, WW1 and the Middle East, and is a biographical exposé on a remarkable woman: Gertrude Bell’ . Indeed it does all of that, and so much more.  ‘Turning away from the privileged world of the “eminent Victorians,” Gertrude Bell (1868—1926) explored, mapped, and excavated the world of the Arabs. Recruited by British intelligence during World War I, she played a crucial role in obtaining the loyalty of Arab leaders, and her connections and information provided the brains to match T. E. Lawrence’s brawn. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East and was, at the time, considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire.  In this masterful biography, Janet Wallach shows us the woman behind these achievements–a woman whose passion and defiant independence were at odds with the confined and custom-bound England she left behind. Too long eclipsed by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell emerges at last in her own right as a vital player on the stage of modern history, and as a woman whose life was both a heartbreaking story and a grand adventure.

Amazon goes further – ‘Here is the story of Gertrude Bell, who explored, mapped, and excavated the Arab world throughout the early twentieth century. Recruited by British intelligence during World War I, she played a crucial role in obtaining the loyalty of Arab leaders, and her connections and information provided the brains to match T. E. Lawrence’s brawn. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East and was, at the time, considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire’. What is not mentioned there is the actual role she played in helping to create the origins of the modern state of Iraq, as part of the pre-WW1 configuration of the broader Middle East, and this I found of particular interest [see quote from pps 214-215 below].

Writing for Publishers Weekly [www.publishersweekly.com]

‘To Sir Mark Sykes, the pre-WWI British Foreign Office Arabist, “”that damned fool,”” Miss Bell, created an “”uproar”” wherever she went in the Middle East and was “”the terror of the desert.”” Three social seasons were all a young lady of good family was allotted to snare a husband. Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) had thrice failed and received the consolation prize, a trip to Teheran to visit her uncle, the British envoy there. After that, she could not be kept close to the dank family manse in Northumbria but was drawn to the sun-drenched Middle East. Dominated even there by her Victorian father, head of a family-owned ironworks, she was denied permission to marry a moneyless diplomat. She refused–to her later regret–a married lover in the military and assuaged her disappointment by pressing British interests in Arab lands east of Suez, becoming in effect the maker of postwar Iraq. The first woman to earn a first-class degree in modern history at Oxford, she wrote seven influential books on the Middle East and, following WWI, was named oriental secretary to the British High Commission in Iraq. Not just another book about an eccentric lady traveller, this colourful, romantic biography tells of a woman with an inexhaustible passion for place that did not always substitute successfully for continuing heartbreak. Despite some maudlin passages, Wallach, coauthor with her husband, John Wallach, of Arafat, vividly evokes a memorable personality’.

In order to illustrate just a few brief aspects of Gertrude Bell’s life and work, I’ve selected various quotations from throughout the book, and while these snippets from the earlier sections of the book don’t do justice to her life in total, they provide some indication of how she was perceived by those she worked for over a number of decades in the Middle East.

• Jerusalem. To Christians it was the way to God, the site of Christ’s crucifixion and Ascension, the scene of the Last Supper, the Via Dolorosa and the Stations of the Cross, close to Bethlehem, where Christ was born. To Muslims it was the opening to Allah, the third holiest city in Islam, the place where Muhammad was carried from Mecca on his legendary steed and where he rose mystically to heaven. To Jews it was the symbol of their homeland, the capital of ancient Israel, created by King David when he united the Hebrew tribes,  and the resting place of the Ark of the Law, their covenant with God. To some people, such as sixteenth-century German mapmakers, it was the center of the world. To the Ottoman Empire, which ruled it now, it was a prized possession [page 44];
• Re. mountain climbing exploits:  “’Had she not been full of courage and determination, we must have perished. Of all the amateur climbers he had known, he added – men and women – no one had equaled her ‘in coolness, bravery and judgement;” [page 65];
• She adored breaking new ground, being the center of attention, with everyone’s eyes and ears on her. But no less fascinated by those whom she deemed of particular interest, she focused her own attention on the way they thought and behaved. At home however, life had curdled from ennui. The English were too predictable; she could tell in advance what a politician might do or what her dinner partner might say. The one group she had met that was different was the Arabs; they excited her.   They stimulated her imagination; they were romantic, exotic, mysterious, unplumbed. [page 68].
• She wanted to inform the English of the ways of the East. She would tell them about the Arab world and it’s culture; it’s people, Bedouin tribesmen and educated townsmen; it’s language, flowery and circuitous; it’s manners, both primitive and polished; its delicate art; it’s intricate architecture; it’s history of holy wars and conquests; it’s literature filled with symbolism and poetry;  it’s politics thraught with international rivalries and tribal revenge; it’s religion of Islam; it’s wailing music; it’s food stapes of flat bread and yogurt; it’s commerce of bazaar merchants and international traders; it’s agriculture of wheat farming and camel grazing; it’s fertile soil; it’s oil-rich sand; it’s terrain of palm trees, incidental water and endless desert. [page 70];
• The Oriental’s action is guided by traditions of conduct and morality that go back to the beginnings of civilisation, traditions unmodified as yet by any important change in the manner of life to which they apply and out of which they arose. [page 72];
• Gertrude saw herself as the equal of any man, but most women, she was firmly convinced, were not. [page 83];
• When the British troops marched into the Baghdad of 1917, a thousand years of splendour and almost a million people, history had swept most of that away. The tyrannical force the Mongiols, the feudal rule of the Persians, the corrupt occupations  of the Turks, and the plagues and floods of the nineteenth century had wiped out most of the city –  the British found only 200,000 people, mostly Sunni Muslims and Jews living in shabby buildings inside the crumbling city walls. [page 194].
• Regarding Gertrude’s influence on the Arabs:  Upon receiving her eloquent plea, the Arab chief said, he summoned his men from the desert and read the letter aloud. ‘My brothers, you have heard what the woman has to say to us. She is only a woman, but she is a mighty and valiant one. Now we all know that Allah has made all women inferior to men. But if the women of the Anglez are like her, the men must be like lions in strength and valour. We had better make peace with them’. [page 197];
• Regarding the Balfour Declaration of 1917 [basically Palestine for the Jews] – Gertude wrote ‘I hate Mr Balfour’s Zionist pronouncement. It’s my belief that it can’t be carried out, the country is wholly unsuited to the ends the Jews have in view; it is a poor land, incapable of great development and with a solid two-thirds of it’s population Mohammedan Arabs who look on Jews with contempt. To my mind it’s a wholly artificial scheme divorced from all relation to facts and I wish it the ill success it deserves, and will get’. Part of her prediction came true, with the trouble between the Arabs and the Jews lasting to this day. But the wholly artificial scheme of a Jewish national homeland, became a reality [though at great cost to others !!]. [page 202-203];
• Exhilarated as she was over defining the borders, she was even more excited about constructing a brand new state. There had never being an independent Iraq, no political entity, no administrative unit had ever existed.  No borders like these had been drawn since ancient times; no western banner had ever flown over it. Now she was not only deciding a country; she was devising its shape and determining its composition; who would lead it, how it would be governed, who would be included in its citizenry, what would be its laws and institutions. Imperialist and Orientalist both, she was creating an asset for England, constructing an entity for the Arabs. [pages 214-215];
• Gertrude wrote: Muslim women who never go out of the house and see no one are absolutely helpless in the face of their menfolk and there’s such a feeling  against interfering in a man’s domestic affairs that no one does anything to help. [page 329];
• Upon her death in 1926, King George, writing to her parents: ‘The Queen and I are grieved to hear of the death of your distinguished and gifted daughter whom we held in high regard. The nation will wish us mourn the loss of one who by her intellectual powers, force of character and personal courage rendered important and what I trust will prove lasting benefit to the country and those regions where she worked with such devotion and self-sacrifice..’

As noted by a number of reviewers and publishers –  ‘Too long eclipsed by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell emerges at last in her own right as a vital player on the stage of modern history, and as a woman whose life was both a heartbreaking story and a grand adventure’. This was a real personal exercise in learning so much about the make-up of the Middle East prior to World War I, and un the immediate decades following that world conflict. In many ways, also an interesting follow up from two recent books read [and reviewed previously in this Column] in relation to the Australian Light Horse  and their exploits in Egypt and the Middle East and ‘historical’ Biblical areas of that part of the world. I’d not realised just how mch influence and control, Turkey had in that part of the world prior to WWI

26^th April

‘The Wartime Book Club by Kate Thompson, published in 2024, 430 pages, [plus 72 pages of reflections, appendices and historical notes and photos].  A wonderful historical book, written as a novel, but based on true events – the story of the Nazi occupation of Jersey  in the Channel Islands during 1943 and the surrounding years.  I’d never given much thought to this aspect of World War II and had a limited knowledge of the events in the Channel Islands.

On this occasion, Kate Thompson brings to reality, the severity of the hardships, the brutality, faced by an ordinary peaceful community as their cobbled streets become dominated by the presence of German soldiers during most of the war period, and their lives and daily activities are completely by the occupation forces.

We read of Jerdsey’s only librarian, and her reaction  to the  Nazi orders to destroy certain books,  where instead she hides many such books away in secrecy, and also, in an attempt to raise the morale of the local community, forms a wartime book club, which achieves its aims, bringing into the hearts and souls of much of the population, a need for books and reading which for many had never existed before  –   until eventually, it was  shut down by the Germans.

The other interesting storyline, involved the post office and the workers who attempted, often unsuccessfully, to either stop letters or delay their receipt to the Germans, written by local residents ‘dobbing in’ neighbours for hiding escapees, or breaking some other rule or law imposed by the occupiers.

I found an especially intriguing aspect of the book was that at the beginning of most chapters, some of those banned books are listed and described, some perhaps surprising examples, such as:

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck;
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickins [because it featured Jewish characters];
• The books of Sigmund Freud [he died in exile in Britain from cancer, while four of his sisters died in concentration camps];
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque [depictions of German failures in WWI];
• Ernest Hemingway’s writings [corrupting influence];
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London;
• Bambi, a Life in the Woods by Felix Salten, banned because of it’s darker origins about persecution and anti-Semitism in 1920s Austria;
• The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, with many of these stories banned, while later, the Allies banned the tales in Germany after the fall of the Nazis, who glorified Little Red Riding Hood into a symbol of the German people saved from the Jewish wolf…………………………..and so on, including a number of German writers who views did not paint the picture desired by the Nazis.

From  Goodreads and other publishers –  ‘From enchanting cliff tops and white sandy bays to the pretty cobbled streets of St Helier, Jersey is known as the land of milk and honey. But for best friends Bea Rose, the local postwoman, and Grace Le Motte, who works in the island’s only library, it becomes the frontline to everyday resistance when their beloved island is occupied by German forces in 1940.  Inspired by astonishing true events, THE WARTIME BOOK CLUB is an unforgettable story of everyday bravery and resistance, full of romance, drama, and camaraderie and a tribute to the joy of reading and the power of books in our darkest hour’.

Or as succinctly described by Booktopia this book ‘Based on astonishing real events, The Wartime Book Club is a ‘love letter’ to the power of books in the darkest of times – as well as a moving page-turner that brings to life the remarkable, untold story of an island at war.’  Well worth a read!!

2^nd May

If the foregoing suggested reading is not grim enough, let me point you to a 2014 publication  ‘Milat: Inside Australia’s Biggest Manhunt: A Detective’s Story’ by Clive Small and Tom Gilling [328 pages]. A detailed former detective’s chilling and forensic description of what was described as the biggest and most complex manhunt in Australian history. The story of Ivan Milat, the serial killer who preyed on young hitchhikers and back-packers who were the innocent victims of a brutal murderer. Belanglo – a place that became synonymous with pure evil.  A very  powerful read,   and quite obviously written from the mind and analytical writing of a former detective, who in fact worked on the case.

Behind the many false leads and dead ends, precious clues emerged that pointed to one man.

The book concludes with very detailed descriptions in a series of appendices of the circumstances [and often minute details] implicating Ivan Milat in the seven backpacker murders and the attempted abduction of an 8^th person, together with detailed technical descriptions of the weapons, etc, used in those crimes.

In summary terms, this is the story of how Ivan Milst was caught. The author, Clive Small, detective in the case, takes the reader inside the operation as he led his team, and how they painstakingly pieced together the evidence that would put Milat behind bars. But as the publicity for the book notes, questions remained, basically unanswered such as did he act alone, were there other victims, and how much did his large family really know?

The book, in its concluding chapters, also examines various other initially unsolved murders, and refers to more than a hundred still not solved at the time of the book publication.

As for the author, Clive Small is a former detective and Assistant Commissioner of the NSW Police. His investigations included the murder of anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay, the Nugan Hand bank, the shooting of police officer Michael Drury, the murder of Cabramatta MP John Newman and this book about  the backpacker murders.

As indicated, the book goes into extremely  detailed analysis of all evidence found during the course of the examination, and if you prefer your reading not to be dominated on ongoing minute details, perhaps you might like to seek our a less investigative descriptions of the crimes and the man involved. But in writing in this fashion, we get an excellent description of the type of detail and evidence that needs to be examined so thoroughly and in many cases repeatedly to achieve a correct outcome.,