J M Hammond: October 2013

This is the text for a talk which I gave at the recent Tenby Arts Festival. It is based on research I am doing for a new book which will be available soon as an e-reader.

TRAVELLERS IN THE SANDS OF TIME

Today the world is an open book to us. We think there is nothing more to find unlike our predecessors of the 19th century, the great era of exploration and colonial expansion. The expeditions were carried out by men for the most part. We think of Sir Richard Burton and John Speke with their discovery of the source of the Nile or David Livingstone and Stanley who found him, Sir Cecil Rhodes in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Mungo Parks who explored Nigeria, Sir Aurel Stein who was the first modern European to explore the Silk Road and many others. But there was also a significant cohort of women explorers which comes as a surprise to those who think that ours is the first generation of women to go out to work or to venture alone across the world. In particular we are going to look at the lives of some of those women who went out into the wilds of Arabia and North Africa. It also comes as a surprise to realise that their exploration of the deserts of Arabia and North Africa started long before the 19th century. These are the women we shall be looking at and I have put them in chronological order because their stories will then reflect something of the history and development of the countries they travelled in.

Between them these women span the better part of two centuries.

What pushed these women to risk life and limb travelling to distant lands of frightening exoticism? How did they cope with the privations of a life under canvas or in the saddle? What did they hope to find there? How did they relate to the people around them, the Moslems, the Sufis, the Jews, the Bedouin, the Druze, the Maronite Christians, Orthodox Christians, the Zoroastrians and many others? Life was cheap, slavery rife and transport systems primitive to say the least.

And what do they all have in common?

All of them came from exceptional backgrounds of one kind or another, some were high born, some were very wealthy, some highly intelligent. They all found themselves at odds with the society around them and they all had a lust for life, adventure and men. In the 18^th century Orientalism was all the rage and may have inspired their curiosity.

Before we look at the lives of these women we need to understand something of the world they explored. Of all of them only Agatha Christie and Dame Freya Stark were travelling in a post WW1 era. Prior to the First World War the areas they explored were part of the vast Ottoman Empire and were under Turkish rule for 400 years or so. The centre of this empire was Constantinople or Istanbul as we know it now. Once the seat of the Byzantine Empire and named after the Emperor Constantine who spread Christianity across the Roman Empire. After the rise of Islam which began in the 7th century it was sacked by the Moslems in 1453 and became the centre of their empire. The Turks ruled in a way that was lax and consequently seemed tolerant of different religions so that all lived side by side albeit in what we would now call ghettos. The 4,000 mile Silk Road crossed much of the Ottoman Empire but was already in decline at this time due to the development of sea routes. It had already created a nexus of cultures and religions.

However, the Porte, as the Ottoman government was called, invested little in their empire but took what they could in the way of taxes creating dead-end economies and resentfulness among their subjects. They had no respect for the historical remains that were everywhere in this region, the cradle of civilisation. The lands they occupied were never nation states as we would understand them but collections of tribes and princes. By way of comparison we should perhaps remember that Italy too was a collection of separate principalities until unification in 1861.

The Turks made no attempt to control or dominate the nomadic tribes in their empire so the Touareg and the Bedouin and others were able to continue a way of life they had known for centuries. Consequently many areas of the desert and mountain regions were dangerous for travellers.

The earliest of these women to set out alone for the East was Lady Hester Stanhope who was the niece of William Pitt the Younger. Her father was Earl Mahon with family estates in Kent but he was lampooned in the press as Citizen Stanhope because of his belief in the ideals of the French Revolution - Equality, Liberty and Fraternity. This led him to be the famous minority of one during a vote in Parliament and to living extremely frugally. Only the demands of his family made him keep a horse and carriage. He ripped down all armorial emblems from his home and carriage.

Hester on the other hand loved all that high society had to offer and loved fashionable, extravagant clothes. She became known as one of the beauties of her day and was even a friend of Beau Brummell. She went to live with her uncle William Pitt in order to act as his political hostess. She learned to be politically knowledgeable and astute but men often found her intimidating as they were not used to well-educated women unafraid to speak their mind. She was also tall and physically fit, able to match any man in horsemanship.

Naturally there were lovers, a cousin known as the Cornish Hercules whose exploits led him to die in a duel, they were rumoured to have had a child too. He taught Hester how to use weapons. He was wild and dark over 6ft tall with powerful muscles and – a large income. He had already travelled widely in Chile, Malacca and Ceylon, then going to Madras and from there across the Red Sea he crossed the desert from Suez to Alexandria. Later, she met General John Moore a hero of Corunna in the Peninsular war who died in that battle as did her brother. She kept the glove he gave her as a love token all her life.

There were others too notably Lord Granville whose faithlessness with the niece of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire drove her to attempt suicide. The whiff of scandal was now clinging about her to add to the general disapproval engendered by her father's reputation making her unmarriageable. It was after recovering from her attempted suicide that she set sail from Portsmouth saying farewell to England for the last time.

She soon had another interest; in her first port of call when she met Michael Bruce in Gibraltar. He was very handsome in the manner which is now called Byronic and had been travelling for three years. He had known General Moore during the Peninsular War and this drew them together but they soon became lovers though he was ten years younger. He and his travelling companion continued on their way with Hester going first to Greece where they met Lord Byron. There was immediate antipathy between Hester and Byron as they disagreed on so many things but especially his belief that women were subservient to men while she espoused the philosophy of Mary Wollstonecroft that women should be educated and treated on an equal footing with men. She was after all her father’s daughter; the child of a radical thinker.

Hester was increasingly drawn to the East, in particular Jerusalem and the Holy Lands partly due to curiosity over a fortune that had been told to her by a certain William Brothers. He was incarcerated in Bedlam but believed himself to be the prophet of a new world order answerable only to God himself. He told Hester that she would one day be Queen of Jerusalem and that she was part of God’s special plan for the world.

Naturally she dismissed this as nonsense at the time but as she drew nearer to the East, the prophecy began to intrigue her.

From Greece Hester went by sea to Constantinople sailing without Bruce and his friend. The ship was caught in a terrible storm and was wrecked off the coast of Rhodes. Hester lost everything apart from the clothes she stood up in and those were torn. It turned out to be a kind of re-birth as the only clothes they could get in the area were Turkish style garments and it was from that moment that Hester began to wear oriental dress, a complete break from the habits and customs of the society that she had left behind. She chose to wear men’s clothes as that meant she did not have to wear a veil.

She travelled in spite of the dangers of the Napoleonic Wars that were raging all around and confident that she had the political nous to do it she had ambitions to be a spy for her country and to be able to advise them on the politics of France in the Middle East. No-one took her seriously probably because of her sex but also due to the deep distrust of conventional people for a person with so much scandal attached to her. It was well known that she lived and travelled with Michael Bruce and they made no secret of their loved.

Wherever she travelled she ensured that she was magnificently attired so as to impress, making a triumphal entry into the towns she visited. Many of the people she saw had never come across a European before, particularly a woman, and she was the first person to carry out an archaeological dig in the area. She befriended some of the fiercest Bedouin leaders and it was under their protection that she travelled throughout Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. She also befriended the Druze Leader Sheikh Bashir Jumblatt ancestor of the modern day warlord Walid Jumblatt. They were also impressed by her courage and her horsemanship no less than by the gifts she distributed. But her greatest moment came when she went to Palmyra. News of her arrival preceded her. Young girls of the local tribe with flowers in their hair and carrying garlands waited, standing on pillars glowing pink in the sunlight. They leaped down as she went by and followed her singing and dancing behind her creating a regal procession. As she passed under the arch some of them held a wreath over her head. She saw herself as a latter day Queen Zenobia. This, she felt was the destiny that Brothers had predicted. She had never been religious, refusing to be confirmed as a child; now she began to take an interest in astrology and the stars.

As she travelled Hester rented houses or stayed in the houses of local dignitaries. She always refused to live in the European areas, preferring to associate with the local people and although never fluent learnt Arabic. She built a house of her own at Joun on a remote mountain top where she lived out the remainder of her days rarely seeing any European visitors except by appointment. She became nocturnal and would keep those she agreed to see up late into the night discussing astrology, philosophy and religion whilst sucking on a narghile or hubble-bubble pipe. At Joun she also created a beautiful garden one of whose features was the rampant datura flower that grew there. Visitors reported that she showed all the signs of addiction to this highly toxic and powerful hallucinogen which causes a complete inability to differentiate reality from fantasy. It often brings about a mystical experience, a feeling of 'rebirth'.
She died alone and penniless, her pension given her at the time of Pitt’s death had been inadequate. She had lost everything in the shipwreck and though for a time she was able to benefit from Bruce’s wealth when he left, at her instigation, she resorted to moneylenders to fund her household, her personal army and the gifts she continued to give. She was buried in the garden at Joun.

Unlike Hester Stanhope Lady Jane Digby did marry – several times. She had a golden childhood growing up in the Dorset and Norfolk countryside before going to London as a debutante and doing the season at the age of sixteen. She took London by storm and was considered the greatest beauty of her generation. She met and married Lord Ellenborough within the year though he was 34 to her 16. His pursuit of his political career left her alone and bored a great deal. She found solace in the excitement of the sophisticated society to which she now belonged and with her cousin Colonel George Anson in a passionate affair. Among the smart set it was not considered important to be faithful to one’s spouse yet the whiff of scandal blew around her and a novel telling a story that was a thinly disguised version of her life was published. She had one son, who died in infancy. She believed that George Anson was his biological father. He had already left her realising that she was taking their affair more seriously than he intended.
Her next affair began not long after the birth of her son. Prince Felix Ludwig Johann Friedrich Zu Schwarzenberg was a member of one of the great aristocratic families of Europe. They met at a ball at the Russian Embassy and he was instantly dazzled by her beauty. For her part she revelled in the flattery and attention after the neglect of her husband and disappointment in George Anson. They became lovers meeting secretly at his house but were soon found out which led to her divorce. She was expecting Felix child and wanted only to be with him and so she left England to follow him despite knowing that he could not marry her because of his catholic faith. She gave birth to a daughter and they set up home in Paris. The divorce when it became public caused a furore. Once again she was the focus of scandalous novels and newspaper articles. Later, after the birth and death at ten days old of a son she and Felix drifted apart, she disappointed in his refusal to marry her, he told that she was having an affair with another. Whatever his reason he had fathered two children with her and abandoned her although she was not without resources thanks to Lord Ellenborough’s generous divorce settlement. Felix’s nickname among the gossips had been Cadland as he had beaten Colonel George Anson out of her affections, just as the horse Cadland had beaten The Colonel in the 1828 Derby Shortened to cad the word has come to mean a person who behaves dishonourably.
From a prince to a king. Jane travelled on to Munich where she became the lover of Ludwig 1 of Bavaria. By now she was infamous and with her beauty she could not go anywhere without attracting attention. Jane was invited to court and Ludwig was immediately smitten. She too had had her fortune told and been promised three kings. This was her first, later came his son Otho when he was King Of Greece and there was said to be a romantic liaison between Jane and the man who later became Napoléon III. After this she married again, this time the Bavarian Baron Karl von Venningen. They had a son, Heribert, and a daughter, Bertha. All was wedded bliss for two years but she was becoming bored and restless. It was at this moment that the Greek Count Spyridon Theotokis arrived from Corfu and became her next adventure. Venningen found out and challenged Theotokis to a duel, in which the latter was wounded. Venningen generously released Jane from the marriage, took care of their children, and they remained friends for the rest of their lives. Jane converted to the Greek Orthodox faith and married Theotokis in 1841. She loved the simple freedom of her new life in Corfu. She took to gardening and bore a son, the only child she ever took an interest in. But it was not to last, the couple moved to Greece with their son Leonidas when the Count was appointed aide-de-camp to King Otho. Greece at that time was a more cosmopolitan society than she had known previously. The streets were full of black-robed and veiled Moslem women, men in Turkish style baggy trousers and colourful costumes from the Levant. Jane thrilled to theses new sights and sounds but the idyll was to end when Jane discovered Spiros was unfaithful and in 1846, after their son's fatal fall off a balcony, Theotokis and Jane divorced; Leonidas had been all that kept them together. To escape her grief she plunged into further adventures and Greece's King Otho, Ludwig’s son, became her next lover. Then she met the Albanian General Xristodoulos Hadji-Petros. His wild looks and reputation as part soldier part brigand immediately appealed to her adventurous spirit. Jane fell in love with the flamboyant mountains chief following him back to his homelands where they lived in caves and open camps under the stars. She had always been a superb horsewoman, now she rode beside the new love of her life, a far cry from the stuffy salons or polite country walk of Europe. She was as good a shot as any of his men.
When she discovered his affair with her maid it signalled the end of their relationship and she left setting sail for Syria but taking her maid with her.!!! Good maids being more difficult to acquire than men!! She was determined to see Damascus, Jerusalem and Palmyra, the fabled city of Zenobia but first she travelled to Baghdad, she describes Mesopotamia as a desolate and burning country and how she joined the harem in their clapping and singing.
Unlike Hester she did not take to local costume but added to the difficulties of her journey by wearing an English riding habit not designed for hot weather. But she fell in love with the country, the savage beauty of the wild mountains and the powder-dry desert.
At age forty-six, she fell in love with Sheik Abdul Medjuel El Mezrab. Abdul Medjuel was a sheik of the Mezrab section of the Sba'a tribe of Syria' and an aristocrat of the desert.
He arranged her trip to Palmyra 30 years after that of Lady Hester and like hers it was the high point of her travels. Under Medjuel’s guidance Lady Jane began to wear the flowing Arab robes that were more suited to the climate. The journey involved fifty hours of camel riding through the trackless desert in constant danger of raids by rival Bedouin tribes. They slept in black Bedouin tents and were woken at dawn with coffee and flat bread.

Although he was twenty years her junior, the two were married under Muslim law and she took the name Jane Elizabeth Digby El Mezrab. The Arabs called her Umm-el-Laban, Mother of Milk in reference to the colour of her skin. She adapted to their ways, smoking a narguileh going barefoot in traditional blue robe and yashmak with her eyes lined with kohl. She also adde Arabic to the list of languages that she spoke – nine in all. Their marriage was a happy one and lasted until her death 28 years later.

Half of each year was spent in the nomadic style, living in goat-hair tents in the desert, while the rest was enjoyed in a palatial villa that she had built in Damascus. She now had a vast family with no less than 8 brothers in law and all their wives and children. Life was never boring as she relished the hunting, the desert skirmishes and the savage beauty of this way of life. She was the first European woman to witness many of the Bedouin traditions first hand. She kept a diary and a portfolio of sketches and water colours.

She continued to help with the management of tribal affairs and was often called for medical advice for both animals and humans – not dissimilar from the role of the lady of a great country estate. Her generosity and fair dealing were well known so that she soon became the matriarch of the tribe and her refusal to follow certain traditions was overlooked.

She befriended Isabel & Richard Burton when he arrived as consul. She supplied him with information about the harem and the sexual practices that helped with his translations of The Perfumed Garden, the Arabian Nights and his treatise on the sexual life of Moslems. Later in 1878 there were also the Blunts, Anne and Wilfred, who were buying Arab horses to bring to Britain the original blood lines, with who she could share her own love of horses. Anne Blunt was the granddaughter of Byron.

By now Jane was seventy and as beautiful as ever though obviously matured and she was still deeply in love with Medjuel but no longer travelled with him into the desert on his regular seasonal treks with the tribe. At 74 she was becoming ever weaker and died of fever and dysentery in Damascus on 11 August 1881, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery there, where her grave may still be seen today. Medjuel died twenty years later and his son is said to have fought with TE Lawrence to recapture Damascus from the Turks in WW1.

Gertrude Bell offers a complete contrast to both these women though there are some similarities too. There was no scandal driving her out to the East and she was given an excellent formal education. She was born in 1868 to a very wealthy family but unlike Hester or Jane their wealth was founded on industry. Gertrude’s father owned a great iron foundry in the North East of England and was eventually rewarded with a peerage.

In her childhood she showed great intellectual promise and a strong will coupled with a love of adventure. Educated at home to begin with, she was sent to school in London and subsequently took a degree in Modern History. She completed this in only 18 months instead of the usual 3 years gaining a first class honours but because she was a woman the degree could not be conferred on her. In fact, the culture of the day was so strongly against women being treated equally that at least one of the lecturers at her college gave all his lectures with his back to the room so as not to be offended by the sight of women students. In addition to her degree Gertrude was already fluent in several languages having studied French (the international language of the day), Latin, Ancient Greek and German.

Since there was plenty of money in the family she did not have to work and was presented as a debutante in the London season. She had very little success there because although an attractive looking woman she found most of the men vapid silly and ignorant. They found her intimidating and overly intellectual; she was not afraid to express her opinions or to carry an argument through. She began to travel.

Her first adventures were in Bucharest and Constantinople staying with relations, Frank Lascelles and his family, who were posted there in the diplomatic corps. Constantinople offered her a first taste of the East and she loved the whole romance of this Arabian Nights world.

Persia was the Lascelles’ next appointment and Gertrude went there too, relieved to escape the monotony of a life of good works and only going out with a chaperone. She immediately set about learning Persian.

It was love at first sight. Love of Persia and its culture, love of the desert, love of the language and love of a young man.

Henry Cadogan, a young secretary at the Embassy, shared Gertrude’s love of Persian poetry. Riding or walking through the countryside she and Henry Cadogan would sit side by side reading their volumes of poetry together. Henry asked her to marry him. She was overjoyed but her parents were not. They refused to allow her to marry him on the grounds that he was insufficiently wealthy; they had also heard rumours that he had gambling debts and was rather an arrogant young man. Gertrude was now twenty-four and despite being a strong confident person with forthright opinions she was no rebel. She obeyed her parents without question. Perhaps it was her optimism that carried her through. She wrote to her father that she was dreading having to say an “indefinite goodbye to Mr. Cadogan” but talks of him staying on in Persia until he is made up to ambassador “or something surprising and remunerative” when he could afford to marry.

Returning home in 1892, in September the following year her waiting was over. News came that Henry Cadogan had died from a chill caught while fishing in

the river Lar. She buried her grief by throwing herself into work completing her first book and translations of Sufi poets.

The essays she had written in Tehran about Persia were published under the title Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures. They offer a delightful picture of everyday life in Persia carefully observed and described with humour.

Travel and activity were the answer Gertrude chose to her unhappiness. She began travelling in Europe where she became a much respected mountaineer at a time when it was a male preserve. She climbed the the Finstertaarhorn which at 14,026 feet is the highest peak of the Bernese Oberland where she thrilled to the terror of clinging by her eyelids to a sheer wall of rock hanging over an abyss

Later she also scaled the Matterhorn.

Her achievements were honoured by having a newly conquered peak called after her; Gertrude’s Peak is part of the Engelhorner group and by being named as the foremost woman climber in the Alpine Journal in 1903.

On her return home, she resumed her Persian studies, started to learn Arabic and went to Italy and Greece where she became fascinated by ancient history. But in 1899 the East had called again and she was soon off, this time to Jerusalem to visit her friends. She hired herself a tutor to help with her Arabic. She found it tremendously difficult at first, yet later was famous for her fluency, even mastering many dialects. She was drawn to the great antiquities of the East, the ruins left behind by ancient dynasties. And now was her first opportunity to organise her own expedition in the desert. She had with her muleteers, a soldier escort and a Bedouin guide but no companions. This was to be the pattern for most of her journeys through the deserts of Arabia.

Desert travel gave her independence, a sense of freedom, challenges to her mind and body and the opportunity to use and improve her knowledge of Arabic, one of the great classical languages of the world. She relished her meetings with the strange and exotic people she came across in the desert; the women veiled, tattooed with indigo, their eyes rimmed with kohl to protect them from disease and their hands often patterned with henna. She also loved the simplicity of camp life

She went to Jerusalem next from where she organized an expedition to Petra, “the rose red city half as old as time” and to Mount Carmel then went into the forbidden Druze territory. She had been warned off by the Ottoman authorities but found the Druze were happy to welcome her. She was invited to witness the start of a Druze raid and saw the warriors “all armed with swords and knives and shouting a terrible song …. – that the foe may fall in swathes before our swords.” One of the Druze on seeing her shouted, “ Lady, the English and the Druze are one.”

From there she went to Damascus and on to Palmyra. Travelling by night to avoid the searing heat of the day, the long ride across the sands was alleviated a little by the stories told to her by the men of her five strong escort. Descriptions of Bedouin raids and the cruelty of the desert emir Ibn Rashid. Gertrude and her escort arrived in Palmyra after five days in the saddle. Here she spent two day s exploring the Roman ruins before returning to Damascus. By now she was becoming famous in the region she writes, “I am much entertained to find that I am a person in this country - they all think I am a Person! And one of the first questions everyone seems to ask everyone else is, “Have you ever met Miss Gertrude Bell?” She does admit slightly ruefully that “renown is not very difficult to acquire here.”

This was something that was important to her. She was now thirty – too old for the marriage market but in any case she was loving the adventure and independence that she now had albeit funded by her generous father. Being treated as a person gave her a sense of achievement. She kept meticulous notes of her journeys and wrote many letters home which were edited into a book after her death.

In letters home she writes of places “full of wild beauty and full of legend”. She speaks of the people she meets, desert explorers, archaeologists, travellers and British government officials including her first meeting with T.E. Lawrence whom she describes as someone who ...“is going to make a traveller”.

The dangers and practicalities of the journey are vividly narrated in her letters, such as crossing rivers on rafts made of skins with donkeys which have to be bound hand and foot to get them over while horses swam across ridden bareback by two naked ferryman, to guide them through the rushing water. We don’t think of the desert as anything but hot yet at night the temperature can plummet below freezing. Gertrude speaks of trudging back and forth across the desert trying to keep warm while the camels were being loaded, of frozen tents that took an age to pack especially with frozen fingers and how the camels slithered on sheets of ice that their feet were ill equipped for.

The East fascinated Gertrude as much for its ancient past as for its people. So in 1905 she travelled through northern Syria to Asia Minor to study the Byzantine churches, in particular the thousand and one churches at Binbirklisse in Turkey. This was to become another book and it was this journey that led to another great love.

Charles Hotham Montagu Doughty-Wylie, Dick to his friends, was English Vice Consul in Konia. He was a married man so her feelings and his were undeclared but she kept a press cutting of his actions in the military campaign at Adana where he rode out at the head of a small patrol to put an end to the massacres that the Turks were perpetrating against the Armenian Christians.

Meanwhile she was exploring along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Her discovery of Ukhaidir, the Little Green Place, established her reputation as an archaeologist. Far from being a verdant meadow as the name might suggest it was a huge castle built of stone and wood with great round towers and enormous outer walls thick with the dust of ages. From there she went to Babylon where a group of German archaeologists were excavating Nebuchadnezzar’s palace and then on to Ctesiphon the ancient Persian capital of Mesopotamia that Gertrude would later establish as Iraq. She returned home where she spent eighteen months writing “Amurath to Amurath”, the description of her travels in Mesopotamia.

Dramatic events in the Balkans in 1912 changed Dick’s career and brought the two of them together. Dick was called to London to discuss plans to send him to Albania as chairman of the committee responsible for establishing the Greek-Albanian border. Soon after his arrival in England, without his wife, he was invited by Gertrude to Rounton, the Bell family home. After his visit they corresponded frequently but in secret.

She escaped emotional turmoil once more through travel. This time it was back to Syria where she began planning an expedition to Central Arabia. She was keen to meet the leaders of the two greatest Arabian clans; Ibn Saud and Ibn Rashid, both formidable and rival warriors.

However, throughout their new adventures she and Dick continued to write. He headed for Addis Ababa again, she for Ha’il, an unpredictable and

dangerous journey even though she prepared for it by careful study of celestial navigation and use of a theodolite.

During her journey to Ha’il, a place that was once a stop on the Frankincense Route from the Arabian Gulf to the Levant, Gertrude kept diaries.

Arriving in Ha’il on the 26th February 1913, she found herself in the middle of a tribal war and with the Amir of the Rashid tribe absent; the women and eunuchs were in charge. In their fear and suspicion of her they imprisoned her. The desert was a lawless place. The Ottoman Empire did not bother to attempt any maintenance of law. Travellers here had no protection. Gertrude however talked her way out of her ordeal and was soon given her freedom again. The experience left a deep impression on her. She had become so confident in her dealings with the tribes and trusted their good nature. In some respects being a woman was an advantage because the Bedouin would have thought it shameful to kill a woman. She travelled with a rafiq or guide from each tribe for protection and this was the first time that she had felt herself in any danger..

Her expedition to Hayil was important for the new information it gave to travellers and archaeologists. Gertrude was able to map a series of wells across the desert and cast new light on the history of the Syrian desert and the various empires that had ruled it, Roman, Palmyrene and Ummayad..

As a woman she had access to parts of desert culture that were barred to male travellers. She spent time with the women folk, going into the harems, listening to their stories and photographing them. She recognised the difficulties of their lives “Here were these women, wrapped in Indian brocades, hung with jewels, served by slaves….They pass from hand to hand………The victor takes them, his hands bloody from murdering their husbands and children.” She listened when they spoke of the hardship of their lives. Wrapped in blue cloth, with their faces tattooed and lips dyed with indigo they told how they rose at first light, fed the sheep milked the camels and baked bread. They also repaired tents spun and wove sheep’s wool and camel hair. It was their task to pack up tents and belongings when the tribe moved on and all the while caring for their babies. Later when a political officer in Baghdad she was to promote the cause of education for women.

Despite her way of life Gertrude never gave up her femininity or her traditional standards. Whenever she travelled she took a full set of silver and china with her so that when she camped she could still dine in some elegance. She behaved to all with the slightly imperious manners of a Victorian Society lady in her salon. Throughout her life she maintained an interest in fashion and elegant dress. Her letters home are peppered with requests for dresses, hats, gloves all the things that a woman of fashion might require but could not find in Baghdad. It was possibly her lady-like ways that appealed to the Arabs in the desert; one highly ritualised society respecting the rituals of another.

It was now 1914 the world was sliding into the chaos of the First World War. Like many others Gertrude rushed to help, working for the Red Cross in London tracing the missing and the wounded to begin with. Tragedy struck again with the fighting in Gallipoli. Her beloved Dick was killed leading his men in an assault under heavy fire for which he was awarded the VC.

Gertrude spent weeks in anguish then in the autumn of 1915 she left once more for the east.

The government recognised that her knowledge of Arabic and the desert were invaluable to the war effort in the Middle East and after a brief stay in Cairo, she was sent to Baghdad. The maps and information she had gathered were of great value in the planning of military campaigns in the region and she knew all the tribal leaders and could negotiate with them for their support. The Ottoman government regarded her as a spy but she was once more a person with an important role in life. As the war ended she moved into peace time administration and in setting the boundaries of the new country of Iraq as Mesopotamia was now to be called. She entered into careful negotiation with all the tribal leaders as to exactly where the boundaries should be drawn recognising that none of the people had any notion of nationhood but gave all their allegiance to the tribe. Nor had they any experience of government having been under Turkish rule for 400 years and other empires before that. One of the major outcomes of the war was the break-up of the Ottoman Empire.

Like Lawrence she passionately believed in Arab Independence and argued for it at the Paris Peace Conference and like him also felt that the Arabs had been betrayed by the British and French who shared out the mandates to govern the region – Iraq and Palestine to the British, Lebanon and Syria to the French.

Working alongside Gertrude was Kinahan Cornwallis, highly educated and a gifted linguist, he was exactly the type of man whose company she enjoyed. He also saw the necessity for Arab independence and supported the claim to the throne of King Faisal. He and Gertrude spent hours together both at work as a team with one shared goal and also in their leisure time, dining together and taking picnics and swimming trips. He was estranged from his wife and so when they became close Gertrude had great hopes for a more intimate relationship. Her letters home are full of his name and even start to use the plural pronoun “we” when talking of her work and social life. This was the third great love in her life but it too ended badly for Gertrude since Cornwallis stopped short of serious romantic intentions or marriage and the two drifted apart.

In Iraq she was very much a person now and was known as Al Khatun – great lady. From her own government, recognition came in the form of a CBE.

She continued to work in Iraq supporting the fledgling monarchy. As her political involvement reduced she began to work on the setting up of a museum in Baghdad to house all the archaeological artefacts. She was often ill and often lonely as more and more of those she had known and worked with returned to England but for her return was not an option – she could not bear the nothingness and anonymity of an English life.

On July 12 1926 she was found dead of an overdose of sleeping pills – accident or suicide? To this day no-one is sure.

We are moving now to North Africa to look at the life of Isabelle Eberhardt. She had an extremely unconventional upbringing as the daughter of Natalia, a Russian émigrée and the tutor to her half brothers and sisters. Later he was her tutor too and her paternity was kept secret. She grew up speaking Russian and French but also studied German and Latin with her tutor. He was Armenian and was fascinated with Islam passing this interest on to his charges teaching them some Arabic along the way.

She found the bourgeois society of 19^th century Geneva stifling and as immigrants the family was not accepted despite minor aristocratic connections in Russia. All her siblings left Geneva as soon as they could. Isabelle began writing and inspired by the works of Pierre Loti with his highly lyrical descriptions of the desert she wrote Vision du Maghreb, Pictures of the Maghreb, the Arab word borrowed into French for evening or the west, before she had ever set foot there. She began various friendships by correspondence calling herself by different names and she was also by now choosing to wear men’s clothes which gave her a freedom that women did not have in the late 19^th century.

Isabelle and her mother left Switzerland to set up home in Algeria at Bône on the coast. Now known as Annaba,

Bône was the name given to it by the French colonialists in 1832 but it reverted to its original name of Annaba after Algerian Independence was gained. When Isabelle and her mother arrived they found a large population of French colonial families who had settled there. However, they did not fit in to this society any more than they had mixed successfully with the elegant burghers of Geneva and they converted to Islam soon after arriving in Bône. Isabelle made friends among the Arab population and called the city Annaba refusing to recognise its French name Bône. She had developed a great antipathy towards bourgeois society and the triumphalism and belief in the superiority of western civilisation of which colonialism seemed to her the epitome.

Here in Annaba, Isabelle fell in love with the romance of Islam, with its asceticism, its immutable purities, relishing long discussions with the holy men of her nearby mosque. The religion offered the chance of a new identity, she could make herself whatever she wanted to be and in its exoticism it was as far from the bourgeois existence of Europe as she could find. She began to dress as a young Moslem student and called herself Mahmoud Saadi.

Orientalism had been fashionable from the beginning of the eighteenth century but Isabelle was not part of that movement which was content to look on the east from outside, she wanted to absorb the orient as part of herself and to become one with it.

Yet, her way of life was in contradiction to the tenets of the faith she espoused and was only sustainable by taking on male identity; she smoked khif, drank alcohol and sexually was a free spirit.

In November, her mother Natalia suddenly died, buried in the Islamic cemetery of Bône. Isabelle in shock and despair began to rave and threaten suicide. Trofimowski arrived and offered her the use of his pistol; shock tactic which brought her up short. She refused the pistol choosing life over death. Owing to being a minor she was forced to go back to Geneva to live with Trofimowski, her tutor/father but she couldn’t wait to get back to Algeria. After his death, she took a boat across to Tunis as soon as she could.

She dressed as a young Moslem man, a Tunisian scholar which made journeying alone in an Islamic country much easier than it would have been for a woman. Calling herself Si Mahmoud or Mahmoud ben Abdallah Saadi or Mahmoud ould Ali she wore an outfit of white wool with a turban tied with camel hair cords covering her shaven head: an outfit that a young taleb or Moslem scholar would wear. She returned to Tunis but soon set out for the Sahel again. “…….once more the Bedouin life, simple, free, and comforting has taken hold of me, is inebriating me and soothing me…O! The happy annihilation of the self in this contemplative life of the desert,” she wrote.

The existence in Algeria of a tradition of female Islamic saints and mystics also helped for many she met knew immediately that she was a woman but treated her with the respect they felt they owed to any scholar of the Koran.

However, the French were in charge in Algeria, having invaded and captured it from the Turks in 1830, and they regarded her with suspicion.

Isabelle had many brief encounters with men but only two great loves one of whom planned marriage but she cried off when his next posting turned out to b in Holland not her beloved North Africa and he was insisting that she should grow her hair. She would not yield one iota of her independence.

She began a journey across country to the edges of the Sahara by train at first but continuing on by camel with only a guide to accompany her, sleeping under the stars after watching the kaleidoscope of colour that was the desert sunset, letting feelings of serenity and melancholia take hold of her. She wrote that the sand felt warm and the sky was ablaze with countless stars. Her journey ended at El Oued where she met Slimène who was to be the one true love and the man she married. He was a spahi, a local member of the French cavalry. She discovered from him that on his father’s side he was descended from a family of marabouts or holy men. On his mother’s side his family were Chaoui which is to say that they were black African rather than Arab and he had the dark skin of his mother.

Their meetings were carried out in secret for fear it would cause trouble on both sides of the colonial divide, the European and Arab communities, not least because of the rebellious uprisings in the country.

Through Slimène she made contact with the Soufi Sect a highly spiritualised form of Islam and her life changed. No more wild nights drinking and fornicating. Her happiness with Slimène and with life in the desert also worked their magic.

Slimène introduced her to all, fellow soldiers, superiors in the army and friends and family “This is Isabelle Eberhardt, my wife and this is Mahmoud Saadi, my companion.”

But the French did not approve the relationship and transferred him to Batna. She was left destitute and sorrowing with no money for food. Soon after this she was attacked with a sabre and nearly died but could not bear to see a man who she believed had been used as a tool by destiny, punished. Once recovered she travelled to Batna to be near Slimène. But the French alarmed at the attention that her case was attracting and being mistrustful of her, exile her and she had to return to France. She returned for the trial, pleading for leniency for her attacker but had to go back to Marseilles soon after where she took a job as a stevedore on the docks to earn some money. Slimène is able to join her when he was posted there and they marry, she became a French citizen through marriage.

She still longed for the desert and the stars and was now burning with a desire to write.

Slimène is discharged from the army and the couple moved to Algiers from where Isabelle began her wanderings in the desert again. In her diary she kept a record of her journeys by coach and mule sleeping rough, in railway stations or on top of abandoned crates in street corners and eating at Moorish cafés. She met Victor Barrucand the editor of the paper which had previously published her stories. He became her protector offering publication and payment for her articles. Meanwhile Slimène was studying to become an interpreter.

After a visit to the moslem holy woman Leila Zeyneb she was convinced that she was a nomad through to her very soul and that she had been chosen for this by destiny.

Returning to Algiers she found that Slimène had been offered a job as an interpreter in Ténès and so they moved to that city, a mixed community of French and Moslem administration. By now Isabelle, ever addicted to tobacco, was chain-smoking and using alcohol and khif in large quantities again. The desert still called and she was soon off on her travels again especially as she found herself at odds with the citizens of Ténès. She did not conform to the expectations of the French community and was considered dangerous because of her associations with the Arabs. When she rejected the sexual advances of a French deputy mayor her situation worsened She wrote: "the problem with Ténès is that herd of neurotic, orgiastic, mean and futile females." She was still sending a steady stream of articles about her travels to the newspapers.

Victor Barrucand invited Isabelle to help on his French/Arabic newspaper, l'Akhbar. It offered Isabelle a vehicle in which she could discuss the wrongs of colonialism and write of her battles with oppression. Her writing became her saviour, she wrote: "there is only one thing that can help me get through the years i have on earth, and that is writing." She was also sent by Barrucand to Oran where General Lyautey was in charge of pursuing French interests and pushing on into Morocco. He was a liberal and open-minded man, somewhat in contradiction to his position in life. Isabelle's rôle was to report on army activities, the rebel tribes and to describe the unknown territory that was as yet unexplored. She lived in the desert with the rebels, glorying in ...“this dust and powder land”.

A year later after travelling constantly across the desert and writing of her experiences and of the people of the desert she succumbed to malaria and, it is said, syphilis. She was taken to hospital at Ain Sifra but discharges herself prematurely asking Slimène to come and join her there. The day after his arrival the town is hit by a flash flood; water gushed down in torrents from the mountains filling and overflowing the river bed. It inundated the houses and carried off many of the townspeople of Ain Sifra. Slimène escaped somehow but Isabelle was killed, crushed by rubble in the crude clay house that she had rented near the oued.

From North Africa our focus returns to Arabia and to another British woman though she was half Italian on her mother’s side. Dame Freya Stark grew up in an unconventional way too. Born in Paris to artist parents, she grew up in Devon and Italy. Her mother left unable to cope with the cold and damp of the weather and the British temperament taking Freya and her sister to live permanently in Italy. She spoke French, Italian, English and German from a very young age.

During her childhood she had a terrible accident when her long curly hair was caught in machinery in the factory that her mother was running. She was pulled up and turned round and round with her head grinding against the shaft. Mario, her mother’s business partner pulled her free but half her scalp was torn away and her eyelid needed stitching back into place. Many weeks of surgery followed and she was lucky enough to have the new technique of skin grafting used on her though it was experimental in those days. She was left with some serious scarring over one side of her forehead which she referred to as disfigurement but which was not as bad to look at as she believed. It did however mean that for many years she lacked self confidence and was especially aware that she was not beautiful, something that she evidently regretted deeply and envied in other women since she referred to it often in all her books and letters. Those who knew her always said that she may not have had beauty but her face was pleasant, with warm lively eyes and an attractive expression. Her eyes must have been particularly twinkling for she recalls an incident when dining on a train; she shared her table with a Frenchman who invited her to drink his wine with him, because, he said, "On voit que le monde vous amuse." (I can see that you find the world amusing).

She returned to England to study at Bedford College but gave up her education to help in the First World War nursing in Italy. She met her first boyfriend at about this time an Italian doctor, Guido, but he called the engagement off and she was devastated believing it to be because she wasn’t pretty enough. She returned to London to try and go into nursing there but after she had completed her training she was sent to Italy to work as she spoke the language.

Despite all the hard work she managed to find time to climb the mountains that she had come to love showing already a taste for adventure and challenge. After the war she settled at first in a house on the coast that her father bought for her where she struggled to make a living growing vines and vegetables. She also suddenly began to learn Arabic perhaps inspired by some of the stories she loved to read but also because there happened to be an Arabic scholar in the vicinity.

After a climbing holiday in the Alps and a tour of France and Spain she fell seriously ill but as soon as she recovered she determined to set off for the East. By now she was fluent enough in Arabic to read the Koran in the original. She landed first at Brumana in Lebanon then on to Syria, a trip that was to furnish the material of her first book.

The people she described as being everything from fair-haired and blue-eyed to the deepest black, a mixture of hill dwellers, Bedouin in their rags and all the women heavily tattooed with henna. She described walking in open fields of corn and gnarled old olive trees and seeing villages of clay baked a glorious ochre colour and babies whose eyelashes were already blackened to beautify them and wearing a blue bead for luck. Picking cress while the men shot quail that was roasted over an open fire and Freya drank leban finishing with the dark black coffee of the region. She was entranced as always by the wild creatures she came across, heron, eagles, larks, fat lizards and buffaloes, huge yellow frogs and cats. But not all was idyllic; she recognised the hardship of life in some of the desert and hill villages, their names, black mountain and hills of brass reflecting their dry rocky grimness.

Her next expedition took her to Baghdad, the very essence of the mystery of the East and the city of the Thousand and One Nights. Again she was helped by all her many contacts but unlike Gertrude Bell who she resembled in so many ways, she did not take a large retinue of men and tents and provisions. Freya seemed to resent the comparison with Bell even though they were very similar in their ways of life, she often referred to Bell facetiously as “My Siamese twin” Unlike Bell, Freya did live among the people on very little money going into unknown territory mostly alone with only one guide. She welcomed the intrinsic danger of a life lived without protection of roof or family; a life lived like a wild animal. Like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air she trusted to providence to provide the necessities of life but at the least breathed the spirit of freedom.

Freya soon met people who had known Gertrude Bell and worked with her. Bell had died only three years previously. The King that Bell had helped guide was still being advised by her former colleagues. Freya visited her tiny house and garden and met Captain Vyvyan Holt who succeeded Gertrude as Oriental Secretary and Kinahan Cornwallis with whom Gertrude was once in love. Freya was immediately attracted to Vyvyan Holt. She loved his very Britishness; his reserve and extreme discipline. He had a very keen sense of british superiority believing that only they could deliver good governance. He was also an accomplished linguist speaking ten different languages. His dealings with the Arabs outside of his political work were strictly business and polo. He was saturnine and clever with “the aroma of the desert clinging to him”.

Like the other women we have described she did not fit in with the colonial or bourgeois society of the day. She was stifled by the petty conventions and found the women/wives particularly dull and unadventurous – the kind of women who boasted about never having had a native cross their threshold. She herself explored as much as she could and added Persian to the list of languages that she could speak to prepare for a trip to Persia where she discovered the Valley Of The Assassins, the famous warrior sect who were said to be high on hashish to give them the courage to fight. She also mapped several mountains that had not been previously explored.

A spell in England gave her the opportunity to contact the Royal Geographical Society with her findings from Persia. They instructed her in some of the more complicated areas of the art of surveying. More of a pleasure was the white evening gown bought in London made of a satin called angel-skin. After a stay in Italy Freya returned to Baghdad where, despite having visited her in Asolo her Italian home, Vyvyan Holt failed to acknowledge her return.

She took a job at the Baghdad Times but her articles were now appearing in magazines and newspapers in England and she was invited to give a talk at the RGS. Meanwhile a trip to Kuwait was her first camel ride across the desert.

She had one final meeting with Vyvyan Holt that was full of pain and resulted in the realisation that love was dead and she was free. She had been longing for him to propose marriage. After spending so much time together as they had in Baghdad and during his visits to Asolo she felt that he must care for her as much as she cared for him. When they met again in Asolo, both by now recovered from their ill health she broached the subject with him only to be rejected. He was in fact homosexual which Freya who was very innocent about such matters had not realised.

Her next journey was too the Hadramaut, part of Yemen, the land of the Queen of Sheba. Here she met the Indian Ocean Tycoon, Antonin Besse, whose ships and warehouses dominated business in the region. Later he founded St. Anthony’s College Oxford which specialises in Middle Eastern studies.

While Freya was in Aden they spent a great deal of time together. She would spend the morning studying, preparing for her expedition and then go to his office in the afternoon where she could watch him trading in everything from apes and peacocks to oil, hides, ambergris and sandalwood. They took daily walks scrambling over the rocky cliffs sharing their love of danger and pleasure in romantic poetry. They shared a philosophy too; both were bored by ordinary life and disgusted by mediocrity while having a longing for solitude and the great out-there.

Shabwa, an ancient buried city many believe to be the land of the Queen of Sheba was the place that Freya was planning to go to in the Hadramaut. She would have been the first European to go there but was prevented by illness, malaria contracted while staying in a harem. She did go to Shibam where the houses looked like cliffs from a distance but close to were revealed as skyscrapers all crowded together in a narrow space each one with a drainage channel let into its side and all painted white. She returned to Europe and spent summer with her mother in Italy and with the Besse’s at their villa on the Riviera.

At Paradou Besse made advances to Freya explaining that it was not a moral betrayal of his wife since he still loved her. It is unclear from her letters whether she succumbed to him or not and her autobiography only refers very obliquely to the men in her life. She was always a very private person. It does seem however that she rejected him eventually but both clung to their friendship.

In 1937 Freya went on an expedition to carry out an archaeological dig in Yemen, the first ever. It was also the first time that she travelled with anyone else, her two companions were Gertrude Caton-Thompson, research fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge and Elinor Gardiner both of whom were held in some esteem in their work. Freya was to be responsible for stores, transport and the other women for the scientific side of the expedition. It was not a success since the women disliked each other and the two scientists found Freya’s haphazard way of working too casual but they did unearth many inscriptions, pots and a grave; the first intact grave to be dug in southern Arabia, and a complete temple, only the second to have been found in Yemen,

It was during this trip that she met Stewart Perowne who became the next great love interest in her life and she acquired a pet monitor lizard called Himyar.

Back in England again – but war was looming it was the year of the Munich conference and Freya busied herself with Arabic talks on the BBC with Stewart Perowne with whom she had become very close. They appeared on the new technology of television though Freya was much more at home giving talks to the RGS. As war broke out she offered her services to the war effort in Cairo but eventually was posted to Aden to work with Sas assistant information officer. Her job involved working on positive propaganda and cementing good relations between the Arabs and the British, not unlike what Gertrude Bell did in the previous conflict. In 1941 she was sent to Baghdad and worked with some of the very people that Bell worked with.

At the end of the war she left Iraq travelling across the desert with Stewart Perowne through Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan. From there she flew on alone to Libya where she met with representatives of various governments including Winston Churchill and Eisenhower. And then she returned to England - the place she always considered home where her loyalties lay and whose interests she upheld and worked tirelessly for even though she never quite belonged and had too much of a touch of the foreigner about her.

She did a tour of America and Canada to promote Arab interests against the Zionist tide.

She foresaw only trouble if there was to be a wholesale migration of Jews into Palestine. The Americans were very against her and her beliefs but she was angered by the hypocrisy of a country that preached equality and independence for all nations yet treated its non-white citizens so badly.

By the end of the war Freya was 52 but continued to travel and write becoming one of our best known writer/explorers.

In 1947 Stewart, now retired from the colonial services was offered a post in Antigua and now finally asked Freya to marry him. She was delighted and accepted with alacrity. Her girlish delight and enthusiastic preparations for a romantic wedding belied her fifty-four years and embarrassed her friends who were aware as she was not that Stewart was a homosexual. He was also nine years younger than she. The couple honeymooned in Venice and then he returned to his work in Antigua. Their marriage was not a success, Freya hated the role of colonial wife now thrust on her and she left.

Stewart eventually wrote the truth about himself to her in response to her many probing questions. After several attempts at reconciliation when she felt she could “cure” him, they parted and though deeply hurt he never breathed a word of criticism against her. Freya plunged into a decade of travel and exploration in Turkey; her books about Turkey became obligatory reading for anyone planning to travel there.

At the age of eighty-two Freya was knighted and became Dame Freya Stark. At eighty-four she made a film with the BBC from a leaking raft on the Euphrates, at eighty-eight she was filmed riding a mule in the Himalayas. On her ninety-first birthday the town of Asolo held a celebration party in her honour for which the Queen Mother sent the Household Cavalry to parade but she was now a shadow of what she had been. There was still a twinkle in her eye but she was no longer so aware of the things around her.

She died in her home at Asolo at the age of one hundred on May 9th 1993.

Like Freya, Agatha Christie lived through both World Wars.
Born to a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, Agatha had a very happy childhood. Her time was spent alternating between her Devonshire home and parts of Southern Europe, where her family would holiday during the winter.Though Christian, she believed in the occult, and like her siblings thought that their mother Clara was a psychic with the ability of second sight.She was educated at home but after her father died in 1902, Agatha was sent to receive a formal education at Miss Guyer's Girls School in Torquay, but hated the discipline. In 1905 she was sent to Paris to complete her education.
Returning to England in 1910, Agatha found her mother Clara ill. They holidayed in the warmer climate of Cairo in Egypt, then a part of the British Empire and a popular tourist destination for wealthy Britons. Staying for three months at the Gezirah Palace Hotel, Agatha – always chaperoned by her mother – attended many social functions in search of a husband and visited the ancient Egyptian monuments such as the Great Pyramid of Giza
Returning to Britain, she continued her social activities in search of a husband. Writing and performing in amateur theatrics. Her writing extended to both poetry and music.
After several brief relationships and one engagement, she met Archibald "Archie" Christie at a dance given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh, near Torquay. Archie had joined the air service, stationed at Devon in 1912. The couple quickly fell in love. Upon learning he would be stationed in Farnborough, Archie proposed marriage, and she accepted.
1914 saw the outbreak of World War I, and Archie was sent to France to fight. Agatha also involved herself in the war effort, joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment and attending to wounded soldiers at the hospital in Torquay.
She met her fiancé Archie, in London during his leave at the end of 1914, and they married on Christmas Eve.
Although initially unsuccessful at getting her work published, in 1920 The Bodley Head press published her novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring the character of Poirot. The rest is history as she became one of the most successful authors ever.
In late 1926, Agatha's husband Archie asked for a divorce; he was in love with Nancy Neele. On 3 December 1926, the couple quarrelled, and Archie left their house Styles in Sunningdale, Berkshire, to spend the weekend with his mistress. That same evening, around 9.45 pm, Agatha disappeared from her home, leaving behind a letter for her secretary saying that she was going to Yorkshire.
Her car, a Morris Cowley, was later found near Guildford, with an expired driving licence and clothes.Her disappearance caused an outcry from the public. The Home Secretary pressured police; a newspaper offered £100 reward.
Over a thousand police officers, 15,000 volunteers and several aeroplanes scoured the countryside. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even gave a spirit medium one of Agatha's gloves to help find the missing woman.
10 days later Agatha Agatha was found at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, registered as 'Mrs Teresa Neele' from Cape Town.
Agatha never explained her disappearance. It was probably a nervous breakdown from depression caused by her mother's death earlier that year and her husband's infidelity.
The Christies divorced in 1928
Feeling bereft Agatha like the other women in this talk opted for travel as a means of taking her mind off her sorrows. A chance meeting aroused her interest in Baghdad and she booked a ticket for the Orient Express. Striking out on her own for the first time, she arrived in Constantinople where she stayed at the Pera Palace Hotel
Agatha had always had an interest in archaeology.

She wrote, “The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself.”

On a trip to the excavation site at Ur in 1930, she met her future husband, Sir Max Mallowan, a distinguished archaeologist, but her fame as an author far surpassed his fame in archaeology.Prior to meeting Mallowan, Agatha had not had any extensive brushes with archaeology, but once the two married they made sure to only go to sites where they could work together.
She wrote,

“Many years ago, when I was once saying sadly to Max it was a pity I couldn't have taken up archaeology when I was a girl, so as to be more knowledgeable on the subject, he said, 'Don't you realize that at this moment you know more about prehistoric pottery than any woman in England?”

While accompanying Mallowan on countless archaeological trips, spending up to 3 or 4 months at a time in Syria and Iraq at excavation sites at Ur, Ninevah, Tell Arpachiyah, Chagar Bazar, Tell Brak, and Nimrud, Agatha not only wrote novels and short stories, but also contributed work to the archaeological sites, more specifically to the archaeological restoration and labelling of ancient exhibits which included tasks such as cleaning and conserving delicate ivory pieces, reconstructing pottery, developing photos from early excavations which later led to taking photographs of the site and its findings, and taking field notes.
So as to not influence the funding of the archaeological excavations, Agatha would always pay for her own board and lodging and her travel expenses, and supported excavations as an anonymous sponsor.
After the Second World War, she chronicled her time in Syria with fondness in "Come Tell Me How You Live", a collection of anecdotes, memories, funny episodes with emphasis on eccentric characters, and lovely scenery.
Four of her detective novels were inspired by her experiences in the East. “Murder in Mesopotamia”, “Appointment with Death”, “Death on the Nile”, “They Came to Baghdad”.
Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976 at age 85 at her home in Oxfordshire.
Intrepid, unbowed, by convention, curious, these women found fulfilment through travel and independence. It also gave them a means of escape from grief, anxiety or scandal. They shared a love of antiquity and the ancient forms of words and ritual that they found in the Orient. Where they made their homes they created gardens also with the exception of Isabelle for her only the desert mattered. Their legacy is the writing and sketches they left behind, maps, pictures, letters and books to inspire successive generations of travellers.

If you have enjoyed reading this look out for my book "Some Sweet Garden Side".
Josephine Hammond

J M Hammond

Wednesday 2 October 2013

Tenby Arts Festival

Travellers in the Sands of Time