It has been a busy year but we put together an exciting programme of events which can be seen on www.tenbyartsfest.co.uk
Highlights of the festival were Charlie Lovell-Jones, a superb young violinist and a wonderful presentation of Chopin's life and music - a collaboration between myself writing the script, Alberto Bona acting as Chopin's ghost and Costas Fotopoulos, international pianist playing the lovely music including his own composition "Hommage a Chopin" which was also the title for the concert.
Viv McLean, also a pianist gave a fabulous concert and the Budapest City Orchestra treated us to a lively display of Balkan gypsy music as well as some more sombre melancholic pieces.
There were plays too, The Fossil Lady of Lyme, and The Late Marilyn Monroe as well as one about Augustus John, his sister Gwen and Nina Hamnett written by local author Tony Curtis. All three held the audience on the edges of their chairs.
There were also some fascinating talks including my own which I have posted here.
And there were art exhibitions around the town, not least Misrana by Susan Sands a lovely mixture of the different media in which she works and her twin passions for the landscape of Pembrokeshire and life in India.
Wednesday, 2 October 2013
Travellers in the Sands of Time
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 18th 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.
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 19th 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 19th
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.
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
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