REMARKABLE WOMAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 August 1940, Page 6

REMARKABLE WOMAN

ADMIRATION FOR THE ARABS. East Rounton is one of Yorkshire’s little-known villages, but it has something well worth seeing, a window in memory of one of the most remarkable w/omen of all time. She was Gertrude Bell, who had a heart which loved the Arabs. One of the most romantic of all English women, she was scholar, poet, historian, antiquarian, gardener, mountaineer, explorer, lover of nature, especially flowers and animals, and —as we read in the little church at Rounton—an incomparable friend. Born at Washington in Durham, she went out East. She met Lawrence of Arabia. She studied the Arabs as no other woman, except Lady Hester Stanhope, had ever studied them. She mapped Northern Arabia. She was an invaluable administrator for the reconstruction of Mesopotamia.

All her qualities of heart, head, and hand, she devoted to South West Asia. In the war years, after the British occupation of Bagdad, she was appointed Political Officer and Oriental Secretary in the administration of Iraq —the first woman ever to hold such positions. She did magnificent work, and the signing of the 1926 treaty with the Turks was in great measure the crowning of her long labour, and the fulfilling of her most cherished desires.

She sleeps in Baghdad. In England her window shows not only the minarets of the Eastern city but also the snow-capped peaks of the Alps she loved to climb, and the English village she loved as a girl.