You may be forgiven for thinking that as keepers of the Wiltshire and Swindon archives our collections have a local or regional focus. Frequently, however, a dip into a collection reveals fascinating insights into world affairs far removed from our Wiltshire home.

One such collection is the Bowman and Mann family papers (WSHC 1038) which take us on a journey into post First World War Mesopotamia and the creation of a new nation state – Iraq. It is here that a young Army officer Captain James Saumarez Mann met Arabist Gertrude Bell.

One of our young student volunteers takes up the story.

I first heard about Gertrude Bell when I started transcribing her letters for the WSHC. I’m honestly surprised she isn’t more well known. She was a respected Arabist during the early 20th century, and she worked with T.E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill.

The eight letters I transcribed included condolence letters from Gertrude to the parents of James Saumarez Mann, a young army officer, who was killed during the Arab uprising of July 1920. Gertrude worked with Saumarez when she was with the British colonial administration in Baghdad.

Before I started this project, I knew very little about Iraq and its surrounding countries, but I have since learned that in the time of Gertrude Bell it was a very tumultuous place. To secure Arab support during the First World War, Britain and the allies promised self-determination to various tribal groups, promises they could not keep.
These broken promises eventually led to the 1920 Iraqi Revolt started. It was also known as the Great Iraqi Revolution. It began in the summer of 1920 but was suppressed by the British by October of the same year. It was at the start of the siege of Kufa – on 22 July 1920 – that Capt. Mann was shot and killed.

Following his death Gertrude wrote a series of letters to the Mann family, praising their son’s work as a political officer and setting out how the British administration proposed to create a nation state.

In March 1921 Gertrude wrote a letter to Mrs Mann in which she said: “…it’s all still too much in the melting pot till we get our treaty through.” This letter also contained a photographic negative of Saumarez’s grave in the Baghdad military cemetery.

The solution the British had was to support Faisal in his endeavour to create an independent Arab state. Saumarez’s father wrote back to Gertrude: “We can only hope and trust that Sir Percy Cox [High Commissioner of Iraq] and his assistants will succeed in establishing the Nation State.”

Gertrude Bell, like her friend T.E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – had promoted Faisal as a suitable head of state. Gertrude wrote to the Manns describing Faisal: “He is a fine creature with high ideals and great breadth of view who can, if anyone can (and I feel a hopeful confidence), succeed in laying permanent foundations here.”

Gertrude Bell was educated at Oxford University and travelled the world soon after. In 1913-14 she travelled through the Ha’il region (which is now northern Saudi Arabia), one of the first westerners to do so. She was a talented mountain climber and horseback rider.

During the war she worked for the Arab Bureau in Cairo providing detailed intelligence to the British Army about the Middle East, including maps, gathered from her travels through the region. In 1917, at the request of family friend Lord Hardinge, she joined the British Administration in Bagdhad where she would later meet Capt Mann. In one of her letters to his father she described the young Saumarez as “one of the most brilliant, as well as one of the most lovable creatures I have ever met”.

Of his death, Gertrude wrote: “I am so bitterly grieved at the death of your son that I feel I must write and tell you how much we all valued him and how deeply I sympathise with your sorrow.” She described his important work in trying to maintain peace and reported that an Arab friend of hers had overheard people predicting that, had he lived, Saumarez would have become the High Commissioner of Iraq.

In another letter Gertrude said: “…we shall owe unrepayable debt to men like your son – there were not many at his level – who instilled into the Arabs personal confidence and personal affection. It is only in this way that new relations … can be established… new relations which eliminate domination and replace it with guidance and assistance.”

The outpouring of affection for James Saumarez Mann led his family to write a memoir to him based on the many letters they had received. They sent a copy of An Administrator In The Making to Gertrude, and in her reply, she wrote: “It is a wonderful record … During the weeks when I still believed him to be safe in Kufa I often held out to myself the prospect of discussing with him the agitation which led up to the outbreak of 1920 – you may imagine, therefor, with what interest I read his last letters.” Gertrude goes on to suggest that Capt. Mann’s descriptions of the uprising confirmed her theory that religious rather than political unrest motivated the revolt.

Over the course of the year that these letters cover, Gertrude becomes increasingly reflective about the decisions made by the British colonial authorities. In a letter to Mrs Mann she wrote: “But now besides my permanent interest in the fortunes of this country and people, I earnestly desire that the lives lost may not have been in a vain adventure.” With the foundation of the nation state of Iraq with it

In March 1921, the Cairo Conference – attended by Gertrude, Winston Churchill and T E Lawrence, among others – concluded that Faisal would make a suitable leader for the new Iraq. On 23 August 1921 he became King.

Gertrude, who had made Baghdad her home and had supported Faisal since 1919 became a close advisor to the new king. In 1922 King Faisal made her Honorary Director of Antiquities, a role which led her to establish the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, now the Iraq Museum, which opened in 1926. However, Gertrude had health issues and on 12th July 1926 she died after an overdose of sleeping pills.

Anna, Student Volunteer