Bell often picnicked for entertainment and worked as Oriental Secretary to the High Commissioner in Baghdad) and spy. Often, the two were indistinguishable. Once using the picnic as a deception, she and her companions took an official (not identified) to a lonely beach, where they interrogated him. “So we bathed from a little sandy island below Baghdad and went back to dine on Davidson’s terrace,” she wrote in her diary, “to make it as much as possible like a picnic.”
Another time, Bell recalls that the king provided a royal picnic: “The palace servants had brought up some 8 or 10 huge fish (unidentified) which they roasted before a bonfire of palm fronds, a delectable food which formed the principal course. But besides that, there was a multitude of excellent Syrian dishes. You get to hate food in this weather, and the Sunday picnic after swimming is the only meal in the week, which I enjoy. We lay on carpets and cushions, like ancient Greeks, and eat by the light of a little moon, after which we remained for a long time under the tamarisk bushes.” While Bell and the king chatted amiably about family matters, she privately wondered, “I hope he’ll go on being as devoted to me as he is now, for it does make things easier to deal with.”
Though she was well-versed in local customs, she always wore Western clothing. A photograph shows Bell in Western garb at a picnic breakfast with Iraq’s King Faisal in the shade of a ruined tower. To beat the intense heat, Bell and company, which also included ranking British military, dined and arrived home again by 9:00. Bell assures us that in the morning, the dessert was “heavenly.” Like Faisal, Bell sat cross-legged in the Arab fashion
Featured Image: Gertrude Bell sitting in the Arab fashion picnicking with King Faisal and British military officers at Tel’ Aquar Quf (August 1921)
See Gertrude Bell Archives, New Castle University, http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/ ; Rory Stewart, “Queen of Quagmire,” The New York Review of Books (October 25, 2007)