Gertrude Bell, T.E. Lawrence, Sir Mark Sykes & the ‘Spanish Flu’

Gertrude Bell, T. E. Lawrence and David Lloyd George each had their brushes with the ‘Spanish Flu’ influenza pandemic of 1918-19 and the grief, illness and long-term effects that accompanied it. Sir Mark Sykes, joint author of the secretively planned 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement which carved up the post-WW1 Middle East to Russio-colonial tastes, caught a fatal dose at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

The agreed British and American position in political circles was to play down the seriousness of the influenza epidemic and this is evident in Gertrude Bell’s letters, as she alerted her family to her illnesses and her need to pay doctors while almost casually brushing off her ill-health. She played the game well, abiding by the party line of not admitting to weakness to avoid stirring any greater unrest in a world still reeling from the upheavals of the Great War and a period of very wet, cold weather. Even the misnomer ‘Spanish Flu’ suited the western powers seeking to remove this influenza epidemic from public view and world leaders’ spheres of responsibility.

Gertrude Gets ‘Flu - and Diverts with a Murder Mystery

In October 1918, Gertrude Bell wrote to her step-mother Florence and mentioned that she was recovering from influenza and malaria. She was fairly casual about two ailments that were killer diseases at that time, stoically brushing off the illnesses and diverting instead to a piece of scandal in the midst of the colonial elite in Tehran.

[Letter from Gertrude Bell, 25th October 1918] “Baghdad Oct 25 Dearest Mother. I'm still slowly getting over malaria - it does take a long time, but I'm certainly better than I was last week … A terrible tragedy has happened at Tehran [to] Sir Walter Barttelot, with whom I used to ride at Gulhak before breakfast. He was also our host on the night expedition into the hills which I described to you. He has been murdered in his bed by a jealous husband - I know no details but I profoundly believe that there was nothing in the whole business but wicked Tehran gossip. The wife in question, Mrs Maclaren, left Tehran a month ago and passed through here on her way to England. I didn't see her in Baghdad, partly because I was having influenza at the time and other partly because, though I had seen very little of her at Gulhak, I thought her Class B lady and had no special wish to renew the acquaintance.”

Leaving aside the great scandal, and her almost comedic dismissal of a Class B lady, it’s interesting to look at Bell’s parallel dismissal of her own influenza. She will have known that she was fortunate to have survived this particular bout of ‘flu, particularly alongside the malaria that routinely affected those who lived and travelled in the Middle East and Asia, given that before the Great War had even come to an end an especially dangerous influenza virus had been on the move. It came in waves, most perilously in the autumn and winter of 1918, creeping into the first few months of 1919. British troops and diplomats, among others, moved the virus around Europe and the Middle East.

The ‘Spanish Flu’ and the End of the Great War

Possible ‘herald events’ of this particular H1N1 'flu occurred from December 1915 onward, yet ‘herd immunity’ wasn’t established; and from March 1918 the so-called (and misnomered) ‘Spanish Flu’ hit a world already weary and dislocated from the Great War and a period of wet, cold weather. The influenza came in three deadly waves. Tens of millions died. Many of the military and political strategists and tacticians who had survived the First World War would not survive this pandemic, particularly the second and third waves with their higher frequencies of complicated, severe and fatal cases.

Sir Mark Sykes died; but Gertrude Bell survived, as did US President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. President of the United States Woodrow Wilson was severely weakened by his near-death experience with the ‘Spanish Flu’, politically as well as physically. T. E. Lawrence lost his father to the pandemic.

Sir Mark Sykes, and the Regulation of Knowledge

One thing that puzzled me, when initially researching this part of Bell’s life, is how indifferent she appears to have been, in terms of her lack of reference to it in her copious diaries and letters, to the death of Mark Sykes from the ‘Spanish Flu’ in a hotel on the 16th of February 1919 during the Paris Peace Conference. In fact, she appears to have simply ignored his death altogether.

Gertrude Bell was complex and brilliant. She was an admirably ‘difficult woman’ - and I mean that in a laudatory sense - with strong opinions and focused determination. She was sensible and pragmatic about illness and, to some degree, death. At the same time she also had an internalised need for family approval, especially that of her father; and, related to this, punctuating her life, she displayed a need for the approval of various men who were unsuitable or otherwise unavailable (i.e. married).

Sir Mark Sykes was apparently not one of the objects of her admiration; and they were not long-term friends. After an initial cordial introduction in Jerusalem in 1905 it appears they subsequently irritated each other intensely - seemingly two strong personalities who rubbed each other up the wrong way to a historic degree.

Although Bell could never compete against his inherent male privilege, it is recorded that she was frequently more than a match for him. She ‘stole’ a route through the desert from him, and rode through it on horseback to beat him to his destination. He was furious, and wrote that she was a ‘chattering windbag … a flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blathering ass’. In turn she thought him incompetent. (Perhaps her ‘chattering windbag’ persona had been a ruse to lure Sykes into a false sense of security; or perhaps he simply didn’t like women with strong opinions.)

The Peace Conference at Versailles, Paris, 1919 - A Gathering of Colonials

While not friends, neither were Bell and Sykes enemies. They were more like sparring partners who cropped up in each other’s orbits in the Middle East and in Europe from time to time. At the end of the Great War they were both present at the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919, along with Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson. But if Bell had a friend at the conference, it was most definitely T E Lawrence, not Sykes.

Sykes had been instrumental in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a mid-War carve-up plan of a projected post-War future; and by 1919 it was proving unpopular. Sykes had also vociferously supported the Balfour Agreement, which in Paris was encountering fierce opposition from behind-the-scenes advisors like Bell and Lawrence who felt that the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine - which the British had taken from the Turkish Ottoman Empire during the War - would be a hugely destabilising mistake for the Middle East.

Various accounts suggest that Sykes was a shattered man, who had begun to question his own support for a Jewish state or homeland in Palestine. Arguably he was becoming yesterday’s man and was aware of this. Bell, whilst also exhausted by the War, felt that there was a huge amount of work to do not only to stabilise the Middle East with a focus on British interests and Arab self-determination, but also to secure her own part in it. She spoke to those in high places and positions of influence who would listen, from statesmen to newspapermen, and put off her much longed for motoring holiday with her father in order to continue her ‘work’ in Paris.

Sykes’s support for the French interests in Syria was also unpopular with many of the delegates. Woodrow Wilson and the Americans certainly did not want to see a return to colonialism in the Middle East.

It is reported that Sykes succumbed to the influenza pandemic, and died in his hotel room in Paris, after struggling for five days to fight off the virus in his lungs. He was only 39 years old. While Sir Mark Sykes’s death was convenient for Zionists who did not wish him to be able to voice his change of heart about a Jewish homeland, his official cause of death was influenza, and foul play has never been suspected. Sykes was buried in a lead-lined coffin in England, which was unfortunately later found to have split, leaving forensic examination of possible viruses and any other potential causes of death impossible.

Bell the Survivor

These great historical character’s lives were constantly impacted by disease and illnesses, and studying them both in life and death can bring us greater understanding of their achievements as well as their foibles. In Bell’s case, for example, luck and possibly her age - she was 50 in late 1918 - given what we now know about the sometimes over-active immune responses of younger adults and Spanish Flu, were on her side. She had an underlying fitness and athleticism, having once been an accomplished mountaineer, and she maintained, both at home in England and in the Middle East, an energetic daily routine which might involve walking, horse-riding, gardening and swimming .

She was however a heavy smoker of cigarettes - indeed, the habit likely contributed to her death. Research continues into the possibility that smoking might lessen the effects of cytokine storms (though many remain understandably sceptical about this). Bell also habitually carried, took and dispensed quinine on her travels on the Middle East and Far East, and had access to good quality medical care at home and abroad. She was a stickler for personal hygiene, as her wealth allowed her to be. Even on her most arduous desert journeys, she was known to travel with a caravan capable of transporting her pristine dinner services and her portable bath - and she had the money to employ the servants and draft animals to carry and boil the necessary water and to prepare baths nightly.

And so there we leave Bell, Sykes, Lawrence and their colleagues, and their pandemic, and continue our own modern quest to try to survive and conquer ours. Theirs was an influenza that they had to learn to live (or die) with; ours is a coronavirus we may well have to regard similarly in due course. We too have our own twin pestilences of plague and war to overcome, with a climate emergency even more devastating than that of 1918. It is we who are living through history now - and it is peculiarly our own.

Sources and Acknowledgements

The Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University (Letters, Diaries, Photographs)

Taubenberger, Jeffery K and Morens, David M (Jan 2006) ‘1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemic’ Ermerging Infectious Diseases https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/

Martine Kettle (25 May 2018) ‘A century on, why are we forgetting the deaths of 100 million?’ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/25/spanish-flu-pandemic-1918-forgetting-100-million-deaths

Auron, Yair (2000) The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide (2009 edition, pp 216-17)

Soussi, Alasdair (10 Feb, 2018) The National News ‘The Spanish flu pandemic and its impact on the Middle East’ https://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/the-spanish-flu-pandemic-and-its-impact-on-the-middle-east-1.703289

Wallach, Janet (1996) Desert Queen, the Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: adventurer, adviser to kings, ally of Lawrence of Arabia

Pers. comm. (email correspondence, 24-25 May 2020) with Professor John Oxford, Queen Mary College London

Special thanks to Professor John Oxford and the family of Sir Mark Sykes