Women In Archaeology - Meeting Dr Larch Garrad, Isle of Man

June 11, 2022 Eleanor Scott

**Larch the Educationalist. (Credit: Manx National Heritage)**

I met the formidable Dr Larch S Garrad at the Manx Museum in 1980. It was a rather unnerving experience for a 20 year old archaeology student, although I didn’t realise at the time quite how lucky I was. This is a short story of how she saved me from writing a terrible dissertation, rescued my degree, and probably enabled my future career and eventually the establishment of #TRAC. It’s a trivial story in itself; but it’s an adjunct to the whole bigger narrative of extraordinary women of archaeology who deserve much wider recognition. Garrad should have been appointed Director of the Manx Museum, but wasn’t. Nevertheless she became an Isle of Man icon - an archaeologist, educator, natural environment expert, and historian of the landscape.

When Gertrude Met Vita: the Friendship of Gertrude Bell and Vita Sackville-West

May 3, 2022 Eleanor Scott

The vibrant Vita Sackville-West was one of the last British visitors to Gertrude Bell’s Baghdad home in 1926, a few months before Bell’s tragic death from an overdose. The two women were quite different in age, temperament and outlook, but had much in common, not least that they were forces of nature with gripping personal stories and a penchant for rattling the bars of their gilded, gendered cages. Both were the snobbish sort of gender-rebels, drawn together by social class, financial privilege and circumstance. Despite being denied positions, opportunities and property through not being born male, neither of them were particularly feminist. Rich women like Vita and Gertrude didn’t need to be.

The Horrors of the Burnings of 'Witches' and Heretics - Island Stories

October 31, 2021 Eleanor Scott

Sixteenth and 17th century Europe saw a huge swathe of prosecutions, tortures and executions of so-called witches and heretics, including the brutal burnings of local families by foreign elite powers on islands perceived to have weak Christianity and church and a fondness for long-lived pagan superstitions and culture. In this piece I look at the burnings of supposed ‘witches’ and heretics on Guernsey, the Isle of Man and Iceland, and some of the symbols of resistance I remember from my own Manx childhood.

Infanticidal Women: The Strange Resurgence Of Murder Trials In A Corner Of Modern England

October 12, 2021 Eleanor Scott

In one 2021 case in Portsmouth, that of Lisa Blagden, where a murder charge would have been ludicrous given there wasn’t even a killing but rather a perinatal death of indeterminate cause, the bewilderingly punitive Wessex CPS went full steam ahead for a Victorian ‘concealment’ charge and prosecution. This was the prosecution of a groomed, abused, mentally unwell, poor and bereaved young woman who had been deprived in pretty much every way. When the case finally came to court, the judge quite rightfully and mercifully ordered that the accused be given an absolute discharge.

Gertrude Bell and the Pandemic

July 10, 2021 Eleanor Scott

Gertrude Bell with T.E. Lawrence circa 1920 (Credit: Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University) — **Gertrude Bell with T.E. Lawrence *circa* 1920 (Credit: Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University)**

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.

From Greenham Common to Clapham Common - Two Generations of Women's Vigil & Protest

March 15, 2021 Eleanor Scott

I thought I should stick this piece on my Archaeology Blog, too. It’s inter-generational women’s history.

CLICK HERE TO READ

From Greenham Common to Clapham Common

Two generations of vigil & protest

Fine Dining in the Desert with Gertrude Bell

January 18, 2019 Eleanor Scott

**Gertrude Bell’s camp, 1913-14 (Credit: Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University)**

Gertrude Bell led some impressive expeditions across the desert landscapes of the Middle East, but rarely was she without her baggage animals or a cart to carry her dinner service, provisions and equipment, and a servant (or two) to prepare her meals. She also needed corn for the horses and camels and food for her ‘soldiers’ (bodyguards) and servants, so she commanded some fairly sizeable caravans at times. A British woman from a relatively elite social background, she reported back to her father and step-mother in regular letters about her travels, her archaeological surveys, her studies of Arab tribes, and her mealtimes. It wasn’t just that food per se was important to her - she was diligent about properly punctuating her day with breakfast, lunch and dinner. The online Gertrude Bell Archive of Newcastle University, thanks to its search function, shows 627 entries in her diaries and letters just for the word ‘dined’ alone. Desert travels also involved eating with Arab tribal leaders as part of the social obligation of reciprocal gift-giving. Bell also received culinary hospitality from many Middle Eastern peoples, including the Yazidis. The details that Bell gives us of these cultural transactions are a fascinating insight into the role that food and eating played in her desert travels, the creation of her persona, and how she saw the natural order of things.

Gertrude Bell 1914-15 - Christmas in France, a New Year in Purgatory

December 22, 2018 Eleanor Scott

**Gertrude Bell in the Middle East, just a few years prior to the outbreak of WW1**

Gertrude Bell and T E Lawrence did their best, whilst disagreeing over fundamental issues such as the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine. Bell foresaw endless struggle and war – and what she saw in France, the fear and the grief and the pain and the suffering, especially of the young, made her wearily cynical of her generation getting it right. She died in 1926; but, like many, by 1915 she’d already seen and felt enough. It was far from ‘all over by Christmas’ - it was never over.

Gertrude Bell's World War 1 - Beginnings

November 15, 2018 Eleanor Scott

**Gertrude Bell possibly circa 1914 (Photo credit: Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University)**

Gertrude Bell’s experience of war work in the south of England and in France was brief, but formative. It began just a few months after the outbreak of the Great War in the summer of 1914. It’s an intriguing story, able to be told primarily because we have her surviving letters as a central part of the archive. Bored and frustrated at Clandon Park Hospital in the south of England - which has been, to date, a little-discussed episode in her life - with no role to speak of except taking round reading materials to wounded Belgian troops, she maneuvered her way over to France to fill a secretarial position. Bell, while there, awkwardly met with Lilian (‘Judith’) Doughty-Wylie, the experienced, respected field nurse who was the wife of the man she hoped to marry; had an epiphany about life being too short; set up a filing system to help distraught relatives better trace missing and wounded boys and young men; and came home just a few months later. Within a year Gertrude Bell was called to the Middle East to serve the British administration – where, in Baghdad, after a series of notable geo-political accomplishments, she died just a decade later by her own hand.

Gertrude Bell - in Search of the 'Real Woman'

October 13, 2018 Eleanor Scott

My disappointment and frustration with Bell’s portrayal in Herzog’s ‘Queen of the Desert’ led me to start writing a blog piece about what is actually fascinating and significant about her life and her relationships - and yes, that includes her ‘love life’ (when this is not being mis-characterised and hatchet-edited as part of the movie process) - as well as thinking about what perspectives might best be brought to bear when analysing and studying the important aspects of Bell’s world and agency. The resulting study is something of a psychological narrative, punctuated by Bell’s encounters with real flesh-and-blood people. (I also have a lot more to write about the circumstances around her death, and how it was received and documented.)

The Death Of Gertrude Bell

April 19, 2017 Eleanor Scott

**Gertrude Bell's funeral, Baghdad, 12th July 1926. Photo: Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University**

How someone died is not always relevant to how they lived; but in the case of Gertrude Bell, I believe that the circumstances of her death tell us a great deal about how she felt about her own life - which in turn casts light on a whole host of historical circumstances of that era, not least the impacts of class and sex, during a time when the Middle East was being carved up and re-plated for Western consumption.

I've studied Gertrude Bell's work for over 25 years. I never felt especially attracted or connected on any personal level to the woman who manifests herself in her writings, but was always fascinated by the richness of her archaeological and photographic output and how that legacy was handled. Yet, just lately, I find myself being drawn again and again to read about the circumstances of her death. I think I know why this is, and it certainly is personal - this year I'll be the age she was when she died. And I think I've finally found the connection that was missing.

Greenham Common Peace Camp - Women's History and Competing Masculinities

January 7, 2017 Eleanor Scott

I look at my photographs of Greenham Common from the early 1980s and I see more now than I saw then. I see the women again, certainly: defiant, rainbow-colourful and vibrant; and I see the sharp razor wire perimeter and the police presence; but I also see competing masculinities that I hadn't thought about before.

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