Red Barns and Gertrude Lothian Bell - by Fr Neil McNicholas

Growing up in Redcar I was always familiar with the “Red Barns” house and garden, seeing it every time I crossed Black Bridge. At the time it was a residence for what I can only assume were private pupils attending Sir William Turner grammar school which originally occupied the site on Coatham Road where the new leisure & community centre stands. (The Coatham Memorial Hall used to be part of the school.)

There was always something a little odd about “Red Barns” in that the side of the house that faces onto Kirkleatham Street looked more like the back of the house, and I suspect that’s how it was designed so the front of the house faced onto its spacious garden and looked toward the hills because at the time there would have been nothing else to spoil the view. There was no Locke Park until 1929 and the only other item on that side of the house was the Darlington to Saltburn railway at the bottom of the garden, but that wouldn’t have bothered the family given that Sir Hugh Bell who owned the house was not only one of the region’s wealthy “iron masters”, but he had a branch line from the railway serve the family house taking him to and from his iron works.

And that’s where we come to the blue plaque that rather incongruously adorns the unsightly Kirkleatham Street wall of the house. Installed in 1934 it reads: Gertrude Lowthian Bell at one time lived in this house, scholar, traveller, administrator and peace maker, a friend of the Arabs. As a youngster I must have read that plaque any number of times, but it basically meant nothing to me whatsoever until I was working in the Middle East and became aware of the role that Gertrude Bell played in the history of that region and in the formation of Iraq. I won’t attempt to even summarise that history - if you are interested in learning more, there are a number of books about Gertrude Bell’s life and achievements, as well as a recent Hollywood film (Queen of the Desert) and a full-length documentary (Letters From Baghdad).

I rather suspect that without the war in Iraq and the current political goings-on in Iraq and Syria, Gertrude Bell would have remained a largely forgotten figure. The only time her name ever seems to come up is in connection with the exploits of Lawrence of Arabia. As a result it seems to me that very few Redcar people will know anything about her and therefore, sadly, the real significance of “Red Barns” with its blue plaque is largely ignored. Having, as we’ve said, been a residence for the grammar school, it eventually became a pub and hotel, but there was nothing on display to make customers any the wiser as to who used to live there. And so in the late 1980s I put together a display about Gertrude Bell which used to hang on the wall by Reception. The hotel has since closed and is now in a sad state of disrepair (how that was allowed to happen given that it is a Grade II listed building I don’t know) with a campaign supposedly in place to save it and have it restored. History at risk of being lost.

The Bell family originally lived in Washington Hall in County Durham (not to be confused with nearby Washington Old Hall where George’s ancestors once lived). It later became an old people’s home and, more recently I believe, luxury flats, but identifiable by Hugh’s father, Sir Isaac Bell’s, stained glass initials in the entrance hall windows if they have survived. It was there that Gertrude was born in 1868. Two years later the family moved to the newly built “Red Barns” in Redcar – they would have thought of it as Coatham. The family built another new house at Rounton, where the family moved when Gertrude was 36. She was responsible for landscaping the garden, creating a lake and a renowned rockery. Sadly the house was demolished in the 1950s and nothing now remains of it or the garden - in fact I think some of the site has now been built on and so another piece of history has been lost.

However, in the parish church in East Rounton (a village which seems to have served the Bell estate) (a number of family members are buried in the churchyard in a little hedged area to the left) there is a memorial window to Gertrude Bell. It depicts a western scene (the Matterhorn in Switzerland which she climbed and the college in Oxford where she studied), and an eastern scene (a desert oasis and the Khadimain shrine in Baghdad). The inscription in Arabic above the window is translated in English to the right, and the Farsi inscription on either side is an excerpt from one of her favourite poems. When I first visited the church there was absolutely nothing to explain the significance of the window, and so I gave a copy of the display I had prepared for the Red Barns Hotel and it was placed on the wall next to the window. In recent years much more information has appeared. The church is well worth a visit. (On the other side of the A19, a few miles south of the Rounton turn-off, are the ruins of Mount Grace Priory. The house there is yet another property that the Bell family once owned, along with much of the land including the hillside above it.)

On July 12th, 1926, three days before her fifty-eighth birthday, Gertrude was discovered dead from an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. There is much debate as to whether it was intentional or accidental – you’d have to have read her life story in order to have an opinion one way or the other. She was buried in the British cemetery in Baghdad, her funeral being a major event attended by large numbers of people including British officials and King Faisal.

They say hindsight is a wonderful thing, and with the perspective hindsight and history give us on the current political and religious situation in Iraq, Iran and Syria, it is easy to condemn the role that Great Britain, and individuals like Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, played in arbitrarily establishing borders in that region with, it can appear, little or no regard for historical tribal territories. However, like a lot of things throughout history, at the time that may have been the best way they knew to do things, and it’s only history that proves whether decisions were right or wrong - none of which should take away from the extraordinary figure for her time that was Gertrude Bell: scholar, traveller, administrator, archaeologist, linguist, arabist and friend of the Arabs.

A brass plaque commissioned for the museum in Baghdad which she created in 1923 read in part: King Faisal and the Government of Iraq, in gratitude for her great deeds in this country, have ordered that the principle wing shall bear her name and with their permission her.

Fr McNicholas can be contacted via email by clicking here