Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell Page B

felt that he should have been consulted. He, after all, would inherit the title. Gertrude and Hugh appear to have agreed that it was questionable to inherit titles through birth rather than ability, an attitude to equality and plain living perhaps inherited from the Pattinsons’ Quaker tradition. If so, that is probably the reason that Hugh chose to write to her rather than to his father.
    The old lady was already ill when she became Lady Bell, and survived only another year. Within a short time of her death came another to sadden the family: Uncle Tommy, Florence’s naughty brother, was killed when he was run over by a London bus.
    Back in Redcar, Gertrude was drawn into Florence’s social work, as she would always be if she stayed at home too long. Soon after marriage, her stepmother had begun an immense project which she dedicated to Charles Booth, who, a few years later, would begin to publish his voluminous study of poverty,
Life and Labour of the People in London
. Over a period of nearly thirty years she and her committee were to interview a thousand of the families employed at the Clarence steelworks, putting these working-class people’s lives under the microscope. Gertrude joined the committee intermittently, interviewing the wives and in 1889 acting as treasurer for various works projects. Later, in Florence’s absences, she would arrange teas, give lectures with lantern slides about her own adventures, and organize Christmas festivities for the workers.
    The book that Florence eventually published in 1907,
At the Works
, was factually exhaustive, providing ample research material for those who had a mission to campaign for change. It is easy to regard Florence’s work as incomplete. Having exposed the suffering endured by the poorer working families and especially when they struck hard times, it explores no further the deep fissures in Victorian society. It poses no remedies. Florence’s position as the ironmaster’s wife has been suggested as compromising. This is to ignore the extraordinary character of her husband and of the Bell enterprises. Capitalist and employer as Hugh was, he saw no conflict between masters and men—more, he saw them as mutually dependent. His men were well paid, enjoying comforts and pleasures denied to many industrial poor and to those who toiled on unenlightenedagricultural estates. He carried on his father’s mission to promote education, and it was a lack of education that lay behind much of the hardship in poorly run homes. He was not just a liberal in his thinking, but active in Liberal politics. He joined the debate about the duty of the state to care for the individual. He believed in the role of the new trade unions, and that employers should encourage them in a shared concern for the welfare of the workers. Socialism was already at the heart of the new political philosophy, if not accepted in its more Marxist extremes. Hugh was part of the thrust towards a welfare state, realized in his lifetime by Lloyd George and Churchill in legislation for benefits for the sick and unemployed and eventually in retirement. It was enough for Florence to display the workers’ suffering and to show how it arose. Hugh’s respect for her as a woman of intelligence and purpose no doubt lay behind her unique access to his men, their wives, and their homes.
    To understand the importance of Florence’s work, one has to bear in mind that at the time the commonplace middle-class view of the working classes was ill-informed and moralistic. Merchants’ wives and ladies at London supper parties would be applauded for such sentiments as “I cannot have any sympathy for the labouring classes because they don’t look after their children properly, or keep their houses clean. The children die, and it is the mothers’ fault.” What Florence did was to lay down the facts of the workers’ and their families’ lives so truthfully that