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British Museum

Lecture to Friends of the Museum by HVF Winstone during

AGATHA CHRISTIE Exhibition

29 January02

with readings by LINDSAY ALLEN, SARAH COLLINS & HENRIETTA McCALL

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QUEENS OF THE DESERT: LADIES OF MESOPOTAMIA

Ladies and Gentlemen.

It has to be said that this great museum, like almost every other institution of its kind anywhere in the world, is living proof of male dominion. Every artefact, almost every label and potted history, attests to a patriarchal world that lasted from the beginning of recorded time to pretty well the end of the 20th century, a world in which relatively few women moved from place to place and those who did took no serious part in discovering or recording the past.

Well, almost. As with most generalisations, the exceptions are compelling. Not even Napoleon, much less the ordinary male explorer, could expect anything like the reception accorded to Lady Hester Stanhope when she turned up at Palmyra in 1812. You will recall that she arrived dressed in Badawin costume in the ancient Syrian town with her inseparable companion Mrs Fry to a massive popular reception. As she rode through ruined Roman streets Arab dancing girls were lowered on ropes from the top of the triumphal arch to place a crown on the distinguished Englishwoman's head. She then camped with her friend for the next week in the Temple of Bel.

More than a century later, another imposing Englishwoman wrote home to her family from a Baghdad freed from Ottoman rule after some seven centuries.

READING GERTRUDE BELL

"I've gone back now to the wild feeling of joy in existence - I am happy in feeling that I've got the love and confidence of a whole nation, a very wonderful and absorbing thing - almost too absorbing perhaps."

That was Gertrude Bell, writing to her father in 1922 four years after British troops had liberated the country from the Turks. They, the troops, called it Mespot. The world had known it for two thousand years by its Greek name Mesopotamia. Now, it was about to assume the name of the city state that pre-dated Alexander's Greece by three thousand years - Al Iraq, Uruk or Erech of the Bible.

 The words are clearly not those of a retiring or reticent person of either sex. Indeed, there is no need for me to introduce that voice of implacable womanhood in this the birthplace of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the Gertrude Bell Memorial as it became, which was the beneficiary of her will to the tune of £6000 when she died in 1926. Her proudest title was that of Honorary Director of Antiquities in the newly created Iraq, and founder of the Baghdad Museum. Along with Philadelphia, the Louvre, Berlin and this place, Baghdad would house many of the glories of Sumer and Akkad, of Babylon and Assyria. I need hardly add that Gertrude, Al Khatun of the Arabs, this lady of high esteem, was also a king maker and nation-state creator in an imperial world where some of the strongest and most uncompromising of men held sway. She was the first female Oriental Secretary in the Indian Government's administration, the first female officer in British military intelligence, and a special adviser to Winston Churchill when, as Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1921 -22, he brokered the establishment of the modern states of Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. She travelled further by camel in the Arab lands than almost any non Arab before or since, male or female, worked on equal terms with the most demanding of scholars, and wrote incessantly and well about the lands she traversed.

I think that will do by way of establishing the Lady's credentials as a woman who knew her way in a man's world, though I should perhaps add that she was an inveterate opponent of women's suffrage and of the Suffragette movement, and a hopelessly unsuccessful seeker after love, marriage and the family life that she coveted above all else.

READING GERTRUDE BELL

February 24, 1921 aboard HMS Hardinge bound for Churchill's Arab Conference in Cairo: "We're off."

March 12, Cairo: "We arrived yesterday. TE Lawrence met us at the station - I was glad to see him. We retired at once to my bedroom...and had an hour's talk, after which I had a long talk with Clementine...."

April (exact date indistinct):

"My Beloved Frank (Frank Balfour, Military Governor of Baghdad and nephew of the Conservative prime minister): I'll tell you about our Conference. It has been wonderful. We covered more work in a fortnight than has ever been got through in a year. Mr Churchill was admirable, most ready to meet everyone halfway... Not the least favourable circumstance was that... when we [Sir Percy Cox and I] came to open our packet...it coincided exactly with that which the Secretary of State had brought with him... "

April 16, Baghdad: "Dearest Mamma, Will you send me some thick woollen tricotine of a blue as near as may be to the enclosed colour... Further, will you give a pattern of the blue to my hat maker, Anne Marie in Sloane Street"

April 17, "...there was a rumour here that the object of the Conference was to declare Faisal King [he was the third son of Husain, Sharif of Mecca and King of the Hijaz]...it was entirely untrue...Meantime, telegrams are going daily to the King of the Hijaz begging him to send [us] one of his sons."

August 23, Baghdad: "...we've got our King crowned and Sir Percy [Cox, the High Commissioner] and I agree that we're now half seas over...Faisal looked very dignified...he looked along the front row and caught my eye and I gave him a tiny salute...".

We are of course gathered here primarily to discuss Agatha Christie - a frivolous imposition on our intellectual life if we are to believe some self appointed guardians of the 'cultural' scene. It is she, after all, who is featured in the magnificent exhibition that has been running at this Museum for two months. It is her devotion to archaeology that gives us the excuse, and the opportunity, to look at some of the extraordinary and remarkable women who converged on the new Iraq during the excavation of Ur and other important Mesopotamian sites. As I remarked when I came here on the opening day of the Exhibition to talk about Agatha in the context of that dig, one of the most important and successful archaeological expeditions of all time, she was, in more ways than one the creature of Leonard Woolley's making. She had no difficulty in acknowledging her debt. If it had not been for him - or at any rate for his very readable articles in The Times and the Illustrated London News (the nearest thing to television in its day) - she would not in 1928 have gone to Iraq (still called Mesopotamia even then), would not have met the man she was destined to marry, and in all probability would have remained simply the most prolific, successful and famous crime writer of all time, minus one or two best sellers with archaeological themes.

As it was, Ur provided everything that was lacking in her life. Everything that her instincts cried out for and that had been denied her in the comfortable and somewhat hedonistic middle-class existence that she emerged from. It provided argument, friendship, rivalry, companionship, eccentricity, and an abundance of character studies. And it provided subject matter from biblical history to espionage, from colourful Arabs to brainy scholars and a legion of eccentric assistants, to a team leader who exercised almost dictatorial authority over his professional assistants but was putty in the hands of his wife Katharine - who was viewed by all with a mixture of fascination and trepidation. Then there was the backdrop provided by the charismatic gang leader Hamoudi, conducting Woolley's symphony with iron will and extravagant gestures, the rogue turned philosopher who was trained by Evans's Gregori at Crete, worked with Campbell Thompson, Woolley and Lawrence at Carchemish, and now dominated the airwaves at Ur.

A writer of detective stories, mysteries and who-dunnits could hardly have failed to make a mint out of Ur.

 Agatha, in her autobiography, said it well:

READING AGATHA CHRISTIE

From An Autobiography, Collins 1993: I fell in love with Ur, with its beauty in the evenings, the ziggurat standing up, faintly shadowed, and that wide area of sand with its lovely pale colours of apricot, rose, blue and mauve changing every minute... The lure of the past came up to grab me... The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself. How unfortunate it was, I thought, that I had always led such a frivolous life...I remembered with deep shame how in Cairo as a girl my mother had tried to persuade me to see the past glories of Egypt, and how I had wanted only to meet young men and dance till the small hours of the morning. Well, I suppose there is a time for everything.

Let me say a few things about Ur and the man who led the joint expedition of the British and Philadelphia museums. The site at Ur was nothing more than a sand-covered mound inhabited by lions when Woolley took it over. Students of its earlier history may recall that when Kennet Loftus went there in the mid 19th century for the Survey of India his beloved dogs were consumed before he could intervene to save them by the hungry lions then in residence.

Some of you may also recall from his book As I Seem to Remember that when Woolley returned to the family home at Bath he was waylaid by an imperious local lady, Miss Tanner, who said, 'Oh you must be Mr Woolley who has been digging at Ur. A friend and I slept there once you know, about ten years ago. The Arabs called it Tell Muqayyar'.

'Yes, Madam,' said Woolley, 'but Tell Muqayyar was occupied by lions in those days.'

'Oh, I dare say', said the intrepid lady.

Woolley and his team arrived on the scene in 1922, charged with the task of uncovering the ziggurats, palaces and ordinary homes of the place known from Genesis by its neo-Babylonian name of Ur of the Chaldees, birthplace of the Patriarch Abraham. By the time of Agatha's appearance late in 1928 the dig was nearing its end and the greater glories discovered not among the relics of the ancient city but in the pre- and early dynastic royal graves beneath the waste and rubbish of six thousand years or so, outside the perimeter wall.

Woolley had competed all along with the expedition across the Red Sea in the Valley of the Kings that had been going on simultaneously. He had competed on very unequal terms for space in the world's media against Howard Carter's gold laden tomb, but he had succeeded where few other archaeologists would have dared even to compete. Whatever else he may or may not have been, Woolley was a master of Public Relations.

READING AGATHA: From An Autobiography: Leonard Woolley saw with the eye of imagination; the place was as real to him as if it had been 1500BC, or a few thousand years earlier. Wherever he happened to be he could make it come alive. While he was speaking I felt in my mind no doubt that that house on the corner had been Abraham's.

And what a medley of enduring and contradictory human characteristics he was, both as archaeologist and man - assured, polished, stoical, a brilliant if over insistent raconteur - as raconteurs tend to be -and a good writer with an easy style; yet vain to a degree, indifferent to the opinions and doubts of his peers and his seniors alike, and sometimes insensitive to the tribulations of his workers and colleagues - 'Too good' as his friend 'Rick', Mortimer Wheeler, was to say of his archaeology - 'Too naive by half', as a High Court judge was to say of his penchant for strong women.

His personal life was spent until he reached old age in the shadow of strong and often wilful women who dominated his personal life and to a large extent limited his professional advancement. His sisters, all intensely religious and scholarly, between them ruled over the family, founded the Nippon Girl Guide movement, taught classics and ran schools, convents and nunneries in various parts of the world. Even so, any man who like Woolley goes to bed in one room with a length of string leading from his big toe to his hypochondriac wife's wrist in another room, so that she can tug on it at the onset of a headache, might be said to deserve his fate.

Woolley was not alone in his elected fate. The young Max Mallowan, just down from Woolley's old college at Oxford, joined the dig within a few months of Katharine's arrival on the scene and immediately became her 'Man Friday'.

Max, even in his younger day, was the typical English gentleman. He was reluctant to complain or to jump to conclusions. Enough to make my point is the fact that he was interviewed for the job not just by Woolley but also by Katharine, though at that time they were not even married. Max did not know who his new chief was but rather hoped that he might be related to the great Kent cricketer Frank Woolley. His first tasks at Ur were to brush Katharine's hair, give her daily massage, and apply leeches whenever a headache threatened.

Gertrude Bell had died in Baghdad of a self-inflicted overdose of sleeping tablets in 1926, two years before Agatha's arrival at Ur. It is perhaps worth mentioning that 1926 was also the year of Woolley's marriage to Katharine and of the arrival in the Iraqi capital of Freya Stark. It was the year in which three intractable women of modern times came, for a brief moment, face to face.

Gertrude came at the end of each season's dig to divide the spoils between the sponsoring museums, Philadelphia, this establishment, and Baghdad. She took one look at the newcomer and described her as a 'dangerous woman'.

But it was for Agatha to paint the definitive picture. She soon discovered that she could never 'like' Katharine but she learnt to 'tolerate' her.

READING AGATHA: Katharine Woolley...was an extraordinary character. People have been divided always between disliking her with a fierce and vengeful hatred, and being entranced by her...She was capable of rudeness - in fact she had an insolent rudeness, when she wanted to, that was unbelievable - but if she wished to charm you she would succeed every time.

By good fortune, Katharine had only just finished reading Roger Ackroyd when Agatha turned up in the 1928 season. Katharine was impressed and for the moment at least relations were harmonious. In fact, relations were so good by the end of Agatha's initiation that she offered the Woolleys the use of her London house in Cresswell Place between seasons, though Katharine's desire to be at the centre of things in London would inspire a series of moves for the Woolley's from one Chelsea house to another until Katharine pronounced herself happy in Embankment Gardens, and finally Royal Avenue, where the great and good were entertained in style - Allenbys, Curzons, Coxes, Anthony Blunt and Ronald Storrs, General Neil Malcolm, Sydney Cockrell, the peripatetic connoisseur neighbour Eumorfopoulos, and the odd archaeologist. The young Freya Stark was taken to Katharine's bosom, eventually setting up temporary home at the Woolley establishment when the keyholders were absent, remaining there on and off until 1939. Freya declared that a peerage, or at the very least a knighthood, was Katharine's precondition for a party invitation. But more of Freya Stark in a moment or two.

Woolley's lifelong devotion to art and craft, both ancient and contemporary, and his strict belief in a disciplined approach to site work owed a great deal to a father, the Revd George Herbert, who spent his wife's inheritance on baubles, as Macaulay would have called them, and who took cold baths every day of his life, winter and summer. There are distinct echoes of the demanding father when assistants at Ur are heard to complain that 5am is an early enough starting time, particularly when a long walk to the actual excavation is demanded of them, and that on the rare occasions that they are a few minutes late the chief is liable to suggest that they go to bed earlier. Woolley, needless to say, was the earliest starter and last finisher, not withstanding that most nights he was awakened by his wife pulling on the toe string.

The atmosphere and precepts that Agatha found at Ur might well form the introduction to a crime novel, and it was not long before that possibility was transformed into literary reality. The place was charged with religion and religious observances from orthodox Judaism and Islam to just about every variety of Christianity; along with an extreme devotion to the work ethic; and with inevitable personal battles and animosities. She returned in 1930 to find a somewhat changed cast, with a youthful newcomer as general factotum. An American academic on the staff told her, 'either everything you do is wrong, or everything is right. I'm the one in the doghouse at present'.

READING AGATHA

It was equally clear that Max Mallowan was the person who did everything right. It may have been because he had been away the previous season, and so was more of a novelty than the others, but I think myself that it was because in the course of five years he had learnt the way to treat the two Woolleys... I soon realised how good he was at managing people. He managed the workmen well, and, what was far more difficult, he managed Katharine Woolley well. 'Of course', said Katharine to me, 'Max is the perfect assistant...I am sending him with you...when we pack up here and go to Baghdad he will take you there. You can go and see Nippur on the way'...an enormous admiration spread over me. How wonderful to be the sort of woman who, as soon as she had made up her mind, had everyone within sight immediately falling in with it, not grudgingly but as a matter of course.'

All this and an Anglo-American cast, a day by day incursion into a world fitfully foreshadowed by Genesis, spiced with Woolley's endless anecdotes of pre-war antics with TE Lawrence, their wartime espionage and intelligence gathering and his, Woolley's, imprisonment in the famous Turkish PoW camp at Kastamuni. All was grist to Agatha's mill. Dr Leidner is a barely concealed portrait of the chief in Murder in Mesopotamia, though Louise, the archaeologist's wife takes centre stage, 'lovely Louise' who is murdered by a blow from a heavy object - delivered by her husband according to the detective who knows all.

In a nutshell, when Agatha recovered from the break-up of her marriage and the effect of her famous disappearance, she could hardly have done better than to catch the Orient Express to Constantinople, and proceed overland to Ur Junction. By the time she arrived in that ancient city, made universally recognisable as Ur of the Chaldees by the Old Testament, she had acquired enough impressions and character studies to fill the pages of several books. I find it hard to believe, but I read somewhere that those books have sold altogether more than 100 million copies. Elsewhere I have seen the figure 2 billion mentioned. I won't quibble. If either is remotely accurate, we are in the presence of a literary phenomenon that is enough to make any other writer, however successful, green with envy, and which certainly makes dismal reading of my royalty statements.

The promised journey home at the end of the next season, 29 - 30, was all that Agatha had anticipated, and more.

READING AGATHA: So the day came...I enjoyed the day at Nippur very much...I don't suppose I would have found it very interesting had I not had someone with me to explain it all. As it was I became more enamoured of digging than ever.

Agatha's future was clearly taking shape. Nippur was the Euphrates site north of Ur that had been surveyed by Loftus for the Indian Government and poorly excavated by a feuding American expedition under the direction of John P Peters, Professor at the Episcopal Divinity School of Pennsylvania, in the late 19th Century. Then came Diwaniyah, Ukhaidar, the necropolis of Nejef, the beautiful mosque of Karbala, a 'venomously offensive' young Political Officer who confided that 'all archaeologists are liars', and his loquacious wife; and a bath in a salt lake...

And there was a meeting with the incomparable American missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Church, Gertrude Bell's very close friends the Van Esses. Dr Van Ess taught 'politicals' of all the nations Arabic according to the rules of Latin grammar. They went on overland by Model-T Ford to Mosul, Nineveh, Aleppo, and on to Greece and Delphi with the Woolleys, deferring always to Katharine's demands. Could any novelist have asked for more?

READING AGATHA: We were going to make a detour on our way back to Baghdad to see the Arab city of Ukhaidar. This lay far out in the desert. The scenery was monotonous, and to pass the time we sang songs...We saw Ukhaidar, wonderful in its isolation...

That was all that Agatha found to say about that remote, early Islamic city. Gertrude had been there in 1909 and she promptly decided to write a book about it. The little known work, The Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidar, was published by the Clarendon Press in 1914. It contained maps, half-tone plates, ground plans and 166 of her own photographs along with 168 pages of text. Her study of the great Palace lasted for four years and when she was finished she wrote:

READING GERTRUDE BELL: (From her Letters) A subject so enchanting and so suggestive as the Palace of Ukhaidar is not likely to present itself more than once in a lifetime, and as I bring this page to a close I call to mind the amazement with which I first gazed upon its formidable walls; the romance of my first sojourn within its precincts; the pleasure undiminished by familiarity of my return; and the regret with which I sent back across the sun drenched plain a last greeting to its distant presence.

Again, on her way from Damascus through the Syrian desert to the Euphrates:

READING GERTRUDE: ...too heavenly to be back in all this again, Roman forts and Arab tents and the wide desert...[she found a short cut to Ukhaidar] I wonder if I shall ever again come upon any building as interesting or work at anything with a keener pleasure...

Agatha was better when it came to people.

READING AGATHA: It was outrageously hot and I longed to bathe. 'Would you really like to?' said Max...I looked thoughtfully at my roll of bedding and small suitcase... I considered, and in the end, dressed in a pink silk vest and a double pair of knickers, I was ready. The driver, the soul of politeness and delicacy, as indeed all Arabs are, moved away. Max, in shorts and a vest, joined me, and we swam away in the blue water. It was heaven - the world seemed perfect...

Woolley was an inveterate story teller. He could never resist the temptation to divert from some important historical or archaeological theme to tell an anecdote about his adventures among the Turks, or a very improbable conversation with a German spy or a kaimakam or pasha or practised forger. Max was an apt pupil in every respect. His autobiography had much of Woolley's rhetorical style about it. Both men developed a journalistic streak that tended to stick by a good story even if it lacked a few supporting facts. Agatha seems to have got the measure of him early on. Their car sank in the sand on this first desert journey and Agatha was told to lie in the shelter of the vehicle while for hours on end the men toiled to dig it out. She fell asleep.

READING AGATHA: Max told me afterwards, whether truthfully or not, that it was at that moment he decided that I would make an excellent wife for him. 'No fuss!' he said. 'You didn't complain or say that it was my fault, or that we should never have stopped there...Really it was at that moment I began to think you were wonderful.'

A few days before, a gardener who was picking roses in the holy city of Karbala advanced on the couple with a large bouquet. Agatha prepared her most gracious smile, only to find to her surprise that the Arab passed by her and handed Max the flowers with a deep bow. Max explained that in the East offerings were made to men, not women.

Eventually the young couple met up with the Woolleys, round about Aleppo I believe. After one very trying day when it rained incessantly they found that some of the bedrooms of their hotel leaked badly, but there were two rooms in which some beds were out of direct range while others were in the firing line. 'I think', said Leonard to Katharine, 'that you and Agatha had better have the smaller room with the two dry beds. We (the men) will have the other.' That was the large room with one dry bed and one wet.

'I really must have the larger room and the good bed, insisted Katharine. 'I won't sleep a wink if there is water dripping on my face.' A little later Katharine plunged into the hot bath Max had prepared for Agatha.

According to several of his students, Woolley would often tell young aspirants in archaeology, 'never be afraid to admit that you are wrong; it is the surest way of learning and remembering something'. Pity he was not able to convince his wife of the same truth! Indeed, he encouraged her presumption.

You may remember that it was she who insisted 'Well, of course it's the Flood', when Woolley dug down to the Ubaid level at Ur and found evidence of mud rather than the virgin soil he had expected. 'That was the right answer', said the dutiful husband with an implied dig at his assistants. Evidence of the biblical, or perhaps a Sumerian, deluge was more grist to his propaganda mill and it brought a new wave of wealthy visitors to the site already made famous by his graphic descriptions of the birthplace of Abraham.

Max and Agatha were married as soon as they arrived home in 1930 and set up the marital home at Cresswell Place, before Max returned to Ur, that 'holocaust of treasures', as Robert Bridges called it, to say his farewells.

He was not there for long. He readily accepted Dr Campbell Thompson's invitation to join him at Nineveh. Apart from anything else, there was clearly room for only one woman at Ur. Katharine it seems had advised Agatha to wait for two years at least before she tied the knot for a second time. It would, she thought, be 'very bad for Max at his age to think he can have everything he wants'.

Agatha in her autobiography shows us how in those early days at Nineveh and its surrounding tells she began to adjust to the life of a wandering writer.

READING AGATHA: I enjoyed my first experience of living on a dig enormously... I became deeply attached to both CT and Barbara [Campbell Thompson and his wife]; I had completed the final demise of Lord Edgware and had tracked down his murderer successfully. On a visit to CT and his wife I had read them the whole manuscript aloud and they had been very appreciative. I think they were the only people to whom I ever read a manuscript - except, that is, my own family.

She and Max were by now in search of their own dig among the rich diversity of mounds in the Mosul region.

READING AGATHA: [from the autobiographical Come Tell Me How You Live, 1999, with acknowledgements to Harper Collins] Yes, now the moment has come and we are really off...We drive off for Victoria. Dear Victoria - gateway to the world beyond England - how I love your continental platform. And how I love trains, anyway!.. a big snorting, hurrying, companionable train...My sister says tearfully that she has a feeling that she will never seem me again...And what, she asks us she to do if Rosalind gets appendicitis?...We climb into the Pullman, the train grunts and starts - we're OFF. For about forty-seconds I feel terrible, and then as Victoria Station is left behind, exultation springs up once more. We have begun the lovely, exciting journey to Syria...Max asks me what I am thinking about. I say simply: 'Paradise!'.. Next morning we reach the Cilician Gates, and look out over the most beautiful views I know...On to Alep. And from Alep to Beyrout.. to our preliminary survey of the Habur and Jaghjagha region...Mrs Beeton, is the start of the whole business. First catch your hare, says the estimable lady. So, in our case, first find your mound. That is what we are about to do.

From then on Agatha followed the archaeological trail with mounting enthusiasm and knowledge, producing of course her play Akhnaton following a visit to Carter's workplace in the Valley of the Kings, as well as her Mesopotamian based thrillers. Nile and Euphrates became familiar settings to her legions of readers.

It was not easy for European women to gain acceptance in such remote places. But the desert Arabs soon took Agatha to their hearts and she, like Gertrude Bell before her, was given that special label by which Arabs designate women of rare distinction - Al Khatun - a term that has, I believe, a religious significance. Max, according to Jacquetta Hawkes, examined fifty mounds before he chose Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak. And according to the same authority his choice showed sound judgement, archaeologically speaking.

READING AGATHA: The fateful day arrives... Hamoudi, by now well trained in the essential doctrine that the comfort of Khatuns comes first, has devoted all his energies to getting one room free of Armenians and livestock, and hastily whitewashing the walls. Two camp beds have been set up in it for Max and myself...Women, children, hens, cats, dogs - all weeping, wailing screaming, shouting, abusing, praying, laughing miaowing, clucking and barking depart from the courtyard like some fantastic finale in an opera!.. No sooner have the lamps been extinguished that mice in their scores - I really mean in their hundreds - emerge from the holes in the walls and the floor. They run gaily over our beds, squeaking as they run...I do fall asleep for a short spell, but little feet running across my face wake me up...The cockroaches have increased and a large black spider is descending upon me...I shall go straight back to England! I cannot stand this life!

That, by all the laws, should have been the end of Agatha's archaeological experience. But an answer was at hand. I think we should hear briefly how the ever resourceful Hamoudi and his friend dealt with a problem that most women, and not a few men, could identify.

READING AGATHA: Hamoudi explains that all will soon be well...a cat is coming...It is a super cat - a highly professional cat...Our cat arrives at dinner time. I shall never forget that cat! It is, as Hamoudi has announced, a highly professional cat...Whilst we dine, it crouches in ambush behind a packing-case. when we talk, or move, or make too much noise, it gives us an impatient look. 'I must request of you, the look says, to be quiet. How can I get on with the job without co-operation?' So fierce is the cat's expression that we obey at once, speak in whispers, and eat with as little clinking of plates and glasses as possible... The sequel is immediate. There is no Western dallying, no playing with the victim. The cat simply bites off the mouse's head, crunches it up and proceeds to the rest of the body! It is rather horrible and completely business like... I have never known before or since such a professional cat. It had no interest in us, it never demanded a share of our food...A very accomplished cat!

Max and Agatha made regular visits to the Woolleys at Aleppo when Woolley was excavating Atchana/AlAlakh with funds provided by his army chief General Sir Neill Malcolm Chief of Staff at Gallipoli). Before Atchana, of course, the Woolleys visited India on behalf of the Government to advise on the future conduct of the Indus Valley excavations. Katharine was much in evidence and it was with her approval that Leonard recommended his friend 'Rick' Wheeler, for the job.

Hamoudi had deserted his old master Woolley at Alalakh/Atchana, leaving one of his sons in charge. A memorable assistant at Tell Brak, incidentally, was Louis Osman, who would become a distinguished creative goldsmith in years to follow, and who was known as 'Bumps', from his description of the Arabian 'Tell'. 'There are bumps everywhere', he remarked famously.

It was the writer Nigel Dennis who gave us some of the most penetrating insights into Agatha's mind. He put his finger on her devotion to Science Fiction, to her solid Anglicanism which was very much in line with Woolley's orthodox and unquestioning belief, and on her alleged authorship of the remark: 'An archaeologist makes the best husband possible, the older you get the more interest he takes in you'; despite Agatha's denial that she invented the observation or even found it funny.

At about this time, Freya Stark too began to journey in the same parts and to write letters to friends and family that would add to a powerful distaff presence in the Arab lands in the 20th century. Yet, although their paths criss crossed Mesopotamia and Syria, Freya and the Mallowans do not seem to have met or at any rate to have acknowledged each other. Indeed, Agatha and Max were never part of the charmed circle of Royal Avenue into which Freya fitted so easily, even demonstrating that she alone among women could handle Katharine simply by pooh-poohing her lexicon of illnesses. She first arrived in Baghdad in 1926, the year of Gertrude Bell's death, and she never ceased to insist that she was unmoved by her predecessor's travels or her writings. It may as well be said here and now that Freya was intensely jealous of Gertrude. Just before the Second World War she turned down an invitation from her friend and patron John Grey 'Jock' Murray the distinguished publisher to write a biography of the Lady, and she was equally intensely pleased with her performance as a traveller of note, though some of her contemporaries mischievously called her 'Peripheral Freya'.

It was left to Wilfrid Thesiger in the 1970s to set aside Freya's claim to precedence as a traveller in the Arab lands. 'Nothing Freya has done', he told Molly Izzard in Bahrain, 'exceeded what any moderately enterprising embassy secretary could have managed. If any one woman was to be thought of as a serious traveller, it had to be Gertrude Bell. There was nothing else in the same class as her last arduous and dangerous journey to Hail, then over the Euphrates to Baghdad and a return crossing of the desert to Damascus.'

Still, Freya's outstanding skill as letter writer and essayist in particular can't be questioned. She wrote from Nasiriyah near Ur in March 1933, shortly before Woolley closed the site.

READING FREYA STARK:

I am down here for three days... Mr Woolley took us all over Abraham's village and it was very interesting, and extremely like the back streets of Baghdad. The houses were two-storied, but very small, and there was the same absence of piazzas: the streets so narrow that the corners were rounded to make it easier for loaded mules. Mr Woolley said that now from clay tablets of bills, letters, etc., left about in the houses, they know the names and occupations of nearly every one of them. One was a school, with all the exercises left about, arithmetic, and calligraphy, etc. Then we went to the Ziggurat. It is very impressive from its size and the three great stairs that run up in triangle meeting at the top. It is rather curious that this is the only public building found (except for a temple or two), as Mr Woolley estimates.

Just before war came in 1939, Freya Stark followed the Woolley circus to the Syrian digs too, and caught sight of Katharine, ' friendly and all cheerful'. Agatha's daughter Rosalind came out too at this time, to take over draughtsman duties from her hopelessly inadequate mother. For Arabs and Kurds of the region, the sight of women sharing the affairs of public and academic life was a most novel thing. For some twenty years before her acceptance, Gertrude was known to Arabs of the desert simply as Bint Beel. And to the very end Bin Saud of Riyadh made fun of her to his tribesmen and imitated her movements and gestures to the delight of the Badu. All our European matriarchs had their detractors as well as admirers.

But at the outset of her Arabian journeys, Freya was open-mouthed in wonder and was conveying her delight in almost daily letters to her kith and kin, and becoming increasingly besotted with Vyvyan Holt, the tall, urbane bachelor for whom Gertrude Bell had fallen hook, line and sinker a few year before; neither it seems realising that his social charm concealed something of an indifference to the opposite sex.

READING FREYA: To her dearest friend 'B', Venetia Buddicom, Baghdad, 17 June 1931:

Got here safely. Found quite a nice clean-looking hotel on the river, just newly started, for 10s. 6d. a day... 26 June: Darling B, Captain Holt looked in yesterday to tell me that the Persian quarantine is quite impossible and I must fly... 18 July, Hamadan: Darling B, I have been depressed this week not feeling very well...Also Capt Holt was so cross and snubby the last evening, and I feel if only I were a little prettier and younger it would make all the difference...

By 1935 Freya was ready to set out on the first of her journeys to the Yemen, where she had a spot of bother and narrowly escaped death. Taken to hospital in Aden she was visited by none other than Katharine Woolley who went ashore at the British outpost while on her way to Suez. She wrote to Sydney Cockrell to tell him that the visit added 'an heroic dimension to Freya's exploit'. It probably led to that remarkable friendship which ended up with Freya's 'social whirl;' in London while enjoying a two-year residence in the Woolley household in Chelsea.

READING FREYA: (London 20 July 1936) Dearest Venetia, Did I tell you I sat next to Lord Halifax at lunch and talked about Italy?

(24 July) I have had a very hectic week and met interesting people. Ruth Draper, Lady Rhondda, Frank Balfour (Lord B's nephew, who says his uncle must have been dotty over Palestine), and a nice little Persian... Yesterday I went to Gertrude Caton Thompson to lunch and there met Lady Rhondda, a far more powerful person with a really beautiful face...She runs Time and Tide and tries to raise the standard of literature...

Freya was about to experience a salutary comeuppance. In October 1937 she set sail for the Hadhramaut on an archaeological expedition with Gertrude Caton Thompson, a fellow of Newnham who had learnt her archaeology with the omnipotent Flinders Petrie at University College. Elinor Gardner a geologist with profound archaeological connections was with them. They were backed by 'Wakers' Wakefield's money, with a topup from the RGS. Freya, as ever, archaeology or no, had red painted finger nails. They at first chose a site at Huraida where there had been tribal troubles and RAF bombs had been dropped, and the British Resident Harold Ingrams, his wife Doreen and the witty flamboyant young Political Officer Stewart Perowne took charge of them. And it wasn't long before the imperious Gertrude was demanding that she be addressed as Miss Caton-Thompson and was roundly condemning the activities of 'Miss Stark'. However, Stewart Perowne, who had been part of the homosexual circle in Baghdad, was comforting.

READING FREYA STARK: (Mukalla, 11 November 1937) Dearest B, Today and yesterday have been terribly exciting because at first go off Elinor went along a gravel ridge between us and Shihr and picked up a palaeolithic flint. No one thought such a thing existed here...We have chartered a lorry for 200 rupees to take us and our food and all our belongings to Tarim and Shibham and sleep on the road as often as necessary. You can't think of the loveliness of our drive along the sands towards the sunset: the shallow wave-water pink and brilliant like a seashell and rows of breaking waves like frills of lace beyond...and on the wet sand, millions of crabs running from us as quick as drops of water and suddenly against the breaking waves, four cranes or herons, three black and one white.

(18 November) We are now installed in Tarim. Luxury - a lovely pink and blue bungalow... (18 November) Yesterday we went to the Himyaritic ruins of Sune...Elinor found tiny and uninteresting looking shells that the British Museum is panting for...It took three hours to get there, a car and three donkeys, one chauffeur, Qasim, two headmen and three slaves...We drove back in the ancient Rugby [their vehicle]...A tomato tin was jammed down as a lid over the radiator and a slave crept at intervals along the running board to take it off - then a geyseer spouted out and cold water was poured in till the boiling stopped: the tin was jammed on again and off we went. And we got back without a breakdown.

Like Agatha, still writing novels for her insatiable readers as she battled among the ancient layers of Arpachiya, Tell Brak and Chagar Bazar, Freya began to have doubts about her suitability for the archaeological life.

(Seiyun, 22 November) I shall never be an archaeologist. I am far too fond of living things and people... We got to Seiyun in the afternoon, and it was very pleasant to drive again through the dusty lanes and walls of gardens and find the feeling of peace that I remembered...We go to Shibam in three days and then in a week or so to Huraidhah where civilisation may be less advanced - and I hope we may then really set to work and dig for a month...(25 November) Darling B, Elinor is ill with a throat today. And Gertrude is pining for London. There are not many born travellers, though they all think they are - but they never like the dull patches; while I just sit and embroider...(28 November) Dearest B, I lay awake last night thinking over all my troubles, which are many just now - and then suddenly it came to me what an amusing book it would make. I hate archaeology...(Aden, 20 December) I went to lunch yesterday at Government House and sat next the Sultan of Lahej, an aquiline old man in a grey coat like a German undress uniform...Mr Perowne, the political secretary, who was opposite, described the international situation in the words used for the Irish question: 'The trouble is that they never forget, that we never remember, and the USA never know'. Dearest love, Freya.

In the atmosphere of the present day, I leave those words to speak for themselves.

We all know how disastrous was Freya's eventual marriage to Stewart Perowne in 1947, though she was to go on for another thirty years or more as the great lady of the Arab lands, resenting to her dying breath the presence of the other Gertrude at her side, her 'Siamese twin' as she put it acidly. Those of you at least who have read my biography of Leonard Woolley, will know how the friendship of master and apprentices went on to the bitter end; an end in which Woolley found himself without appropriate employment and without a home of his own, due chiefly to his predilection for uncompromising women. Katharine died soon after the end of the Second World War. That awful muscular disease which left her in hopeless, ironic dependence on Leonard at the end, might well have accounted for much that was inexplicable in her lifetime. Freya was probably the last outsider to hear from her. On 14 February 1946 she wrote to Sydney Cockerell, who early in her writing career had advised her to 'avoid a tendency towards embroidered prose and sententious opinions'.

READING FREYA: I have a letter from Katherine Woolley, written just before she died - a wonderfully gallant message which seems to me to explain the extraordinary fascination she always had for me, in spite of so many things - a strain of cruelty chiefly - which repelled. But there was great courage and a passion for life, and this comes out in her farewell.

As I said at the outset, it is Agatha who brings us together this evening. In her story, so well told in 'Come tell me how you live', Agatha and archaeology come together via scholarship, academic co-operation and dispute, espionage and literature, and of course via Woolley and his work among the royal graves and the palaces and ziggurat of Ur. Indeed, they come together with such popular force that they contributed significantly to perhaps the most successful literary phenomenon in any language since the King James Bible and Shakespeare. I make no apology for taking part in an exhibition that has been shown with pride and success in several countries and that unites two outstanding literary and academic achievements of our age.

Before Woolley left one of his last homes, at Sherborne in Dorset, for one of his last visits to Syria and the Amq Plain, Max and Agatha called on him. She noticed how ill at ease he was. She read him a draft version of the verse she had written in Lewis Carroll vein for her biographical sketch Come Tell Me How You Live:

READING AGATHA:

I'll tell you everything I can

If you will listen well:

I met an erudite young man

A-sitting on a Tell.

'Who are you, sir?', to him I said,

'For what is it you look?'

His answer trickled through my head

Like bloodstains in a book.

He said: 'I look for aged pots

Of prehistoric days,

And then I measure them in lots

And lots of different ways.

And then (like you) I start to write,

My words are twice as long

As yours, and far more erudite.

They prove my colleagues wrong.

But I was thinking of a plan

To kill a millionaire...

I recall Agatha's valedictory words as the Second World War approached and she said goodbye to Tell Brak and Chagar Bazar and the old Kurdish vilayet of Mosul that had been their home for five years:

READING AGATHA

I am remembering a little hill all covered with golden marigolds where we had a picnic lunch on one of our holidays; and closing my eyes, I can smell, all around me, the lovely scent of flowers and of the fertile steppe...'I am thinking', I say to Max, 'that it was a very happy way to live...'.

That will have to do. Thank you ladies and gentlemen.

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