The Early Life of Gertrude Bell talk by Margaret Bozic

The Early Years of Gertrude Bell: Gertrude Bell was an amazing woman. Born in 1868, in Washington County Durham, she was the first woman to gain the equivalent of a first class degree at Oxford University, she was a diplomat, an adventurer and it was she who drew up some of the boundaries in the Middle East after the First World War. This talk explores her beginnings in the North East of England. How a woman born in Washington, and who spent the first thirty years of her life in Coatham, near Redcar, became such a colossus.

The talk is about her upbringing in Washington and Coatham in the nineteenth century based on her diaries and letters, and about her education in London and at Oxford, including the prejudice against women students at that time.

This story of her early life ends as she is about to set out to Persia on her adventures.

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Host or Publisher Newcastle Libraries