Gertrude Bell died peacefully in the morning hours of Monday 12th July 1926, two days before her 58th birthday. Fifty years later we recall her devotion to a country in which she had dedicated the last years of her life. Her bones rest where she had wished them to rest, in the soil of Iraq.

I saw her for the last time, three months before she died, together with A. H. Whitburn, the architect at Ur, towards the end of March 1926, in her little house behind what was then named New Street Baghdad. We reached, as Victoria Sackville West has described it, “a door in the blank wall, … a creaking of hinges, a broadly smiling servant, a rush of dogs, a vista of garden-path edged with carnations in pots, a little veranda and a little low house at the end of the garden path, an English voice—Gertrude Bell”. She received us courteously—“Ah you two”, she said, “I am glad you have come”, for she was tired and dispirited, long overdue for the leave that she never took, and now that she had discarded her activities in politics, archaeology had become the ruling passion of what was left of her life.