Speaker Peter Sotheran - Gertrude Bell: A Woman in a Man’s World

Redcar’s most famous daughter, remembered by many as the Queen of the Desert, spent her formative childhood years at Red Barns in Redcar.

The first woman to gain a first-class honours degree in Modern History at Oxford, Gertrude Bell became an intrepid mountaineer, a published author, an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, an accomplished linguist and an influential diplomat.

At the international Cairo Conference in 1921, she sat as an adviser, literally at the right hand of Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary.