Not Your Average Englishwoman

I first encountered Rosita Forbes atop a camel in the middle of the Rabiana Sand Sea in southern Libya. There was probably no finer way of making this unusual writer’s acquaintance. Here, deep in the Sahara, she was in her element, disguised as an Arab woman and with only a few camels and human companions between her and a nasty, lingering death. In fact it was worse than that. Apart from the natural dangers of the desert, she was passing through the territory of tribesmen who regarded this motley expedition of an Englishwoman and the Egyptian Olympic-fencer-cum-spy-cum-explorer Ahmed Hassanein Bey with profound suspicion, if not downright hostility.

‘We posted sentinels at night, slept with our revolvers cocked beside us and by day went armed with such an array of weapons that the hostile Zouiya villagers decided we were better left alone,’ she wrote in The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara (1921). It was just as well they took such precautions. On leaving the entrancing oasis of Buzeima, she overheard a Zwaya tribesman mutter bitterly: ‘You should not escape thus; we had men enough to kill you.’ Rosita Forbes was not your average Englishwoman. Born in 1890, the daughter of a Lincolnshire squire and MP, she refused to settle for the traditional role expected of her. In an era of travel and exploration dominated by the tweedy gentlemen amateurs of the Royal Geographical Society, she held her own and bowed to no man. Beautiful, flamboyant and independent, she left school at 17, married a colonel at 21 and then during the First World War spent two years as an ambulance driver on the Western Front, winning two medals from the French government. She divorced her first colonel in 1917 (pawning her wedding ring to fund an unsuccessful expedition home on horseback from Durban) and married her second in 1921, a more successful union that lasted until his death four decades later. Pictures of Forbes in the 1920s show a woman at the peak of her good looks, dressed in an array of party ensembles and wide-brimmed hats of varying extravagance. In one she stares down the barrels of a shotgun at the onlooker, head cocked beneath a raffish fedora, one eye closed, the other eyeing her target with a cool, unflustered eye. In another, at the Jewels of Empire Ball at Brook House on Park Lane in 1930, she sports a pearl sautoir that tumbles down the plunging neckline of a velvet ballgown and an astonishingly exuberant ostrich feather and diamanté headdress. So much for Rosita Forbes at play. From childhood she was captivated by stories of travel. ‘I always collected maps,’ she wrote in Adventure, an early memoir published in 1928.

The curly red lines across African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces would leave just one small desert for me.

They did. It was a patch of the Libyan Sahara, which she explored with Ahmed Hassanein Bey in 1920–1 and wrote about in perhaps her finest book. The Secret of the Sahara is the high-spirited story of this expedition to the remote oasis of Kufra, which she was only the second European to see. Their route lay through the famous oasis of Buzeima, a sapphire cleft in the sand-blown desert, and home, so she was warned, to ‘a particularly savage portion of the Zouiya tribe . . . [who] attacked every strange caravan at sight’. I remember reading Forbes’s extraordinarily evocative description of the desert around Buzeima as I approached it on the back of my own faithful camel. It was a savage arena of black mountain ridges, towering cliffs of Nubian sandstone, dark despite the dazzle of the sun, lying like shattered cathedrals hurled across a sandy, flint-strewn plain. At once awful and uplifting, it struck Forbes as ‘a veritable inferno of desolation’. After this harsh introduction, the oasis seemed like paradise.

Buzeima is the loveliest oasis I have ever seen, with its strange ruddy hills – jewels purple and crimson reflected in the silver salt mirage which girdles the bluest lake in the world. All this colour is clear cut against the soft, pale dunes. It is seen through a frame of drooping palm branches with perhaps a rose-hued figure, scarlet sashed, guarding a flock of goats by a dark pool among high green rushes.

Kufra was the climax of the expedition, reached only after overcoming the challenges of treacherous tribesmen, suffocating sandstorms and ailing camels. She confesses to having become obsessed with this holy oasis: ‘nucleus of the greatest Islamic confraternity rigidly guarded from every stranger, the centre of the mighty influence against which every European Power has battled in turn, [it] stirred my imagination’. Nor did it disappoint. She found its setting magical, fringed by hills glowing mauve and violet at sunset, the fading emerald and sapphire of date palm and lake half aflame among the burning sands. Her first-hand account of Jaghbub, another isolated oasis town virtually impenetrable to foreigners, was the highlight of the return journey north. Seat of the ascetic Sanusi Order, a fiercely orthodox Sufi Islamic revivalist movement, Jaghbub boasted the Zawia, or religious lodge, which by the late nineteenth century was Africa’s second greatest university, after Cairo’s Al Azhar. The Sanusis led the indigenous resistance to brutal colonial occupation by fascist Italy. After their battlefield heroics, they were ultimately crushed by the Italians who rounded up the population of Cyrenaica (eastern Libya) into mass concentration camps, poisoned wells and sent men to die a slow death in the salt pans. The Italians captured and executed the Sanusi leader Omar al Mukhtar in 1931 after a show trial lasting only minutes. (Colonel Gaddafi piled further humiliations on the Sanusi family and their followers, hounding relatives into exile after he toppled the Sanusi monarchy of King Idris in 1969 and razing the noble Zawia to the ground in 1988.) Every desert traveller faces a reckoning at the end of a long journey. ‘I lay on my back and looked at the stars, weighing the balance of success and failure and, suddenly, I felt that this was not really the end,’ Forbes wrote. ‘Some time, somehow, I knew not where or when, but most assuredly when Allah willed, I should come back to the deserts and the strange, uncharted tracks would bear my camels south again.’ She never did, but still there was no end to her travels elsewhere. Gertrude Bell may have damned her with a spiteful, unsisterly flourish – ‘in the matter of trumpet-blowing she is unique’ – but this did not prevent Forbes from becoming a celebrity travel writer who was in demand on both sides of the Atlantic. It is true that Forbes was never backward in coming forward – in The Secret of the Sahara the second photo shows ‘The author as a Beduin Sheikh’, and the Arabic-speaking, desert-navigating Egyptian, without whom she might well not have survived, is controversially rather written out of the story. But to accuse a travel writer of self-promotion is like complaining about an English batting collapse. Some things in life are inevitable. Besides, male travel writers and explorers were just the same – no one would ever have considered Richard Burton a shrinking violet. In Libya Forbes had won her spurs, the cue for a royal audience at Buckingham Palace and a fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society. As for her book, serialized in the Sunday Times, it was a runaway success. More, perhaps too many, followed, including a dozen forgotten and forgettable romantic novels. Her travel writing was of a higher order and reflected her unstoppable zest for travel to some of the world’s most difficult and dangerous places. From the Middle East and Africa in the 1920s, she moved on to Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, then South America and the Caribbean in the 1930s. If maps were magnetic for Forbes, powerful men were irresistible to this dashing society beauty. Although she lacked a university degree, unlike Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, and was told by a Telegraph executive that she was far too pretty to get on as a foreign correspondent (‘As long as you look like that, you haven’t a chance to be taken seriously’), she made her own way, interviewing statesmen around the world. Her circle of friends and acquaintances included kings (Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria) and queens (England, Romania), aristocrats, politicians and celebrities. It was a lasting regret that her services were never called upon by the wartime British government, again unlike those of her contemporaries Bell and Stark. Yet perhaps the interview in a rose garden with Hitler and the flirtation with Benito Mussolini were an adventure too far. Though she protested that they were no more than journalistic interviews, the timing of their publication in These Men I Knew (1940), in which Stalin, Goebbels and King Zog also featured, was inauspicious. After the war she and her husband retired to their own private Eden on a 400-acre estate in the Bahamas. The writing dried up a couple of books later and, after a glamorous, hard-won career forged simultaneously on the road less travelled and in England’s society pages, Rosita Forbes retreated into the oblivion that awaits us all.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 62 © Justin Marozzi 2019