Sir Hugh Bell

GB wrote to her father , I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the [sic] Iraq.

Commentator James Buchan calls her letters to her father and stepmother one of the great correspondences of the past century.

GB 's father , a widower for about five years, married novelist and playwright Florence Olliffe .

GB 's father, Hugh Bell , was an industrialist who was later knighted. After her mother's death Gertrude developed a very close relationship with her father.