It’s always a pleasure on these pages to present a great lady traveller and writer from the era of Mabel Bent… so, here we introduce Rosita Forbes, F.R.G.S. (16 January 1890 – 30 June 1967), a wonderful character, controversial at times – easily springing from between the covers of Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, even Agatha Christie – and, by huge coincidence, for a time she was also a close neighbour of Mrs Theodore Bent,
Her story, of course, is on too grand a scale to go into in any detail here, and no better introduction to recommend is Duncan Smith’s pacey and wonderfully illustrated essay.
What interests us are Rosita’s links to the Bents. On the day of her birth, Thursday, 16 January 1890, at swanky Riseholme Hall, near Lincoln, the Bents were sitting on their packed trunks to get them closed before embarking that Saturday for the western shores of Turkey and their imminent discovery of Olba. Here is Mabel’s diary at the time: “We left England on Saturday night, January 18th [1890], the waves dashing over the steamer from the other side of Dover pier, and neither stopped not stayed, till we stopped for the night at Lucerne at the Hôtel St. Gothard, close to the station and very comfortable…” (The Travel Chronicles of Mrs. J. Theodore Bent, vol 1, Oxford, 2006, p.269).
After driving ambulances (Hemingway again) in the Great War the rural lanes of Lincolnshire were too solitary for Rosita and she began an extensive sequence of travels in Asia and Africa culminating in her first book Unconducted Wanderers (1919).
We don’t know, but in her reading and preparation for her travels it is very likely that she hit upon the Bents (although Theodore was dead by the time she was eight). Her great 1925 book From Red Sea to Blue Nile – Abyssinian Adventure opens in Aden, a base the Bents used frequently for their expeditions in the area. (Both pioneers, Mabel was the first European woman to venture voluntarily into the Wadi Hadramaut, and Rosita the first to the Kufra Oasis in Libya.) It is hard to believe that the latter did not pack Mabel’s Southern Arabia in her saddlebags to read in Aden – the scene, of course, of Theodore’s final adventure.
And more directly, in From Red Sea to Blue Nile (opening with its wonderful dedication, ‘To Abyssinia And Her Heir-Apparent, H.I.H., Ras Tafari’, we get specific references to the Bents’ trek to fabled Aksum in Ethiopia in 1893, writing, page 348, that Theodore ‘commemorated his journey in a most interesting book, The Sacred City of the Ethiopians‘. Again, it seems most unlikely that she would not have had a copy with her as she sailed across the Red Sea to Somalia to begin her ride north, and write, this from her Foreword, ‘the record of three months on muleback, the story of what happened… during an eleven hundred mile trek through mountains and forests, rivers and deserts in search of photographic material. It is a tale of adventures, serious and frivolous, of what we saw and heard and did between the Red Sea and the Blue Nile, but it is only an impression of Abyssinia as she appeared from tent and saddle.’ And during her time in Ethiopia she was never far from the routes followed by the Bents.
In any event was born at Riseholme Hall, near Lincoln, England, th . Even if not before 1925, we know the adventuress consulted Bent in the course of her trip to Ethiopia in … and there a several references to Theodore’s classic… in her own account….1923/4
Dedicated “i”
And then there is the serendipitous role of Great Cumberland Place – the thoroughfare in London linking Marble Arch to
she would know south arabia for her Aden etc stuff
other famous residents nelli melba
Dedicated “To Abyssinia And Her Heir-Apparent, H.I.H., Ras Tafari”
She was married again in 1921, to Col. Arthur Thomas McGrath.
Starting from aden
map?
Mabel’s museum
Rosita and her husband moved in to ?? in late ???? and immediately began a renovation project…
Meanwhile, down (or up) the road at No. 13, the by then long-widowed Mabel Bent had been renting her London townhouse (her country residence was Sutton Hall, outside Macclesfield, Cheshire) since ????, prior to that the couple rented No. ?? No. 13 very soon became a cross between a depository and a museum, acting as the point of arrival for most of the Bents’ acquisitions – wonderful things from Aksum to Zimbabwe.
But did Rosita and Mabel ever meet? The two travellers only overlapped as it were in Great Cumberland Place for half a year or so, the latter months of 192? and the Spring and Summer of 1929, and by then Mabel was elderly and perhaps not receiving callers – she died on ???, with her nieces in attendance (in 1926 they had already begun the process of clearing out and selling off the more precious things – the British Museum being the major benefactor).
Rosita, well aware of the Bents and their twenty years of incredible travel, must have known that Mabel was living a few metres from her. Firm evidence of a meeting might one day surface, but for now we can image the two formidable explorers, taking no nonsense from men, sharing tea (or a whiskey) in one of Mabel’s drawing-room and discussing the contents of it, perhaps the Ethiopian chair Mabel returned with in 1893, the style of which Rosita was familiar with from her own ???? adventure.
One topic Mabel might not have raised, or not without a good few Irish curses, was Rosita’s Fellowship of London’s Royal Geographical Society. Mabel was on the list for the second tranche of women Fellows in the early 1890s, until the Admirals who ran the show scuppered the rights of women to join. The process was not reopened for them until ???, with Rosita getting her Fellowship in ???
Some …. would make a diverting and curious documentary … h both women travelled many thousands of miles, but that mere 100 metres or so that separated them may well have been steps too far… down Great Cumberland Place, W1.