My weekend begins and I am like everyone else…..trying to recover from the Christmas break….

For those that may have missed th first in this series……https://lobotero.com/2019/12/21/gertrude-bell-2/

Jane Digby….not to be confused with Elanor Rigby of Beatles fame.

This is Woman #2 of my series of the women that helped mold the Modern Middle East…..for good of bad….they made a difference.  Digby is the less known and even less written about of these women of the Middle East.

When Jane Digby was born in 1807, child of privileged English aristocracy, nobody could have predicted the course her life would take. She was the daughter of Captain Henry Digby, a sailor from a line of sailors who had fought against the Americans in the West Indies and against Napoleon at Trafalgar. He would go on to become, like his father before him, an Admiral. Jane’s mother was also named Jane, and she was the eldest daughter of Thomas Coke, a politician and landowner who would become the Earl of Leicester. Thomas only had daughters, and he was rich enough to allow them to marry for love if they wished. He himself was a widower at the time, though he remarried at the age of 68 to a woman fifty years younger. Henry Digby was actually Jane Coke’s second husband, her first having died in an accident, and they married the year before Jane was born. She was Thomas’ first granddaughter, and the apple of his eye. Between Thomas’ indulgence and the money that Henry had made through capturing Spanish ships as a privateer, Jane grew up wanting for nothing.

Jane Digby, English Adventuress

As usual to help those that cannot spend the time to read the information I post a short video on the the subject……

In early June 1853, the English adventuress Jane Digby left the city of Damascus to set out on what she later called ”the greatest adventure, probably, of all my journeys.” She wore an aba, or cloak, over a djellaba, and a square white kaffiyeh, or scarf, folded into a triangle and fixed on her head with strands of colored silk. On her feet, she wore lemon yellow kid ankle boots with pointed toes. Her guide, Medjuel el Mezrab, a Bedouin sheik, wore what he usually wore, which is to say, a scarlet cloak over a striped djellaba, a bright silk kaffiyeh and red leather boots with upturned toes. He had tied several silk scarves in a wide sash around his waist, which served as a holster for his knives and pistols, and around his neck hung a sword on a silk cord. He wore his final accessory, a hooded hawk, on his wrist.

Not as well known as Gertrude Bell but still just as important to the history of the Middle East.

Class Dismissed!

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”