See also
| Husband: | Adrian Hanbury BELL (1901-1980) | |
| Wife: | Marjorie Hilda GIBSON (1908-1991) | |
| Children: | Anthea BELL (1936-2018) | |
| LIVING | ||
| Sylvia BELL (1938-2019) | ||
| Marriage | 12 Jan 1931 | Ealing, London, England1 |
| Name: | Adrian Hanbury BELL1,2 | |
| Sex: | Male | |
| Father: | - | |
| Mother: | - | |
| Birth | 4 Oct 1901 | Manchester, Lancashire, England1 |
| Census | 2 Apr 1911 (age 9) | Eastbourne, Sussex, England3 |
| Glengorse, Chesterfield Road | ||
| Occupation | 2 Apr 1911 (age 9) | school; Eastbourne, Sussex, England3 |
| Glengorse, Chesterfield Road He left Glengorse for Uppingham in 1915. |
||
| Education | frm 1915 to 1920 (age 13-19) | Uppingham School; Rutland, England |
| Census | 19 Jun 1921 (age 19 yrs 6 mns) | Hundon, Suffolk, England4 |
| Great Lodge | ||
| Occupation | 19 Jun 1921 (age 19) | Farm pupil; Hundon, Suffolk, England4 |
| Employment: Worker Place of Work: At home |
||
| Residence | 1932 (age 30-31) | Weston Colville, Cambridge |
| Church End Adrian was living with his wife and his brother Francis. |
||
| Occupation | 1939 (age 37-38) | Crossword Puzzle Composer |
| Occupation | Author on ruralism and journalist.; Barsham, Nr Beccles, Suffolk | |
| Census | 29 Sep 1939 (age 37) | Wainford, Bungay, Suffolk5 |
| The Old Rectory | ||
| Occupation | 29 Sep 1939 (age 37) | Crossword Puzzle Composer,writer on farming (The Times)t; Wainford, Bungay, Suffolk5 |
| Death | 5 Sep 1980 (age 78) | Gillingham, Norfolk, England1 |
| Burial | 1980 | Barsham, Nr Beccles, Suffolk |
| Name: | Marjorie Hilda GIBSON1,2 | |
| Sex: | Female | |
| Father: | William James GIBSON (1871-1957) | |
| Mother: | Alice BELLRINGER (1878- ) | |
| Birth | 24 Mar 1908 | Potchefstroom, North West Province, South Africa1 |
| Census | 2 Apr 1911 (age 3) | Canterbury, Kent, England6 |
| Lyndhurst, St Stephens Rd, Canterbury | ||
| Census | 29 Sep 1939 (age 31) | Wainford, Bungay, Suffolk5 |
| The Old Rectory | ||
| Occupation | 29 Sep 1939 (age 31) | Unpaid domestic duties; Wainford, Bungay, Suffolk5 |
| Death | 1991 (age 82-83)1 | |
| Burial | 1991 | Barsham, Nr Beccles, Suffolk |
| Name: | Anthea BELL1,2 | |
| Sex: | Female | |
| Spouse: | Anthony KAMM (1931-2011) | |
| Birth | 10 May 1936 | Sudbury, Suffolk, England |
| Death | 18 Oct 2018 (age 82) | Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England |
| Name: | LIVING1,2 | |
| Sex: | Male | |
| Spouse 1: | LIVING | |
| Spouse 2: | LIVING | |
| Spouse 3: | LIVING | |
| Name: | Sylvia BELL1,2 | |
| Sex: | Female | |
| Spouse: | Colin L. J PROUDMAN (1934-2021) | |
| Birth | 31 Aug 1938 | Redisham, Suffolk, England |
| Occupation | 1961 (age 22-23) | Secretary, BBC; London, England |
| W1. | ||
| Death | 16 Dec 2019 (age 81) | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada |
In 1911 Adrian was a boarding pupil at Eastbourne, Sussex
Adrian Bell was born in Lancashire, grew up in London, and was educated at Uppingham School. Poor health kept him from university, and in 1920 he apprenticed himself to a farmer in West Suffolk. Later farming on his own account, his first books, the trilogy Corduroy (1930), Silver Ley (1931) and The Cherry Tree (1932), were based on his early experiences of life on the land in East Anglia. Continuing to farm and write books, he also worked as a freelance journalist, and was the compiler of the first Times crossword puzzle in 1930, contributing many more puzzles over the years, as well as weekly articles for the Eastern Daily Press.
Adrian Hanbury Bell (4 October 1901 – 5 September 1980) was an English ruralist journalist and farmer, and the first compiler of The Times crossword.
Early life
Bell was born at Stretford, Lancashire, son of Robert Bell (1865-1949), editor of The Observer, and artist Emily Jane Frances (1873-1954), second of three daughters of architect and surveyor Charles de Witt Hanbury, of Leeds, later of Manchester, descendant of the Royalist politician John Hanbury and related to the nonconformist historian Benjamin Hanbury. The Bell family later moved to London. He was educated at Uppingham School in Rutland.
Career
At the age of 19 he ventured into the countryside in Hundon, Suffolk, to learn about agriculture, and he farmed in various locations over the next sixty years, until his death in September 1980. His work on farms included the rebuilding of a near-derelict 89-acre (36 ha) smallholding at Redisham, near Beccles.
Out of his early experiences of farming at Bradfield St. George, in Suffolk, came the book Corduroy, published in 1930. Bell's friend, the author and poet Edmund Blunden, advised him and helped secure his first publishing deal. Corduroy was an immediate best-seller and was followed by two more books on the countryside, Silver Ley in 1931 and The Cherry Tree in 1932, the three books forming a ruralist farm trilogy. The popularity of literary back-to-the-land writing in England in the 1930s can be put in the context of, for example, Vita Sackville-West's long narrative poem The Land. The Penguin Books paperback edition of Corduroy came out in 1940 and was much prized by soldiers serving during the Second World War.
Bell wrote the "Countryman’s Notebook" column in the Eastern Daily Press from 1950, and produced over twenty other books on the countryside, including Men and the Fields (1939), Apple Acre (1942), Sunrise to Sunset (1944), The Budding Morrow (1946), The Flower and the Wheel (1949), Music in the Morning, (1954), A Suffolk Harvest (1956), the autobiographical My Own Master (1961) and The Green Bond (1976). Bell was friendly with many literary and cultural figures, including Edmund Blunden, F.R. Leavis, H.J. Massingham, Alfred Munnings, John Nash and Henry Williamson.
When The Times began to lose circulation to The Daily Telegraph because the latter was running a daily crossword, Bell's father suggested him to the editor as the first "setter" even though he had never even solved one. Bell had just 10 days' notice before his first puzzle was published, in the weekly edition on 2 January 1930. Having set around 5,000 puzzles between 1930 and 1978, Bell is credited with helping to establish its distinctive cryptic clue style.
Ann Lynda Gander wrote the first biography of Bell in 2001.The first full length critical appreciation of his work, At the Field's Edge by Richard Hawking, was published in April 2019.
Family
Bell married Marjorie Gibson in 1931; they had a son and two daughters. Son Martin Bell is a former BBC war reporter, and was an independent Member of Parliament between 1997 and 2001. Things that Endure, a half-hour BBC radio documentary on Adrian Bell presented by his son, was broadcast on 2 September 2005 on Radio 4. Daughter Anthea Bell, who died in 2018, was a translator known for her English versions of Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, W. G. Sebald and the Asterix comic books
By his son Martin Bell
Adrian Bell was entirely one of a kind. At the age of 20, then a rather Bohemian young man about Battersea, he heard the call of the land as an almost religious vocation. His dream was agricultural. He was apprenticed to Vic Savage, a yeoman farmer in Carlton Colville near Bury St Edmunds, who taught him all he knew in the best agricultural college of all, which is a working farm. Out of that experience, my father wrote a book, Corduroy, which prospered greatly by word of mouth and became a countryside classic. When he graduated to a small farm of his own he wrote two more, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree, to complete the trilogy. All three books ran to many editions - the grandest of them an illustrated version with perfectly matching pictures by Harry Becker. They are hoarded to this day, and traded, by the many devotees of my father's work. There even exists an Adrian Bell Society.
The most important edition of all, without doubt, was the Penguin. It was published in 1940 in a small format and on paper of distinctly war-time quality. A Penguin could fit into a soldier's pocket or his kit-bag, and often did. It thus found a place wherever British forces served, by land, sea and air, in the war zones of the Second World War. It was especially prized in the prison camps.
I became fully aware of the effect he had only after his death. At the bottom of a drawer we found a collection of the letters sent to him by servicemen who had read his books in their bivouacs and tank turrets, and drawn from them comfort and hope in their lives' hardest times. He provided a life-line to another world, a world of peace and sanity, of enduring values and country rhythms remote from the war's destruction.
In a now almost forgotten magazine, Everybody's, he wrote an open letter to one of the members of this far-flung constituency, an RAF fighter pilot. 'You wrote to me from Malta, from a Malta pounded by air from Sicily, from North Africa, ringed by U-Boats, all but cut off. You wrote to me (heaven knows how the letter got through) that when the war was finished, you and your girl wanted to marry and have a little farm in England. You have a vision of England. Wherever you are, it has been your consolation and hope. Keep that vision, because it's true. It may be the key to your life. I am anxious that you should know this; because if you follow your impulses and live your farming life, with all its ups and downs, at the end of it you will sit back and recall that first vision of it that you had in the desert or the jungle. And you will know then that all in all it was a true vision.'
My father's vision was shared and communicated through that little paperback edition. Mr Penguin has many achievements to his credit, but in my view his wartime work was the most valuable of all. I would even call it heroic. It sustained the faith and fortitude of men who had lost touch with friends and family, and the country for which they were fighting. When it was all over and the survivors returned, it is my view that Penguin should have been decorated - with the DPM (Distinguished Publications Medal) or some such. He had surely earned it.
Marjorie was born in the Transvaal, South Africa.
| 1 | Bruce Bellringer's Family Tree. |
| 2 | www.heardfamilyhistory.org.uk. This GEDCOM is predominantly the work of Nick Heard, but it incorporates the collaborated work of many other family historians. You are welcome to use the information herein but please acknowledge the source. Every effort has been made to ensure the data is accurate, but any use you make of it is entirely at your own risk. (c) Nick Heard 2009 |
| 3 | Text From Source: Census England 1911 Address: Glengorse, Chesterfield Road Place: Eastbourne, Sussex, England Name,Relation,Sex,Age,Married,Years,Chd Born,Chd Living,Chd Died,Occupation,Industry,Employ Status,At Home,Where Born,Nationality,Infirmity Adrian Hanbury Bell,pupil,M,9,S,,,,,school,,,,Manchester, Lancashire, England,, Glengorse was described by the enumerator as a Gent's school. John Prosser, 61, was Housemaster.There were 44 males including masters, servants and pupils, and 5 females, including matrons and servants. |
| 4 | Text From Source: Census England 1921 Address: Great Lodge Place: Hundon, Suffolk, England Name,Relation,Age,Sex,Marr/Orph'd,Birthplace,Nationality,Education,Occupation,Employment,Place of Work,Chd <16,Children's Ages Adrian Hanbury Bell,Boarder,19y 6m,M,Single,Manchester, Lancashire, England,,,Farm pupil,Worker,At home,, Adrian was learning farmer on the farm of Victor Savage, 37,and his wife, Martha. There was a maid, Beata Fay, 21, living there. |
| 5 | Text From Source: Register England & Wales 1939 Address: The Old Rectory Place: Wainford, Bungay, Suffolk Name of person,Status,Gender,Birthdate,Condition,Occupation,Comments Bell, Adrian H,,M,4 Oct 1901,M,Crossword Puzzle Composer,writer on farming (The Times), Bell, Marjorie H,,F,24 Mar 1908,M,Unpaid domestic duties, Gibson, Alice,,F,28 Dec 1878,M,Unpaid domestic duties, The three Bell children had closed records. |
| 6 | Text From Source: Name Related Cond Age Occupation Birth Place William James Gibson Head Mar 39 Army Bandmaster Brighton, Sussex, England Alice Gibson Wife Mar 32 Hoxton, London, England William Laurence Gibson Son Unm 11 Scholar Whitton, Middlesex, England Alice Frances Gibson Dau Unm 8 Scholar Ealing, London, England Charles Herbert Gibson Son Unm 5 Scholar Hendon,London, England Marjorie Hilda Gibson Dau Unm 3 Potchefstroom, North West Province, South Africa |
| RG14/4337 RG78/174 RD58 SD1 ED17 SN114. Cit. Date: 2 April 1911. Assessment: Secondary evidence. |