Adrian Hanbury Bell (4 October 1901 – 5 September 1980) was an English ruralist journalist and farmer, and the first compiler of ''
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' ( ...
''
crossword
A crossword is a word puzzle that usually takes the form of a square or a rectangular grid of white- and black-shaded squares. The goal is to fill the white squares with letters, forming words or phrases, by solving clues which lead to th ...
.
Early life
Bell was born at
Stretford
Stretford is a market town in Trafford, Greater Manchester, England. It is situated on flat ground between the River Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal, south of Manchester city centre, south of Salford and north-east of Altrincham. S ...
,
Lancashire
Lancashire ( , ; abbreviated Lancs) is the name of a historic county, ceremonial county, and non-metropolitan county in North West England. The boundaries of these three areas differ significantly.
The non-metropolitan county of Lancas ...
, son of Robert Bell (1865-1949), editor of ''
The Observer
''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the ...
'', 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
A royalist supports a particular monarch as head of state for a particular kingdom, or of a particular dynastic claim. In the abstract, this position is royalism. It is distinct from monarchism, which advocates a monarchical system of gov ...
Rutland
Rutland () is a ceremonial county and unitary authority in the East Midlands, England. The county is bounded to the west and north by Leicestershire, to the northeast by Lincolnshire and the southeast by Northamptonshire.
Its greatest len ...
.
Career
At the age of 19 he ventured into the countryside in Hundon,
Suffolk
Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include ...
, 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
smallholding
A smallholding or smallholder is a small farm operating under a small-scale agriculture model. Definitions vary widely for what constitutes a smallholder or small-scale farm, including factors such as size, food production technique or technology ...
at
Redisham
Redisham is a village and civil parish in the English county of Suffolk. It is located south-west of Beccles and north-east of Halesworth in the East Suffolk district. The population of the parish was 125 at the 2011 United Kingdom census.
...
, near
Beccles
Beccles ( ) is a market town and civil parish in the English county of Suffolk.OS Explorer Map OL40: The Broads: (1:25 000) : . The town is shown on the milestone as from London via the A145 and A12 roads, north-east of London as the crow fl ...
.
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
Edmund Charles Blunden (1 November 1896 – 20 January 1974) was an English poet, author, and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was a ...
, 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
Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, Order of the Companions of Honour, CH (Birth name, née Sackville-West; 9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.
Sackville-West was a su ...
's long narrative poem ''The Land''. The
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.Eastern Daily Press'' from 1950, and produced over twenty other books on the countryside, including ''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
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' ( ...
'' began to lose circulation to ''
The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally.
It was f ...
'' 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.
The first full length critical appreciation of his work, ''At the Field's Edge'' by Richard Hawking, was published by The Crowood Press in April 2019.
Family
Bell married Marjorie Gibson, an admirer of his work, 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
A member of parliament (MP) is the representative in parliament of the people who live in their electoral district. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, this term refers only to members of the lower house since upper house members o ...
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
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typ ...
,
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts i ...
,
W. G. Sebald
Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001), known as W. G. Sebald or (as he preferred) Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by literary critics as one of the g ...
and the ''
Asterix
''Asterix'' or ''The Adventures of Asterix'' (french: Astérix or , "Asterix the Gaul") is a ''bande dessinée'' comic book series about a village of indomitable Gaulish warriors who adventure around the world and fight the Roman Republic, wi ...
'' comic books.
References
Further reading
* Ann Lynda Gander. ''Adrian Bell, Voice of the Countryside'', Holm Oak Publishing, 2001.
* Richard Hawking ''At the Field's Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside'' ''The Crowood Press'', 2019 ()
* K.D.M. Snell, ''Spirits of Community: Belonging and Loss in England, 1750-2000'', Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.