Adrian Bell

Adrian Bell (4 October 1901 – 5 September 1980) was an English ruralist journalist and farmer, and the first compiler of The Times crossword.

Adrian Bell

Life

The son of a newspaper editor, Bell was born in London and educated at Uppingham School in Rutland.[1] 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.[2]

Out of his early experiences of farming at Bradfield St. George, in Suffolk, came the book Corduroy, published in 1930.[3] 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.[4]

Bell wrote the "Countryman’s Notebook" column in the Eastern Daily Press from 1950,[5] 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.[6]

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.[7]

The first full length critical appreciation of his work, by Richard Hawking, was published by The Crowood Press in April 2019.

Family

His 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.[8] His 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.[9]

Further reading
  • Ann Lynda Gander. Adrian Bell, Voice of the Countryside, Holm Oak Publishing, 2001. ISBN 0-9533406-1-9
  • Richard Hawking, At the Field's Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside, The Crowood Press, 2019 (ISBN 9780719829062)

References
  1. "Adrian Bell | Authors | Faber & Faber". www.faber.co.uk.
  2. Smith, Amy. "Commemorative bench unveiled during walk on the history of land girls in Redisham". Beccles and Bungay Journal.
  3. "Corduroy". www.goodreads.com.
  4. "Penguinfirsteditions.com".
  5. "A Countryman's Notebook by Bell, Adrian". biblio.co.uk.
  6. K D M Snell. Bell, Adrian Hanbury, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004
  7. Kamm, Oliver. "The Times crossword: the man who began it all" – via www.thetimes.co.uk.
  8. "Things That Endure". The Radio Times (4248): 125. 2 September 2005 – via BBC Genome.
  9. "Anthea Bell, 'magnificent' translator of Asterix and Kafka, dies aged 82". The Guardian. 18 October 2018.
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