Adrian Bell
Adrian Hanbury Bell.
Early life
Bell was born at
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.[5]
Out of his early experiences of farming at
Bell wrote the "Countryman’s Notebook" column in the Eastern Daily Press from 1950,[8] 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.[9]
When
Ann Lynda Gander wrote the first biography of Bell in 2001.[11] The first full length critical appreciation of his work, At the Field's Edge by Richard Hawking, was published in April 2019.[12]
Family
Bell married Marjorie Gibson, an admirer of his work, in 1931; they had a son and two daughters.
References
- ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ^ The Hanbury Family, vol. II, A. Audrey Locke, Arthur L. Humphries, 1916, pp. 354, 360
- ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ^ "Adrian Bell | Authors | Faber & Faber". www.faber.co.uk.
- ^ Smith, Amy. "Commemorative bench unveiled during walk on the history of land girls in Redisham". Beccles and Bungay Journal. Archived from the original on 20 October 2019. Retrieved 20 October 2019.
- ^ "Corduroy". www.goodreads.com.
- ^ "Penguinfirsteditions.com".
- ^ "A Countryman's Notebook by Bell, Adrian". biblio.co.uk.
- ^ K D M Snell. Bell, Adrian Hanbury, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004
- ^ Kamm, Oliver (12 October 2023). "The Times crossword: the man who began it all" – via www.thetimes.co.uk.
- ^ Ann Lynda Gander. Adrian Bell, Voice of the Countryside, Holm Oak Publishing (2001)
- ^ Hawking, Richard. At the Field's Edge, Crowood Press (2019)
- ^ Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, Stanley Kunitz, Howard Haycraft, Wilson, 1976, p. 106
- ^ The Readers' Companion to Twentieth-century Writers, Frank Kermode, Fourth Estate, 1995, p. 63
- ^ The Authors' and Writers' Who's Who, vol. 5, Burke's Peerage Ltd, 1963, p. 38
- ^ "Things That Endure". The Radio Times (4248): 125. 2 September 2005 – via BBC Genome.
- ^ "Anthea Bell, 'magnificent' translator of Asterix and Kafka, dies aged 82". The Guardian. 18 October 2018.
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)
- K.D.M. Snell, Spirits of Community: Belonging and Loss in England, 1750-2000, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.