Adrian Bell was an English ruralist journalist and farmer, and the first compiler of The Timescrossword.
Life
The son of a newspaper editor, Bell was born in London and educated at Uppingham School in Rutland. 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 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 poemThe 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 Apple Acre, Sunrise to Sunset, The Budding Morrow, The Flower and the Wheel, Music in the Morning,, A Suffolk Harvest, the autobiographical My Own Master and The Green Bond. 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. The first full length critical appreciation of his work, by Richard Hawking, was published by The Crowood Press in April 2019.
