George Bell

Home > People > History > British and Irish History: Biographies

Bell, George (1883–1958). Bishop of Chichester (1929–58) and leading ecumenist. Born in Hampshire and educated at Christ Church, Oxford, Bell was successively chaplain to Archbishop Davidson (1914), dean of Canterbury (1924), and bishop of Chichester. From 1919 he strove tirelessly for Christian unity and, as chairman of Life and Work (1932), was a leading international protagonist, responsible for founding the World Council of Churches. Present in Berlin at Hitler's accession (1933) and later personally confronting Hess and Ribbentrop, he foretold the evils of Nazism. A confidant of Bonhoeffer, the German dissident pastor—whom he met secretly in wartime Stockholm—and of the anti-Nazi confessing church, he tried in vain to obtain British support for wartime German resistance; he persistently opposed demands for German unconditional surrender and condemned obliteration bombing. With vast ecclesiastical experience, he seemed the obvious choice for Canterbury (1944), but his outspokenness possibly cost the nation and the church the benefit of his primacy. A profoundly pastoral diocesan bishop, he was a lover of English literature. He reintroduced religious drama—the first since the Reformation—to cathedral life, commissioning for Canterbury Masefield's Coming of Christ (1928) with music by Holst, and Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

Revd Dr William M. Marshall

Bell, George (1878–1966). Australian painter, draughtsman, teacher, and critic. In 1903–20 he lived in Europe (he was an Official War Artist in the First World War), then returned to his native Melbourne. He started teaching privately in 1922 and in 1925 founded the Bell–Shore School with Arnold Shore (1897–1963). By this time Bell was a well-established painter working in an uncontroversial Impressionist style, but he was plagued by doubts about the validity of his work, thinking that he should be trying to extract the ‘underlying truth’ from visual appearances rather than merely recording them. His style began to move more towards Post-Impressionism, and in 1934–5 he made another visit to Europe, this time specifically to study modern painting (he was the first Australian artist to do so): Braque, Cézanne (above all), Matisse, and Picasso were among the artists to whom he paid the most attention. He was less distinguished as a painter than as a teacher—a seminal figure in the development of modernism in Australia: Robert Hughes calls him ‘arguably the most influential single teacher who ever worked in Australia’ (The Art of Australia, 1970). Russell Drysdale was his most famous pupil. Bell was art critic for the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial, 1923–48.

Bell, George (1883–1958),British ecumenical churchman; dean of Canterbury, 1924–9; bishop of Chichester, 1929–58. Outstanding for his moral courage and for his concern that all humankind should act as Christ intended, he was a strong supporter of the World Council of Churches and of the Confessional Church in Germany in its struggles against Nazification. Bell visited Stockholm in 1942 and was there approached by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an emissary of German resisters (see Schwarze Kapelle), who sent messages through him to George VI. They did not realize how slight the king's actual power was, nor how unsuitable Bell was as any sort of intermediary to the British government: having already spoken out in the House of Lords against the indiscriminate bombing of civilians (see strategic air offensives, 1), he was no longer persona grata to Churchill. In the aftermath of war, Bell led the movement to re-establish links between the English and German churches. See also religion.

M. R. D. Foot