Alan Bell
Brought the London Library into the age of the computer
ALAN BELL, who has died aged 75, was a gentleman scholar who as Librarian led the London Library in St James’s Square through the shoals of digital technology and the internet in the early 1990s.
Bell was a dignified figure typically clad in a threepiece suit, and his preference was to communicate in an elegant hand or through the spoken word. But he showed enthusiasm for progress. When members complained of being harassed to return books, he would smoothly reply: “We don’t mind you being late, but the computer does.”
Yet he was also capable of pursuing down the street an offending borrower who had retained a first edition of Cardinal Newman’s Apologia. He never batted an eyelid on a visit to The Daily Telegraph when a secretary in the obituaries department addressed him as “mate”, and remained neutral when members campaigned for the installation of a coffee room at the library (though everyone assumed he was opposed).
Alan Scott Bell was born in Sunderland on May 8 1942 and went to Ashville College, Harrogate, where he was a house librarian and gave a debonair performance as Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest. After Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was befriended by the historian of Christianity Owen Chadwick, he joined the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts.
He went on to the National Library of Scotland before becoming librarian at Rhodes House in Oxford, where he supervised the accession of the papers of the former Rhodesian leader Sir Roy Welensky. Of greater personal interest to him were the papers of Evelyn Waugh, which had been temporarily placed there by the Waugh family, and he went on to help Michael Davie edit the 1980 volume of diaries.
In addition to reviewing for the TLS and the Spectator and contributing to the Dictionary of National Biography, Bell edited the works of several neglected 19th-century authors. These included Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book (a family memoir) and a couple of works on the Scots judge and memoirist Lord Cockburn, who railed against “Skotchmen” adopting “the affected pronunciation of a paltry, lisping puppy Englishman”. Even more taxing was tackling the almost totally incomprehensible manuscripts of the critic George Saintsbury, which Bell described as “a challenge to paleographic ingenuity”. In one passage he could only discern the words “drunken bridesmaids”.
Bell’s one full-length biography, published in 1980, was of the Reverend Sydney Smith, the witty Anglican clergyman who was a founder of the Edinburgh Review and campaigned for civil rights for Roman Catholics – a stand that cost him a mitre. In response to some grumbles that his book was short on humour, Bell eventually published The Sayings of Sydney Smith. But he produced only the first of a promised four-volume edition of Smith’s letters, which he had collected and transcribed, and thereafter felt constrained from publishing other works on Smith because of demands for the other three.
While contemplating writing a life of Evelyn Waugh, Bell made several trips to transcribe letters held in America. On discovering that Selina Hastings had a commission to write a biography of the author (published in 1994), he sold her his work. Later, with Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson, he co-edited a 43-volume Complete Works, which is still in production.
After stepping down from the London Library in 2002, Bell retired to Edinburgh, where he decided to read right through the new Dictionary of National Biography. By the time of his death, he was thought to have got through two-thirds of its 72 million words.
He is survived by his wife Olivia Butt, his daughter Julia, who owns a DIY business, and son Nicolas, the Librarian at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Alan Bell, born May 8 1942, died April 24 2018