Adrian Bell & the FIRST Times Crossword   

My 3rd cousin, once removed, of the Crediton Berry and Bellringer branch of my maternal family, Marjorie Gibson, married a writer, Adrian Bell.  Adrian was born in Lancashire, grew up in London, and was educated at Uppingham School in Rutland, where during the First World War, with all the young masters serving at the Front, the elderly teachers drafted in were unable to maintain discipline, and Adrian had a tough time there. Afterwards poor health (he suffered from headaches throughout his life), and his father's stubbornness kept him from university. He had a strong desire to be a poet. Despite this, he found himself instead being shoe-horned into journalism. His father was the deputy editor of The Observer, so Adrian worked in his father's office.  That unhappy "apprenticeship" ended after about a month and he was happy to leave. But he pursued his poetry.  Leading what was described as a Bohemian life in Battersea, one day he happened upon a small ad in the Daily Telegraph - a Suffolk farmer was advertising for a young man as a farming apprentice for a year.  The poet in Adrian heard the call of the Suffolk countryside and he decided that he could manage the farming that went with it. Farmer Savage agreed to take him on, perhaps with some reluctance, as Adrian's father had to pay rather more than he expected to recompense the farmer for Adrian's obvious lack of an agricultural labourer's physique. In any event, the 1921 census finds Adrian Bell at Great Lodge, Hundon, Suffolk, his occupation "Farm Pupil" living with  farmer Victor Savage and his wife Martha. He took to the life, and could see that he had found his vocation.  After his apprenticeship he bought a small farm, and  started farming on a modest scale, helped by his family. There were  obstacles to overcome. He was not skilled at the financial aspects of farming. And this was a time of the Great Slump.   Eventually economic conditions put an end to his own farm. Living with his mother in Sudbury instead of working on his own farm still, he began writing a fictionalised account of his experience as the farm pupil, which became his first books - the  trilogy  Corduroy (1930), Silver Ley (1931) and The Cherry Tree (1932), describing life on the land in East Anglia. He was encouraged by his friend, the poet Edmund Blunden.  It was in 1929 that his father was lunching with a friend from The  Times, who was bemoaning the fact that The Times was losing readers, attracted to other quality dailies by the new craze copied from American newspapers where it was a popular feature  - the crossword. Though Adrian had no experience or interest in such a thing, his father assured his friend that his son could create crosswords for The Times. Perhaps the three guinea fee was too much of a temptation, for Adrian took on the challenge, and compiled the first ever Times crossword, that was published in the Sports Pages of  The Times on 1 February 1930. It is said that his crosswords were the first to feature cryptic clues. The newspaper became an avid client for his puzzles. At about the same time, when visiting his father, who was staying with Adrian's Aunt Mabel in London, he met a boarder there - our cousin Marjorie Gibson. She had been born in South Africa, the daughter of Lieutenant Gibson, a bandmaster in the Life Guard, and our cousin Alice Bellringer.  Marjorie was working as a secretary in London and had found lodgings with Aunt Mabel in Pimlico. Adrian was smitten. But before he could propose, to his dismay, she was sent to stay with her aunt in the USA . When she returned in 1930 Adrian proposed and they were married at the earliest opportunity, in January 1931.  Perhaps to their surprise, Adrian's novels were proving to be very successful, though the couple lived in often very basic, but perhaps to them romantic, dwellings.  Continuing to write books, he also worked as a freelance journalist despite his adolescent misgivings about that role. But his ability to engage his readers with his perspective on farming and rural affairs proved very popular, in his periodical and newspaper pieces as well as his books.  Adrian and Marjorie settled into married life, and began to raise a family, living in several rural settings and eventually returning to Suffolk, all the while  Adrian writing his books portraying rural England. Even after the outbreak of war publishers could justify printing Adrian Bell's new titles, despite the shortage of paper. For despite the dark days that many servicemen suffered, Adrian's writings apparently brought rays of sunshine into their lives. He began to receive letters from soldiers on the front who had been obliged to abandon many of their possessions, yet somehow managed to retain their heavily thumbed copies of Corduroy, or some other Bell work, that summoned vivid memories of England's countryside. And POWs in the camps in Italy and in Germany wrote to him to tell how precious his writings were to them in their bleak surroundings. In 1943, when a local farmer was threatened with eviction as his farm was failing, Adrian bought the farm, and agreed that he should farm it, but allow the threatened farmer to stay on and help.  By then it was 15 years since he had farmed, and he didn't see eye to eye with the previous owner regarding the best way to farm. But in wartime Britain farms worked to demanding standards and he was conscious that his predecessor had rather let things slide to a run-down state. There was plenty of help available to him as Italian and German prisoners-of-war were sent to work on the farm, and of course, Land Army girls. It took Adrian a while to re-acclimatise himself to farming. And his mind inevitably was also on his writing and his crossword compilation. Determined to follow his more traditional approach, he did make mistakes. But he got through the war as master of his own farm. After the war he lost the help of Land Army and POWs. The Post-War years brought poor harvests, ill-health and a need for more income than the farm could generate, so in October 1949 he sold it. In 1950 he was contracted to write a weekly article for the local paper, the Eastern Daily Press. His crossword work continued, and he was still writing his novels. But the world became a different place in the 50s. Adrian's rural England was not so popular in the modern world. His books sold, but not in the numbers of previous years, and publishers were reluctant to take them. But he continued to have books published until 1976, achieving 22 published works, plus a volume of poems, and an anthology of others' writings that he edited.  He continued with his weekly articles for the Eastern Daily Press, and continued compiling crosswords for The Times - almost 5000 of them in total. He died on 5 September 1980. Marjorie died in 1991.

Adrian Hanbury Bell The first Times crossword compiled by Adrian Bell in 1930. Adrian & Marjorie.

Sister Mary Oliva C.S.M

Agnes Oliva Willing

In 1919 Agnes was sent to Cape Mount, Liberia. She was based at the Bethany School there, with 15 teenaged boarders and about 100 day pupils. As well as teaching at the school, and teaching small classes of infants in more distant communities, she had to preach at missionary meetings in the local village.  It was very much training on the job, as Agnes was obliged to manage circumstances as she encountered them, helped by locals and the other missionaries.  She learned something of the local Vai dialect, made journeys into forest and bush to distant villages, and even to neighbouring Sierra Leone, a journey of several days on foot and by boat. After a while , despite her misgivings about her medical skills, Agnes was obliged to take over the running of the hospital and the dispensary for a while, averaging only two bed cases, but with up to 5o dispensary cases daily. Patients included everything from bad teeth to a woman with leprosy who was isolated in a nearby field hut.  For three months, with some missionaries on leave and others moving to new posts, Agnes was the only missionary on the station.  During this period she confronted the hostile opposition of a charismatic revivalist sect, luckily without suffering the threatened violence.  Her absent colleagues returned, and in December 1921 Agnes left the mission post and Liberia. She was suffering from malaria and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She sailed back to England on the SS Bodnant, arriving in Liverpool on 31 December 1921. She stayed with friends, the Bakers, in Upper Norwood for some 5 weeks before sailing back to the USA on the SS Cedric. She settled in the Deaconess House in Philadelphia, and decided then that she wanted to dedicate herself to the religious life. At first she sought to be set apart as a deaconess.

Sister Mary Oliva

Agnes pursued her vocation further by becoming a nun, entering the novitiate of the Convent of the Community of St Mary, Peekskill, New York in November 1926, and being received into the Order on 21 September 1929, as Sister Mary Oliva. She was sent to Sagada in the Philippines in 1936., to resume her missionary work.

The mission worked with the Igorot tribes in the mountains.  As well as teaching the youngest children, by 1837 Sister Mary and the other nuns were asked to teach the sacred studies to the High School students.  She wrote that things in the mission had gone fairly smoothly, until the Japanese attacked the USA, and occupied the Philippines.  The Sisters were taken into Japanese internment in May 1942, and were imprisoned at first at the former police barracks at Camp Holmes near Baguio. Agnes was philosophical about her internment. The missionaries suffered the hardships of deprivation of freedoms, food, company, communication with the outside world, but Agnes claimed that it was an opportunity for her spiritual and intellectual growth, having time to study. They endured cockroach infestations, and flooded quarters when the rains came. But the missionaries did not suffer the brutality that was inflicted on military and other prisoners.  Space was at a premium in the overcrowded quarters, but at Baguio the Japanese allowed the American civilian internees take charge of the daily running of the camp. At first the sexes were separated which was hard on the families, and the crowding and constant presence of so many internees preyed on the nerves, and the screaming and crying of children was wearing. As the time passed, food rations shrunk, and daily life grew harder as the Japanese began to evidently be losing the war; they became edgy and more repressive. Then on December 29, 1944 the women and children were ordered to assemble before being put on trucks. The local Igorots feared the worse for their friends. But in fact they were transported to Manila, where they were interned in the Bilibid prison. The conditions there were filthy and disease ridden.  There was little food in Manila, and the internees made do with rotten vegetables and mouldy corn. At first they removed the weevils from the corn, but then realised they were the only protein they were likely to receive, so they left them in. Within a week several internees including some of the sisters were sick with dengue fever. Then they discovered the water was poisoned. The men had to dig several wells to get access to safe water, though it could not be drunk without first being boiled. But Sister Mary seems to have endured all hardships stoically, strengthened by her Faith.

The end of Japanese occupation came suddenly, the Japanese guards filing silently out of the prison, and in no time American tanks were rolling through the city. There were major changes for the internees - much more and better food, and the opportunity to leave the prison with a pass.  But internees of a sort they remained, and the war continued, with snipers active in the city.  Rumours that Bilibid was to be bombed caused the women and children to be evacuated to a shoe factory for a day. When they returned to Bilibid what meagre possessions they owned had been looted by the Fillipinos. They continues saying Masses whilst outside mortars dropped, and the sound of machine guns could be heard. One morning a bomb dropped very near their end of the building, but the Sisters survived.  Soon they were moved to a camp at Santo Tomas University.  A few days later their repatriation began. They boarded the S.S.Ebberle, and landed at San Pedro, California on May 2 1945. Sister Mary Oliva's account of her internment can be downloaded here.

In 1946 Sister Mary Oliva returned to missionary work at Sagada.  The Convent and the Church had been reduced to rubble.  War had taken its toll of the Igorots, and the Sisters were asked to open an orphanage.  Many of the children were badly malnourished, and it took a year before they began to recover.  The Sisters resumed their High School teaching, their work with the Women's Auxiliary Group and training the Sisterhood of St Mary the Virgin.

Sister Mary Oliva's foreign missionary work ended in 1957. She retired to the convent at Peekskill, New York, where she continued with convent duties until her death at age 92, in 1982. Her ashes are interred in St Mary's Convent cemetery.
 

The House of Bethany, school and mission, Liberia	Native village and mission, Nenana, Alaska	POWs at Bilibid camp, Manila