GORDON BELL (1887-1970)
Wyn Beasley remembers the life and career of Gordon Bell, one of the founding fellows of the ‘College of Surgeons of Australasia’
"The Edinburgh to which he came was still “Auld Reekie”; the Royal Infirmary had recently moved from the hillside east of Nicolson Street to the valley on the west, in Lauriston Place"
When I wrote about Sir Gordon Gordon-Taylor in the October 2009 issue, I referred to his friendship with the man who taught me undergraduate surgery, Sir Gordon Bell. Bell was one of those Scots who, growing up as the son of a colonist farmer in the late nineteenth century, came to his native land to study medicine.
His ancestors farmed in Annandale in Dumfries; but grandfather William migrated first to Australia, then on to New Zealand where in 1872 he became established in one of the rich valleys of Marlborough. One of his neighbours here was a Monro of the Edinburgh anatomist line. Grandfather Bell prospered and in 1879 he bought the nearby Northwood station, which his son, also William, ran. And into this district, after a period as governess to the Monros, came a young schoolmistress, Emma Amelia Dollimore, the daughter of New Zealand’s fist Baptist clergyman, Decimus Dollimore (who sounds as if he might have stepped out of the pages of Thackeray or Anthony Trollope). From a band of suitors, she selected William Bell as her husband, and to them a son was born in 1887, and named Francis Gordon.
Gordon was a foundation pupil of Marlborough High School (later College) in Blenheim (Figure 1); then at the age of 17 he travelled, alone, to Edinburgh to enter the medical school. The Edinburgh to which he came was still ‘Auld Reekie’; the Royal Infirmary had recently moved from the hillside east of Nicolson Street to the valley on the west, in Lauriston Place. In the process it leapfrogged both the old University building, and the Playfair building of the College of Surgeons.
He won the Vans Dunlop scholarship in 1908, and graduated with distinction in 1910. By the outbreak of the First War he had managed to combine his junior hospital posts with service as an anatomy demonstrator and with the acquisition of an MD and an English Fellowship; and he had the offer of a fellowship to the Mayo Clinic. The army did not want him at this stage – doubtless because ‘the war would be over by Christmas’ – so he went to the Mayo, writing home to Marlborough of the luxurious surroundings in which he found himself.
By 1915, the war was not over and the army did want him, and by the time of the Passchendaele offensive of 1917, at the crossroads at Brandhoek, he was a casualty clearing station surgeon, his service to be recognised by the award of a Military Cross and a mention in despatches. He came out of the war as a major, and had just become re-established in Edinburgh – to the extent of becoming an Edinburgh Fellow, which was obligatory before he could take up a consultant post at the Infirmary – when the professor of surgery in Dunedin at what was then New Zealand’s only medical school, Louis Barnett, retired, endowing a (part-time) chair in memory of a son killed during the recent war.
To this Ralph Barnett chair, with a glowing reference from Gordon Taylor, Gordon Bell was appointed in 1924. The Bells travelled out in the Shaw Savill liner Ionic, to be met on arrival in Wellington by the Dean of the medical school, Lindo Ferguson, and the university Chancellor, Rev. Andrew Cameron who, by a serendipitous coincidence, happened to be in the capital city on a political lobbying expedition. Three years later the founders of what would become the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons met in Dunedin; and in 1939 Gordon Bell succeeded Sir Louis Barnett, who had just completed two presidential years, on the Council. His own presidency came a decade after Barnett’s, and he had the satisfaction of presiding over the first full dress College meeting since the austerity of the Second War – in his home town of Dunedin, and moreover in the centennial year of the province of Otago, which had begun as a settlement of mostly Free Kirk Scots in 1848 (Figure 2).
Gordie retired from his chair in 1952, and was elected an honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. The following year he was made KBE in the Coronation Honours List, to be invested by Her Majesty in Christchurch during her Commonwealth tour (Figure 3). His retirement was a busy one: he came back to his chair to bridge an awkward interregnum in 1957, and in 1964 he and his colleague Sir Charles Hercus published a book on the history of the Otago school under its first three deans. He chaired an appeal for a radiotherapy unit at the new Wakari Hospital in Dunedin, which was named after him; and he made a final public appearance representing his beloved Edinburgh College at the centenary of the University of Otago in 1969. He died the following year. The Australasian College commemorates him with a memorial lecture, delivered at its New Zealand meeting: the 1982 lecturer, Professor (now Sir) Miles Irving, took pleasure in being able to record that, in centuries past, the Irvings and the Bells farmed neighbouring properties in Dumfries. Bell’s presidential portrait (Figure 4) was regarded by the artist, (Sir) William Dargie, as one of his best works.