Page 34 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)_Neat
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20                   GERTRUDE BELL
                     clan. Early in 1887 her stepmother’s only surviving brother,
                     Tommy Olliffc, was hit by a bus in the King’s Road, Chelsea, and
                     died soon afterwards as the result of the injuries he sustained. A
                     year earlier her grandmother, Margaret, had died after a long
                     illness. She was the daughter of another outstanding scientist
                     and industrialist of the North-east, Hugh Lee Pattinson, whom
                     Lowthian Bell met soon after joining his father’s ironworks at
                     Walker-on-Tyne in 1836. Pattinson was the son of a Quaker shop­
                     keeper and taught himself physics and chemistry. He discovered
                     an economic method of removing silver from lead ores and thus
                     gave rise to a profitable local industry. He met Lowthian at the
                     Newcasdc Literary and Philosophical Society where, coinciden­
                     tally, Lowthian’s father Thomas had met his partner James Losh
                     at the beginning of the century. Though Pattinson was twenty
                     years Bell’s senior the two men became close companions and
                     opened a chemical works together at Washington, but Pattinson
                     retired shortly after to devote himself to astronomy. Lowthian
                     married Pattinson’s daughter in 1842 and she presided over the
                     domestic affairs of the Hall at Washington with kindly but firm
                     authority, in token of which the place became known to local
                     people as ‘Dame Margaret’s Hall’.
                       Also in 1887 news came of another family death; John Bell,
                     Lowthian’s brother and senior partner, died of a heart-attack at his
                     home in Algiers. John was a substantial shareholder in the Bell
                     enterprises. He and his second wife Lizzie had four daughters the
                     eldest of whom, Evelyn, married John Edward Courtenay Bodley
                     the historian and, according to his own testimony, ‘Founder’s
                     Kin of the King of all Libraries’. Naturally John Bell left his
                     shares to his wife. But over the years a family row ensued as to
                     the interpretation of the company’s articles of association which,
                     according to Hugh Bell, held that all such shares should be made
                     available to existing directors of the firm at a price agreed by the
                     board. Courtenay Bodley insisted that any such arrangement
                     would deprive his own wife, and therefore him too, of a rightful
                     inheritance. Hugh eventually won the battle—he almost certainly
                     had the letter of the law on his side, for Bodley was not a man to
                     shirk litigation if he had a leg to stand on—and the shares were
                     eventually purchased at a price he considered to be greatly below
                     their market value. A fierce verbal onslaught developed and
                     nobody was better qualified to wage a war of words than Bodley,
                     sometime secretary to Charles Dilke, author of the standard
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