Page 106 - Life of Gertrude Bell

92 GERTRUDE BELL
parativcly few industrialists of the age to see the importance of
relating business to economic trends which he analysed so
shrewdly ... ’ Bell lost the battle for technical education, while
the Krupps of Germany and their like in America, Asia and
Europe won it. Britain was to pay a high price for its folly, and
Lowthian Bell was one of the few men who understood just how
great it would be. In his own family, where no grandchild,
nephew or niece had been denied the very best education that
money could buy, not one followed in his footsteps. Maurice,
popular with the workpeople and a good manager, took over
many of the family responsibilities at the Works, but he was no
technician. In Lowthian’s younger days Washington Hall, where
Gertrude’s father grew up, was alive with scientific and philo­
sophical debate of the highest order. The ironmaster of
Washington counted among his close friends and acquaintances
Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, Robert Stephenson, Baron
Armstrong the armament king, William Morris, Burne-Jones, and
some of the distinguished Quakers of the region of whom his
wife and father-in-law were notable representatives. His own
education in Scotland, Germany, Denmark and France, in the
course of which he distinguished himself as a chemist and
physicist, had made him an international figure by the time he
reached his early twenties. His published works, Chemical
Phenomena of Iron Smelting and Principles of the Manufacture of Iron
and Steel, were standard textbooks for many years. It can only be
regarded as a peculiarly English fact that this extraordinary man,
acknowledged even by the Krupps of Germany as the leading
technical authority of his age, was listed in most directories of
the time under the heading ‘Merchant’; to the end of his days,
even within his own family, he was spoken of as a ‘trader’.
Thus Gertrude’s grandfather very sensibly decided in 1901 to
unite his companies with those of a competitor, Dorman Long.
That company, a relative latecomer to the area, had been ex­
ceptionally successful under the technical management of Sir
Arthur Dorman, a Kentish farmer who went north in 1875, and
1i the financier Albert de Lande Long. They purchased a majority
of the ordinary shares of Bell Brothers, and Sir Lowthian Bell
became chairman of the new organisation. Already Lowthian
had sold off the chemical companies which he founded in con-
junction with his father-in-law, Hugh Lee Pattinson, to the
Brunner Mond Company. The firm’s rail interests had been

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