Page 32 - Life of Gertrude Bell

20 GERTRUDE DELL
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-Tync 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
Newcastle 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 shordy after to devote himself to astronomy. Lowthian
married Pattinson’s daughter in 1842 and she presided over the
domesdc 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