Hi!
To answer everybody - 'Lodger', 'Forfarian', 'Monica' and Rosie' - individually, after having received such a wealth of information within such a short time, is difficult. So I'll try it this way: Thank you all so very, very much for the intensive work you've done to assist me. It's absolutely amazing what you've found out, which is far more than I had in any way expected. I've copied all the information into a Word file and will now start to sieve through all the details provided and try to find the connections within the different families. Difficulty is, of course, that not only first names, but also last names, are continually repeated in the coming generations. So, for example, my grandmother "Mary Pennycuik Whamond Bell (Scott)" has taken her name from relatives in the past. And then of course, because of this, parallel to the immediate family, cousins often had the same first and last names.
Back in February of this year I got in touch with my cousin on my mother's side of the family who has been building a tree on Geni. The information I had at this time, as reported by my parents and as such considered to be true, was that my father had been born in February 1906 in Bearsden, Glasgow, his parents being William Ewart Gladstone Bell and Mary Bell, both from Scotland. The family then emigrated to Australia where my grandfather became a successful cellist and professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. My father, John Stevenson Bell, later returned to Scotland and never saw Gladstone again. That, at least, was the story as told to me and my mother. In 1975 the second son of my grandfather (he married three times, after Mary, a student, Muriel, 25 years younger and later another student, Joan, 36 years younger!) maintained that my grandfather had not come from Scotland, but had been born in Sunderland, England (Scandal!) which my mother refused to accept. This has however now been proved, together with a lot of information which has changed the entire situation. Apparently, for career reasons, my grandfather first changed his accent from Sunderland brogue to Oxford English and then to Scots, always referring to his 2nd. son as "Laddie". The second time was possibly by chance, having lived in Scotland for some years.
Gladstone, born in 1881 was, as we have now found out, considered a boy wonder as a musician, cello, making his first appearance in London before the Lord Mayor of London at the age of 14. He then went on to teach music in Edinburgh and Glasgow prior to 1902, studied music for two years in Germany at age 21 and later played in famous orchestras in London and elsewhere. He probably married Mary in 1904. In London he was offered a six month contract to appear in the "Exhibition" in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1906 and 1907. He arrived there no later than October 1906, remained for almost 3 years and first arrived in Sydney, Australia in 1909. According to his second son he made various trips back to Great Britain, of which I know nothing and I never met him. Considering that my father was born in February 1906 and the journey to New Zealand took about 50 days, Gladstone must have left his first wife Mary only months after the birth of my father. In no way did the family "emigrate to Australia", as I and my mother were informed, nor was it ever mentioned that he had at any time been in New Zealand; something only found out a month or so ago. Also, my father was not born in Bearsden, but in actual fact in Wishaw, possibly even in Daziel, and nothing suggests that he or his mother Mary left Scotland before 1911; two photos of my father wearing a kilt at approximately age 5 were taken in a professional photographers studio in Glasgow around 1910. As far as I know, we had no contact to my grandmother's family or either to my grandmother herself, who died when I was 6; they just didn't exist and my grandfather was merely a name in the distance, who had left and never returned. I still don't know the reason for all these lies and deceptions, but thanks to you all I'm getting deeper and deeper into finding out what actually happened! Thank you all again.
Lionel W. Bell
