Adrian Bell

Adrian Hanbury Bell[1] (4 October 1901 – 5 September 1980) was an English ruralist journalist and farmer, and the first compiler of The Times crossword.

[4] At the age of 19 he ventured into the countryside in Hundon, Suffolk, to learn about agriculture, and he farmed in various locations over the next sixty years, until his death in September 1980.

The popularity of literary back-to-the-land writing in England in the 1930s can be put in the context of, for example, Vita Sackville-West's long narrative poem The Land.

[7] Bell wrote the "Countryman’s Notebook" column in the Eastern Daily Press from 1950,[8] and produced over twenty other books on the countryside, including Men and the Fields (1939), Apple Acre (1942), Sunrise to Sunset (1944), The Budding Morrow (1946), The Flower and the Wheel (1949), Music in the Morning, (1954), A Suffolk Harvest (1956), the autobiographical My Own Master (1961) and The Green Bond (1976).

[16] Daughter Anthea Bell, who died in 2018, was a translator known for her English versions of Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, W. G. Sebald and the Asterix comic books.