George Kennedy Allen Bell (4 February 1883 – 3 October 1958) was an Anglican theologian, Dean of Canterbury, Bishop of Chichester, member of the House of Lords and a pioneer of the ecumenical movement.

[4] Here too he was socially engaged, as one of the founders of a cooperative for students and university members and sitting on the board of settlements and worker-development through the Workers' Educational Association (WEA).

Bell's early career was shaped by his appointment in 1914 as chaplain to Archbishop Randall Davidson, one of the key figures in twentieth century church history.

Bell reported on 6 June to a gathering of the bishops of the Church of England and clarified the difference between confessing and rejecting, and the separation between a lawful and an illegitimate calling on Jesus Christ.

From 1934 Bell functioned as a president of "Life and Work", when Bonhoeffer and Karl Koch as praeses of the synod of the old-Prussian Ecclesiastical province of Westphalia were invited as representatives of the Confessing Church to the world ecumenical conference in Fanø.

On Bell's suggestion and against protests from the representatives of the pro-Nazi DEK, the world conference expressed solidarity with the Confessing Church and its struggle and again exposed the Nazis' policies, including the concentration camps.

His public support is said to have contributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller's survival by making his imprisonment in Sachsenhausen in February 1938 (and later in Dachau) widely known in the British press and branded as an example of the Nazi regime's persecution of the church.

During the war, Bell was involved in helping not only displaced persons and refugees who had fled the continent to England, but also interned Germans and British conscientious objectors.

This included supporting the creation of murals by the German refugee and artist Hans Feibusch at St Elisabeth's Eastbourne and Bloomsbury Group members Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant at Berwick, East Sussex.

In November 1939 he published an article stating that the Church in wartime should not hesitate to condemn the infliction of reprisals, or the bombing of civilian populations, by the military forces of its own nation.

The Archbishop of York replied to him in the House of Lords: "it is a lesser evil to bomb the war-loving Germans than to sacrifice the lives of our fellow countrymen..., or to delay the delivery of many now held in slavery".

Yet after a month-long silence, Bell received a rough rebuttal, for the allies had concluded at the Casablanca conference to wage war until the unconditional surrender of Germany and to initiate area bombing.

[10] Bishops of the Church of England at the time were chosen, ultimately, by the British prime minister and it is known that Winston Churchill strongly disapproved of Bell's speeches against bombing.

[17] The British historian Tom Lawson wrote that Bell was principally concerned with the situation of the Confessing Church in Germany, not with the persecution of the German Jewish community in the 1930s which escalated into a campaign of genocide against all European Jews in the 1940s.

[18] Like his ally and friend Pastor Martin Niemöller, what Bell objected to was not the antisemitism of the Nazi regime per se, but rather the attempt to apply the Aryan Paragraph to those German Jews who had converted to Christianity.

[21] Bell was also one of the first British bishops to protest against the inhumane treatment of approximately 14 million Silesian, Pomeranian, East Prussian and Sudeten Germans expelled from their homes in Eastern Europe.

In the last years of his life, he became acquainted with Giovanni Montini in Milan through his ecumenical contacts, who in 1963 became Pope Paul VI and brought the Second Vatican Council to its conclusion.

[24][25] Due to the controversy, in February 2016 the woman spoke publicly for the first time under the pseudonym "Carol", in an interview with the Brighton Argus, saying that she was sexually abused from the age of five until her family moved away when she was nine.

[23][27] Carlile found that "there was a rush to judgment: The church, feeling it should be both supportive of the complainant and transparent in its dealings, failed to engage in a process which would also give proper consideration to the rights of the bishop.

"[27] The report also found that the available evidence did not suggest there would have been "a realistic prospect of conviction" in court, the standard that prosecutors in England and Wales use in deciding whether to pursue a case.

[31] In late January 2018 the Church of England's national safeguarding team issued a statement saying it had passed 'fresh information' on to Sussex Police that it had recently received concerning Bishop Bell.

[33] In January 2019 the Church's National Safeguarding Team announced that new allegations by a "range of people", following publication of the Carlile Report, had been reviewed by ecclesiastical lawyer Timothy Briden whose terms of reference did not permit him to investigate the original complaint.

[35] In November 2021, Justin Welby retracted his previous claim that there was a "significant cloud" over Bell's reputation, and announced that a statue of him would be erected on the west front of Canterbury Cathedral.