Charles Frederic Moberly Bell

Family background

Charles Frederic Moberly Bell was born in Alexandria. At this period, Egypt was ruled by Muhammad Ali, and its second city was a major Mediterranean trading port, dealing in commodities such as Egyptian cotton. His father was a merchant, and first cousin to George Moberly, Headmaster of Winchester College and later bishop of Salisbury. This made Charles Frederic first cousin once removed to Charlotte Anne Moberly, a pioneering educationalist best known for the Moberly-Jourdain incident.

His mother, Hester Louisa nee David, was named after her godmother, Lady Hester Stanhope, the archaeologist and traveller. Hester Louisa's mother, Louisa Jane, was one of the two Williams sisters who were protected and provided for by Lady Hester and her uncle, William Pitt the Younger, British prime minister. Moberly Bell appeared to believe the family story that the Williams girls were Pitt's illegitimate children, and attempted unsuccessfully to obtain proof.

Both his parents died while Charles Frederic was still a child. He was sent "home" to England to live with relatives and be educated there. He returned to his birthplace in 1865, at the age of 18, and worked briefly for the same company as his father had, Peel & Co..

Journalism and The Times

Moberly Bell then found free-lance work with The Times. In 1875, he became its official correspondent in Egypt, and achieved fame with his coverage of the Urabi Revolt of 1882. He founded the The Egyptian Gazette in 1880.

In 1890, Bell was invited by the owner of The Times, Arthur Fraser Walter, to help run the financially shaky paper, considered highly respected but stolid and boring. As managing director, Bell revitalized the title, greatly increasing its staff of foreign correspondents. In 1902, Bell created Literature, a forerunner of The Times Literary Supplement, and in 1910, followed that supplement or spin-off with The Times Educational Supplement. In 1908, Bell helped to engineer its sale to Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe. Bell remained with the paper until his death in 1911.

Encyclopædia Britannica

According to Herman Kogan, who wrote The Great EB: The Story of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Bell's single most notable accomplishment was his deal with American Horace Everett Hooper to reprint and sell that multi-volume work of reference under the sponsorship of The Times. Beginning in 1898, Hooper and his advertising executive Henry Haxton introduced aggressive marketing methods (full-page advertisements and direct marketing) to sell a reprint of the Britannica's 9th edition, which was justly famous for its scholarship but by then out of date. Building on the newspaper's solid reputation, Hooper managed to sell an extraordinary number (over 20,000 sets) of the 9th edition and, in 1902-1903, over 70,000 sets of its supplement, the 10th edition. The profit on the 10th edition was in excess of £600,000, and the royalties paid to the paper made it profitable for the first time in years.

The relations between Bell and Hooper were generally positive, partly owing to the profitability of Hooper's methods and also to Hooper's sincere respect for scholarship. Bell assessed Hooper as "a ranker who loved to be accepted as a gentleman. Treat him as a gentleman and one had no trouble with him; treat him as an essentially dishonest ranker and one got all the trouble there was to get." Supported by Bell, Hooper introduced The Times book club in 1905, and led the drive to make the Eleventh Edition the best possible Britannica, no matter the cost. This expense caused a rift between Hooper and his business partner, Walter Montgomery Jackson; their protracted legal fight (1908–1909) and public corporate wrangling caused The Times to cancel its contract to sponsor the 11th edition in 1908. That edition was finally issued in 1910-1911 under the sponsorship of Cambridge University, after Oxford refused.

Writing

Bell wrote three books: Khedives and Pashas (1884), Egyptian Finance (1887), and From Pharaoh to Fellah (1889).

Marriage, daughter, biography

In 1875 Moberly Bell married Ethel Chataway; the couple had two sons and four daughters. Two of her brothers, James Vincent and Thomas Drinkwater, emigrated to Australia and became newspaper proprietors and politicians. James visited Egypt in 1889 to learn about the sugar cane industry.

Like his cousin the bishop, Moberly Bell's biography was written by an academic daughter, in his case Enid. The Life and Letters of C. F. Moberly Bell was published in 1927, 16 years after his death. A swifter appearance was the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography 1912 supplement, written by William Flavelle Monypenny, the biographer of Benjamin Disraeli.

Enid Moberly Bell wrote several other books, including biographies of the journalist Flora Shaw and the social reformers Octavia Hill and Josephine Butler. Enid was second mistress at Lady Margaret School in Parsons Green, and vice-chair (to Lady Frances Balfour, former president of the National Society for Women's Suffrage) of the Lyceum Club for female artists and writers. Enid set up a home in Chelsea with Anne Lupton (d.1967); a sort of Boston marriage. Anne was the sister of Olive Middleton, née Lupton (d.1936), the great grandmother of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.