Arthur Bell (engineer)

Arthur Wilbraham Dillon Bell (4 April 1856 – 29 May 1943) was an engineer active in New Zealand and Western Australia. Bell was a son of Francis Dillon Bell; his father was at the time of his birth a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives. His elder brother, Francis Bell, would later be Prime Minister of New Zealand. Bell received his secondary schooling in New Zealand and after a time in journalism and as a public servant, he went to England to train as an engineer. After a short period of engineering work in England, he returned to New Zealand in 1879, and in 1891 he went to Western Australia. He retired young in 1907 and returned to live in New Zealand. In 1917, the Bells moved to Melbourne to be with their daughter's family.

Bell was born on 4 April 1856 in Parnell, Auckland, to Margaret Joachim Bell, née Hort, and Francis Dillon Bell. His father was a pioneering land surveyor in New Zealand, sent out by his cousin Edward Gibbon Wakefield to help with the settling of New Zealand in September 1842, and had a considerable political and bureaucratic career over the next decades. Arthur was his fifth child, part of a family of six brothers and one surviving sister. He was educated at Christ's College in Christchurch and at sixteen gained a senior scholarship. At eighteen he left school and began acting as secretary to his father, who was then Speaker of the House of Representatives, and in his spare time did free-lance journalism for The Wellington Independent, making three hundred pounds a year. Bell also spent a short time in the civil service. He had enjoyed the journalism but by the age of nineteen he was persuaded by his family to change to an engineering career. This was a switch that he sometimes regretted.

Like several members of his family he went "home" to England for the grounding of his new career. He was apprenticed to Sir John Hawkshaw, one of the foremost British engineers of his day. This gave Bell a broad grounding, because he was required to do drafting and other general work on big projects including underground railway work and dock and harbour construction, the latter to become an important area of specialty for him. In 1877 he ‘received back his articles’ and was made Assistant Engineer to the York and Lancaster Railway.

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