Bella Sidney Woolf

Bella Sidney Woolf
Born	1877 London, England
Died	1960 (aged 83) Oxford, England
Spouse(s)	Tom Southorn (m. 1921–57)

Bella Sidney Woolf OBE (1877–1960) was an English author, sister of author Leonard Woolf and first married to Robert Heath Lock, and in her second marriage to Hong Kong colonial secretary and colonial Ceylonese administrator Tom Southorn.

Woolf was born in London, the eldest (or 2nd eldest) of ten children to Marie (née de Jongh) and a Jewish barrister Solomon Rees Sydney Woolf. Her father died in 1892.

At the end of 1907 she travelled to Ceylon to visit her brother, Leonard Woolf, then a junior civil servant stationed in Kandy.

In the following months she met Robert Heath Lock, Assistant Director of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, near Kandy. They were married in 1910. In August 1908, she went back to England with her brother, who was returning briefly before taking up a promotion as Assistant Government Agent of Hambantota. Robert Heath Lock died in 1915.

In 1921, aged around 44, she remarried, to Tom Southorn, whom she met in Ceylon through Leonard. In 1904 as a junior civil servant, Tom had met Leonard off the boat on his arrival in Ceylon. He served a long period in colonial service in Ceylon and rose to be colonial secretary of Hong Kong, Acting Administrator of Hong Kong on various occasions, and Governor of the Gambia.

From this time she sometimes went by the name Bella Woolf Southorn, and occasionally used Bella Sidney Southorn. But she continued to publish as Bella Sidney Woolf.

She greatly enjoyed her life as the wife of a colonial civil servant and was fascinated by all the places she lived, which informed her writing, both fiction and what we would now call 'tourist guides'.

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