Frank Bell

Frank Erskine Bell OBE (18 September 1916 – 14 July 1989) was a British educator. Whilst a prisoner of war (POW) in Borneo during World War II he organised a "secret university" to provide educational opportunities for his fellow prisoners. He founded the first Bell Language School in Cambridge, England in 1955 and later established the Bell Educational Trust, a charity involved in language education. Early life Bell was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1938 with a first in French and Spanish. He joined the British Army in 1940, was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1941, and was posted to the 48th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment which left England on 3 December 1941, destined for North Africa. It never arrived. On 7 December the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the British force, of which the Regiment was a part, was diverted to the Far East (see Pacific War). It arrived in Batavia, Java on 4 February 1942. Singapore fell to the Japanese 11 days later, and the Japanese landed on Java at about the same time. When the Dutch forces capitulated to them on 8 March the few British troops on the island, whose role was mainly airfield defence, became POWs. Bell was interned in five different camps before arriving at Batu Lintang camp at Kuching in Sarawak on the island of Borneo in September 1943. At first the British officers and other ranks were all in the same sub-camp, but after a while the officers were separated out. As he was a 2nd Lieutenant, Bell was housed in the officers' compound. Bell was known by the nicknames "Tink" and "Tinker" (a reference to the character Tinkerbell in Peter Pan). The "Kuching University" Bell was largely responsible for conceiving and organising what became known by the prisoners as the "Kuching University" in the British officers' camp. Under Japanese regulations, prisoners were forbidden to teach, to learn, to compile or possess notes on any subject whatever, or to meet in groups for discussion. The penalty for disobedience was imprisonment or death. Despite this, the university, led by Bell, established classes in seven modern languages (Dutch, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Urdu), as well as subjects as diverse as history, public speaking, navigation, pig-farming, civics, chess and poultry keeping. Bell and his fellow educators compiled text books, led classes and awarded diplomas.