Martin Bell and Christine McCausland archive
Details
Type of record: Archive
Title: Martin Bell and Christine McCausland archive
Classmark: MS 2251
Creator(s): Bell, Martin (1918-1978)
Date(s): 1950 - 2018
Size and medium: letters, manuscripts; 19 boxes
Persistent link: https://explore.library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/733850
Collection group(s): English Literature
Description
Documents, manuscripts, letters and ephemera relating to Martin Bell and Christine McCausland.
The archive is arranged into series by document type, and includes collections of correspondence addressed to and from Bell, different types of literary manuscripts (translation, life-writing and poetry) and ephemera collected by Bell. Later series cover McCausland's correspondence and activities.
Biography or history
Martin Bell was born in Hampshire in 1918. He attended the University of Southampton, and later served from 1939 - 1946 with the Royal Engineers in Lebanon, Syria and Italy.
He held various teaching posts throughout the 1950s – early 1960s, and worked as an opera critic for The Queen magazine. Bell was awarded the first Arts Council Poetry Bursary in 1964, and the Gregory Fellowship at Leeds in 1967. During his time in Leeds, Bell took up a part-time teaching position at Leeds College of Art. He would remain in Leeds until his death in 1978. Bell featured in Penguin Modern Poets 3, first published in 1962, and his Collected Poems, 1937-1966 was published in 1967. His Complete Poems was edited by Peter Porter, and first published in 1988. An edition of his translations of Robert Desnos was published in 2018.
For a more detailed biography, see the Special Collections Research Spotlight (https://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections/research-spotlight/15)
Christine McCausland was a landscape artist and illustrator. She was born in Scotland in 1944, and had worked as a court reporter. She met Bell in the mid 1960s and lived with him in Leeds during his Gregory Fellowship, before moving to London. She died in Hastings in 2020.
Provenance
The archive includes personal papers of both Bell and McCausland. Bell's papers were presumably passed to McCausland on his death, or via Peter Porter, who had been his literary executor.
The archive was donated to Special Collections in 2020, following McCausland's death.
Access and usage
Access
This collection is currently being worked on by the Special Collections team and therefore may not always be readily available for users to consult. Please contact staff in advance if you would like to access the material.