Winthrop Pickard Bell (1884 - 1965)

Born 12 May 1884 in Halifax, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Ancestors

Died 4 Apr 1965 at age 80 in Chester, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada

Biography

Winthrop Bell is Notable.

Winthrop was born in 1884, youngest of two sons of Andrew Mackinley (A.M.) Bell, a prominent Halifax merchant .^[1] He was a spy in Germany for the Allied side (MI6).^[2]

Education
His early education in Halifax was at the Old Albro Street School beginning in 1889 (at age 5) and continued at the Halifax County Academy at the corner of Brunswick and Sackville Streets (age 12 and onwards). He was a member of the Halifax Academy Cadets.^[3]

Pic Halifax county academy https://archives.novascotia.ca/communityalbums/HalifaxLibrary/archives/?ID=523

Recognized early as a brilliant scholar, he was the orator at his graduation in 1900. he then went to sackville, New Brunswick where he attended the University of Mount Allison College, studying Latin, Greek, and Roman History. In 1901-02 he studied German. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Mathematics in 1904.^[3]

From there he went on to a summer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and then McGill University in Montreal where he studied briefly in the engineering faculty under Professor Ernest Rutherford, who would win 1908 Nobel Prize in Physics. In spent much of 1905-06 as a surveyor for the Halifax and South West Railway in the Sable River area of Nova Scotia. He returned to Mount Allison in 1906 -1907 where he worked on a Master's degree focused on history, Germany, and philosophy.^[3]

He next attended Harvard university to complete his Master of Arts in Philosophy under Prof. Josiah Royce, with financial support from money his mother had inherited. After graduating in 1909 he went to Emmanuel College at Cambridge University but came down with pleurisy. After surgery in May 1910, he went to Germany in the fall, where he attended Leipzig and later Göttingen University where he began studies in philosophy under Professor Edmund Husserl. He found his time in Germany to be intellectually stimulating. There, he did his doctoral thesis on his former professor Josiah Royce. He sat for his exams for the doctorate on August 7, 1914 three days after England declared war on Germany, having been placed in "protective custody." He spent the entire war as a prisoner in Germany. Both of his parents died while he was imprisoned.^[3]

Returning to England before the end of 1918, he met with Sir Robert Borden, a family friend who also happened to be Canada's prime minsister. Borden put him in contact with MI6^[2] and he also got an appointment with Reuters in London to travel to Holland and Germany ostensibly as a reporter during the peace talks.^[3]

It was while working as an agent in 1919 that he discovered the emergence a national socialist (Nazi) conspiracy.^[4]

He passed away in 1965.^[5]

Did You Know?

Winthrop and his brother Ralph had the same middle name. They also married sisters.

Sources

1. ↑ Birth: https://archives.novascotia.ca/vital-statistics/birth/?ID=154980
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1} The History Network.org https://thehistorynetwork.org/196-winthrop-bell-cracking-the-code/
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4} Mount Allison University: https://libraryguides.mta.ca/winthrop_pickard_bell/education
4. ↑ https://crackingthenazicode.com/
5. ↑ Memorial: Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/40449212/winthrop-pickard-bell: accessed 08 August 2023), memorial page for Winthrop Pickard Bell (12 May 1884–4 Apr 1965), Find a Grave Memorial ID 40449212, citing Old Baptist Burial Ground, Chester, Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, Canada; Maintained by N. Graves (contributor 46958549).

• https://libraryguides.mta.ca/winthrop_pickard_bell/biography
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/winthrop-bell-great-war-hero-1.5161316
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winthrop_Pickard_Bell

In his latter years he focused his energies on historical research, much of which concerned the group of mid-18th-Century immigrants to Nova Scotia known as the "Foreign Protestants".[19] His most notable publication was The "Foreign Protestants" and the Settlement of Nova Scotia, which was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1961; his Register of the Foreign Protestants of Nova Scotia was published some years after his death.[20]

Subject of the book Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada's Greatest Spy by Jason Bell (2023).