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Myers Literary Guide:
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The North-East
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JOHN BELL (1783 - 1864) Bell was born in Newcastle and was from boyhood a passionate collector of curiosities. In 1803 he opened a second-hand bookshop on the Quayside, but he could never bear to sell anything that took his fancy. His house was crammed with coins, archaeological oddities and above all, with stacks of broadsides, handbills and manuscripts relating to prize-fights, crimes, scandals and disasters. Bell also collected songs and in 1812 published the extensive (334 pages) Rhymes of the Northern Bards. He continued collecting and it is to Bell that we are indebted for some of the best North East pieces like 'Buy Broom Buzzems' and 'Bonny at Morn'. Frank Rutherford argued that Bell's work was the main source for the songs, as distinct from ballads and pipe tunes, in the famous Northumbrian Minstrelsy (1882). Among Bell's papers is the earliest known copy of the familiar and controversial 'Foggy Dew'. Other North East collectors included Miss Laura Smith, who visited the Tyneside boarding-houses in the 1880s, and Joseph Ritson (q.v.), who published the celebrated 'Collier's Rant', one of the first English miners' songs to appear in print, in his Northumbrian Garland or Newcastle Nightingale (1793). There was also, of course, Thomas Doubleday (q.v.) to whom we owe the first record of Captain Bover, whose fine tune is in Northumbrian Minstrelsy. Bover died in 1782 and a tablet in Newcastle Cathedral describes him as 'having for several years previous filled with the highest credit the arduous situation of regulating officer of this port.'
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