BORN HULL 1893. ENLISTED SEPT 1914 & WENT TO EGYPT IN 1915. SON OF RAIMES MORTEN & MARY ANN BELL. KILLED IN ACTION.
Hull Pals Memorial Post. PRIVATE GEORGE HUNTER BELL 11/1016. Born in April 1893, George was the eldest of four children to Raimas and Mary Ann Bell of 2 Lincoln Street, Hull. A Labourer by trade, he enlisted at City Hall on Thursday September 10th 1914 joining the 11th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment, ‘The Tradesmen’, 2nd Hull Pals. Like all the surviving Originals, George was a veteran of Egypt, the Somme and Oppy Wood by the turn of 1918. How it must have felt to watch as one by one your comrades fell around you, we will hopefully never know, but George will have seen many of those eager faces, once flushed with the excitement of adventures to come, turn first to battle-hardened cynics and then to corpses as all around him the war raged on with no end in sight. As 1917 turned to 1918 the end must have seemed no closer to those first volunteers. The tragedy of his death on 27th March 1918, is in the idea that he died thinking all those deaths had been in vain, that the Germans had broken their line and after all their effort and all their pain, they were going to lose the war. George’s body was never recovered and his name is commemorated on the Arras Memorial; he was 24 years old.
