Robert Lancelot Bell
Last updated 13:35, Thursday, 10 April 2008
Lance Bell played an important part in improving the livestock industry in Britain – he was one of the first to import Charolais cattle into this country, back in 1959.
Mr Bell, who was a vet in Longtown for many years, was an acknowledged authority on the French breed.
Between 1970 and 1974 he spent a great deal of time lecturing about the breed to farmers in Britain, the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
He ran farms alongside his practice and there he worked on finding ways of eliminating veterinary problems and enhancing treatments.
Preventing barley poisoning was one of his successes and preventing muscular dystrophy in beef cattle was another.
One of his farms was at Roadhead and this was eventually sold to buy another, at Lynemoor.
Robert Lancelot Bell was his full name, although he was always known as Lance and he was 87 when he died, in the Thomas Hope Hospital at Langholm.
He had been one of five children born into a farming family at Hallbankgate in 1920 and his early education took place in Brampton, at the White House Grammar School.
In 1938 he enrolled at the famous Royal Dick Veterinary College in Edinburgh and he became an MRCVS five years later.
After graduating he joined the Carnegie veterinary practice in Brampton but, after a very short while, put up his own plate in Longtown. There, he ran his own practice until 1968, when Bill Read became a partner, but he had to retire in 1970 on health grounds – he had caught brucellosis while injecting calves.
For 27 years he had been the local veterinary inspector for the Ministry of Agriculture in Cumbria, Dumfriesshire and Roxburghshire.
It was in 1948 that he married Edith Sewell, a secretary from Carleton, Carlisle, and she became a magistrate in Cumbria, appointed to the Bench in 1961.
Mr Bell was chairman of the livestock committee of the British Charolais Cattle Society in the 1960s and, during the same decade, he was active in helping to revive the Longtown Horticultural Show.
In the 1970s and 1980s he exhibited Charolais cattle in the Royal and Highland Shows and he was involved in the Cumberland Show with horses, mainly hunters – because he was an exceptionally good horse vet. He used to say that when he was a student at the Royal Dick there were 5,000 horses on the streets of Edinburgh.
He loved all field sports and latterly ran a successful horse and sheep enterprise close to his home at Canonbie.
He became vicar’s warden at Arthuret Church, Longtown, in the 1950s and it was at the church that his funeral service and interment took place.
Mr Bell leaves his wife, two sons and a daughter, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
