My Early Life - As dictated by Philip to Dierk von Behrens in May 2016

Like so many other Australian families, and in my case on both my mother’s and father’s sides, my family story is deeply affected by mining.

My Mother’s story

My mother’s father, Ted Mullins, was killed in a gold mining accident in Beaconsfield, Tasmania, in 1905, when my mother was a child of only around five years.

My mother’s mother died shortly afterwards, in the same year, of a "broken heart". This led to all sorts of upheavals in the life of my mother, Ruby Frances Mullins.

When my mother Ruby was orphaned in Tasmania, she was taken under the wing of her aunt, Kate Sanguinetti (nee Smith) who was living in Melbourne, so Ruby moved there to live with her.

Kate had married a widower, John Francis Sanguinetti, who had a 16 year old son named Frank. Ruby grew up as Ruby Sanguinetti (not even knowing the correct spelling of her birth name), within an Italian Anglican family. John Sanguinetti’s father, Giovanni Baptiste Sanguinetti had arrived in Australia in 1853 and made the pragmatic decision to join the local Anglican Church, St Stephen’s in Richmond, bringing his family into contact with the Bell family of cabinetmakers.

Ruby was happy in the Sanguinetti family, even though there was animosity from Frank Sanguinetti towards his stepmother Kate.

My Father’s story

My father Francis (Frank) Arthur Bell - came from a well-established family with a quality furniture making tradition spanning four generations.

On my father’s side, my great-great-grandfather Thomas Bell arrived in Australia in 1836 as part of the Adelaide free settler movement, and he built all of the furniture for Government House in Adelaide.

Then during the 1850s, Thomas Bell moved to Melbourne and started working to build a business based on the long-term wealth of the Victorian mining boom.

Thomas Bell’s business became the most well-established quality joinery and fine furniture manufacturing business in Victoria. For example, at the time of the funeral of Burke and Wills in 1861, the Victorian Government turned to Thomas Bell to build the hearse to carry their coffins. The funeral procession through Melbourne was watched by half a million people. Fine examples of Thomas Bell’s cabinetry are still to be found in Como, Victoria. It so happens that the church that both the Bell and Sanguinetti families attended, St Stephens, was one that Thomas Bell had built the communion table for.

Upon Thomas Bell’s death, his business passed to his family of ten sons and two daughters, and the business became known as Bell Brothers Fine Furniture.

This established business foundered at the beginning of the 1870s financial depression that followed the gold rush. The Bell Brothers had taken on a large contract to provide the furniture and fittings for the headquarters of a Victorian bank, and the job was well near completion, with a large share of the business’s assets tied up in the contract. This same bank held all of the family’s liquid assets. When the bank collapsed the family’s business assets and personal assets were both lost, with the business going bankrupt shortly afterwards.

Following the bankruptcy of the family business, the Bell family moved to a rural property in Gippsland, except for the eldest son, George Nelson Bell. George Bell was Philip’s great-grandfather, who remained in Melbourne. One of the lasting legacies of George Bell is the hexagonal library table he built for the Supreme Court of Victoria, which is still in use today in the court.

Unfortunately, George Bell’s business also went bankrupt later in the 1870s, brought down by the economic recession in Victoria.

Because his father’s business had gone bust, George’s son Arthur (Philip’s grandfather) could find nowhere in Melbourne to complete his apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker. This forced him to go to sea to learn his trade as a shipwright. Arthur came back to Melbourne to marry Susannah (Susie) Smith, and they had four children, including Philip’s future father, Frank Bell, the eldest son.

The meeting of Frank Bell and Ruby Sanguinetti

In keeping with the long-standing Bell tradition of locating future wives through the church, Frank Bell and Ruby Sanguinetti met at St Stephens, and were married in 1927, when Frank was 27 and Ruby was 24.

They had a son, Graham, in 1928, but then the Great Depression intervened, so they did not have their second child, Philip, until 1938. In the period after Graham was born, Frank joined Russell Engineering Parts, and was soon the right hand man to Mr Russell, the Managing Director. Russell Engineering Parts was later renamed Repco.

Following the World War II Japanese bombing of Darwin in 1942, in 1943 my father was ordered by the Manpower Directorate of the Australian government to help rebuild the airforce barracks near Darwin. While in the Northern Territory, he contracted an undiagnosed illness and died intestate in 1943 - by this time back home in Victoria.

I recall spending six happy childhood years in Victoria, including the period when my father was sent away to the Northern Territory. I remember being the young Anglican protestant boy sent to obligatory Sunday school – something I found boring. I recall the bizarre experience, following Sunday school, of sitting under a Union Jack in St Paul’s Anglican Church in Canterbury during the sermon.

However my father’s death left my mother feeling distraught and alone. Unfortunately, my mother’s Aunt Kate had died only a few months before my father, increasing her feeling of isolation. My mother felt unable to accept the help offered by the Bell family. 

In the absence of a will, the State divided my father’s assets - excluding the family home - three ways among me, my 16 year old brother Graham, and my mother. My brother’s assets and my own were put in trust until our maturity at age 21. My mother retained the family home.

Ruby meets Harry and all that followed

In 1944, a year after my father’s death, my mother met (Harry) Henry James Havelock Allen on a tram, who in time fleeced her of home and inheritance.  Harry then waited until my brother Graham had access to his inheritance at 21, and ‘helped’ him administer and squander this. We moved to Walla-Walla in 1948 where they had purchased a cinema business, and I went to school there for a bit over a year before the business was sold and we moved back to Melbourne.

We then moved from place to place in rural and urban Victoria, keeping ahead of Harry’s creditors and chasing work, my mother as a cook and Harry as a waiter. During this period I was moved from school to school, helping to chalk up a total of 11 schools attended over my primary years. The very last of my mother’s money was lost running a “picture circuit” around the NSW Riverina. This did not prove profitable and was sold for a loss.

In 1950, when I was 12 years old, Harry fled his creditors, with Ruby and me in tow, moving us all to Cairns in Far North Queensland. Harry persuaded Graham and his new wife Thelma to move to Cairns as well, so Graham could set up a radio sales and repair business and employ Harry.

Cairns was ‘the queen city of the North” but when we arrived, there was such a shortage of housing that my mother and Harry lived in a lodging house, and they put me into the Marist Brothers boarding school. I became Bishop Cahill’s ‘white haired little boy’ who served at all his morning masses.  

My mother and Harry, who were again fleeing Harry’s creditors, left me behind in Cairns when I was around the age of 14.

I concentrated on my studies and became an increasing devout Catholic living within a Catholic school environment and having developed a close relationship with Bishop Cahill. Excellent matriculation results enabled me to defer being recruited directly into the Catholic seminary, which was my goal at the time.

My mother was insistent that I finish my education before I joined the seminary. I had one of the best results in the State and gained a Commonwealth and Open scholarship for enrolment at the University of Queensland.

My pursuit of Catholic Philosophy

I started an Arts Degree at the University of Queensland in 1956, and decided to stay on to complete Honours. Here the Dean of Arts and Head of French almost persuaded me to choose an Honours degree in French. I wasn’t conscious at that time of the prevalence and effect of self-interested people. My eventual Honours degree was in English and Arts with a lacing of philosophy. My philosophy studies included Aristotle, as well as John Henry Newman and his The History of Religious Opinions. Demonstrating the enormous influence of the Catholic Church in Queensland at the time, Archbishop Dewey had earlier secured a seat on the Senate of the University of Queensland.

Through the Philosophy Department, I met the ‘Catholic Philosopher’ Durell. The appellation “Catholic Philosopher” was regarded by the Department as an oxymoron. They were fiercely anti-Labor and anti-Catholic. 

Interested in Catholic philosophy despite its contentious intellectual status, after finishing my degree I joined the Dominican Order of Preachers and attended their teaching centre in East Camberwell. Their teaching centre, along with the conservative area of Toorak, was among the most conservative centres in Australia. The Dominicans are the stable rock in the Catholic Church – their doctrine does not change through the centuries.

My experience in the Dominican ‘mother house’ was bizarre. The students served the food and collected the dirty plates, but woe betide you if you even chipped a single piece of crockery.  You had to wend your way through the large communal dining room and show each person the damaged plate, then prostrate yourself and beg each person individually for forgiveness!  It was medieval! The order was so strict that I was not granted leave to attend my grandmother’s funeral a couple of blocks away when she died in 1961.

Being increasingly critical of the Church’s teachings, and uncomfortable at how it was out of step with modern times, my ordination was delayed as the Prior and Prior Provincial had reservations about whether I was a safe choice for ordination. It was clear that I was unhappy there, suffering frequent migraines.

Life after the Priory

After the decision was made to defer my ordination, I recognised that I was unlikely to ever be ordained, having seen what had happened to another colleague whose ordination had been delayed.

In August 1965 I left the seminary, and with my Honours degree, was soon accepted into the Commonwealth Public Service, after a short period as a House Master at Melbourne Grammar. I spent 24 years in the Commonwealth Public Service in a variety of positions, before being made redundant at the age of 51.  It was during this time in the service (1981) that I helped establish the Field Naturalist Association of Canberra, having seen the enormous benefit my children gained from involvement in the Victorian Junior Field Naturalists Association.

Concerned not to dissipate my redundancy payout, and in order to learn how to manage my own resources, I joined the then dominant financial management group - AMP - as an insurance agent and adviser. I gained a Graduate Diploma in Financial Management from Deakin University and specialised in retirement investment. Through this interest in investment I succeeded to the extent of becoming not rich, but relaxed.

The end point of my philosophical journey

I no longer believe in God, though, close to death, as a result of my aggressive non-small cell carcinoma of the lung, which has metastasised, I am conscious of the danger of beliefs becoming ‘wobbly’ near death. But I can say that I went right into the bowels of religion and personally found nothing of substance there.

Today, my family and friends, as well as the English author Samuel Johnson, and the concept of The Consolation of Philosophy (as described by Boethius), provide me with lucidity and equanimity.

These are jottings on the early stages of an eventually secular life well lived.