Who is Alan Bell?

UPDATE (July 2022):  Nick Urzdown, the author of Spanks for the Memories, which I've read, as well as Good Times with Girls and A Spanking Good Life, which I haven't read, sent me a comment on the original version of this post.  I have updated the post to incorporate the information that he provided.

I have spent the last few months reviewing some of the Roue Classics movies.  Depending on how you count them, these are the 18 or 20 movies that were released by Roue in the early eighties (two of them, First Week of Term and Uncle George, were originally released in two parts).  All but three of them (Jane and the Tutor, After Hours and Tutor’s New Pupil) are available from the Roue website as well as some other sources.

The name ‘Alan Bell’ is closely associated with the early years of Roue.  Bell is one of the major figures of the British spanking movie scene from the late 20^th century and he is on a par with George Harrison-Marks (Janus and later Kane), Christian Fennington and Michael Harry Smith (Spanking for Pleasure), Ivor Gold (Red Stripe), George Harlow and John Kirkwood (Moonglow and Moonglow West respectively) and others.  All of these names (some may be pseudonyms) are probably well known to most British spanking movie aficionados and some aspects of their lives are equally well known but Bell is more of a mystery.

So that raises the question ‘who was Alan Bell’?  He has a page on the Spanking Art Wiki (spankingart.org) that reads:

"Alan Bell was owner and editor of the British spanking magazine Roué in the 1970s and 1980s. He also worked a director of spanking videos by Roué Videos in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1982, he edited four editions of the Janus spanking magazine.  Under the pen name Mr. X, he also worked as a spanking artist, drawing M/f spanking art."

That’s it.  That’s all there is.  And even that is more than I had known before I read that page; I hadn’t known he was also an artist.

I can expand on the Spanking Art Wiki a little.  Roue was most likely founded in 1978 and it began producing movies around 1980.   I received a comment on the original version of this post from Nick Urzdown who informed me that:

"The magazine was started by a married couple and when the husband died his widow had no wish to edit the publication, so Roberts was brought in."  ['Roberts' is Alan Roberts who edited Roue in the late 80s.]

If so, then what I had believed was some type of management dispute was probably the death of the original owner and the sale of the magazine.  I'm not certain how Alan Bell was involved with Roue.  He may have been editor of the magazine but he certainly directed, and often appeared in several Roue movies made during that time including both parts of First Week of Term.

George Harrison-Marks stepped down as editor of Janus in 1982 about the same time that Roue temporarily suspended publication.  Bell stepped in to edit four issues of Janus while Roue was shut down, this information comes from both a history of Janus and a biography of GHM.   Roue resumed publication near the end of 82, or maybe early in 83 but I don't know if Bell had any involvement with the revived Roue.  Bell also directed a few movies for Blushes around the same time, these include Term End Punishments, Big Girls do Cry and The Detention Room.  I have been trying to put dates on the Blushes movies based on when the accompanying photostories appeared in the magazines and what I have been able to do so far indicates that Bell's Blushes movies were made in 1983 which would be just after his brief tenure as editor of Janus.  This suggests that he might not have had any role in the relaunch of Roue.

I learned from The Spanking Art Wiki that Bell was also an artist who used the name Mr. X for his spanking art.  That article contains a link to some of his drawings on the Encyclopedia of Spanking Art which identifies Blushes as the source of those drawings.  Unfortunately, there are no dates on any of the drawings so I have no idea when they were created.  I have some information that Bell also appeared as a dom/top in photostories that were published in Blushes and some of its sister publications.

After his time with Blushes, Bell and Mr. X seem to disappear from the scene.  I’ve read several books and articles on the British spanking scene in the eighties and nineties but Bell wasn’t mentioned in any of them.   I have searched the web for more information with little success.  I did find one lead that appeared promising at first.  In March 2014, an exchange on the Janus Twitter account suggested that Bell was dead:

Unfortunately, no more information was given and, in the response to a follow-up request for more information on the history of Roue, ‘Tarquin’ only said “a story I'd love to tell but sadly there aren't too many people left around to tell it”.  [I’m assuming that anyone reading this knows the story of Janus publisher Gordon Sergeant and his nephew Tarquin.  If not let me know and I’ll write a post on that story.]

So, I am still left with the question ‘who was Alan Bell’.  If anyone can tell me more. I would love to hear it.