Born on 22 October 1813 at Newhall,
Crail,
Fife, Scotland, he was educated locally at
St Andrews University. Bell left Scotland and sailed to
South Africa, landing at the
Cape of Good Hope in 1830 and through his uncle
Sir John Bell, Secretary to the Cape Government, was given a post in the civil service. He was appointed as expedition artist on Dr.
Andrew Smith's two-year journey north as far as the
Limpopo in 1834. He went from Acting Clerk of the Legislative Council in 1838, to Assistant Surveyor-General in 1843, to Surveyor-General in 1848. Appointed to the Postal Enquiry Board in 1852, he designed the well-known Cape of Good Hope triangular stamp, the first of that shape. It became extremely rare and consequently much sought after by
philatelists. His design of rectangular stamps remained in use until 1902. Many of his sketches and paintings show a whimsical sense of humour, though his sensitive portrayals of the mixed population of Cape Town and of the tribes he encountered on the Smith expedition to the north, have become an invaluable record of life in 19th-century South Africa. The return of many of his paintings from England to South Africa in 1978, gave art historians a fresh appreciation of his work and greater insight into that period of Cape history. However, in his essay "Alcohol and Art", Russel Viljoen, professor in history at the
University of South Africa wrote: Bell also made an important contribution to
heraldry in South Africa. Throughout his residence at the Cape, he copied old Dutch/Afrikaner coats of arms from memorials, seals, stained glass windows, and other artefacts, and in 1861 he advertised his intention of publishing them in book form. The book did not see the light of day, but he later gave the manuscript, the drawings, and his notes to his brother-in-law Daniel Krynauw. Krynauw built up his own heraldry collection, and after his death, the two collections were placed in a Cape Town museum, from where they were transferred to the South African Library (now
National Library of South Africa - Cape Town Campus) in 1946. The material in the Bell-Krynauw Collection was eventually published in Cornelis Pama's
Die Wapens van die Ou Afrikaanse Families (1959), and his later heraldry books. Bell designed the arms of the South African College (now
University of Cape Town). He also designed the "three anchors" badge of the South African Mutual Life Assurance Society ("Old Mutual"), of which he was chairman at one time. A large number of his originals hang in the Library of Parliament in Cape Town, the
University of the Witwatersrand and the
Africana Museum in Johannesburg. The book
Travels in the Interior of South Africa (1868) by
James Chapman, was illustrated by Bell. His
Reports of the Surveyor-General, Charles D. Bell Esq., on the copper fields of Little Namaqualand (1855) was written after a three-month visit to the area. He gave his name to the town of
Bellville in the Cape, and Bell, a small village between Peddie and Hamburg, near the mouth of the Keiskamma River in the Eastern Cape. John Bell was a traveller and the eldest son of Charles Davidson Bell. Between 1861 and 1862 he accompanied Henry Samuel Chapman from Cape Town to
Walvis Bay, through
Hereroland to
Lake Ngami and back to the Cape Colony via
Shoshong,
Kuruman and
Hopetown. He was married to Margaret Roome in 1865 and died in 1878 in England. ==Death and legacy==