Robert Bell was born in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, on 22 November 1917. His father, Robert Duncan Bell, was a farmer, having previously been a missionary to the Ojibway and Chinook Indians. His mother was Violet Lydia Clarke, daughter of an actor-manager from Bilston in Staffordshire, England. Robert was educated at Woodlands, Deganwy, north Wales, and Haileybury College. He went on to St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he won the Bently prize in surgery. He was house surgeon on the plastic and orthopaedic units at Bart's under Rainsford Mowlem, and then joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, where he rose to be Squadron Leader. He married Phyllis Pearl Hunter Codling in 1941. They had a daughter (Diana Mary) and two sons, one of whom (Geoffrey Duncan) trained as a physician and is now Professor of Gastroenterology at Sunderland Royal Hospital. He had many hobbies, including numismatics and the history of table games and tradesman's tokens, on which he wrote the authoritative textbooks. He died in 2002.