Digby Bell (1849-1917) was one of the most popular Lambs of his generation, and very nearly was elected Shepherd in 1910. He joined The Lambs in 1882 and served two terms as the Boy.
Bell was born November 8, 1849, in Milwaukee. When he was five, the family moved to New York. During the Civil War, he was working on Wall Street and rose to work on the stock exchange. He tried his hand as a passenger agent for the White Star Line before finding his true calling in show business. With his steamship connections, he reached Italy to study opera for five years. He made his stage debut in Malta in 1876 as the Count in “La Sonnambula.” Other roles followed, and Bell sailed home.
Bell toured the country as a popular star. He had the lead in more than fifty light operas in his career.
He founded the Digby Bell Opera Company in the Gilded Age. Bell ran the touring company on a shoestring budget. In the fall of 1895, he had a company of sixty on a southern and midwestern tour of a comic opera called “Nancy Lee.” Bell wasn’t paying the creator, Frederic Miller, and an injunction ensued. Following poor business in the South, he stranded the company of sixty actors and musicians in Terre Haute, Indiana, without a cent. Bell left them and returned to New York with his wife. His reception at The Lambs was probably frosty.
In August 1897, calamity struck the company when it was involved in a railroad crash outside Alton, Illinois, on an overnight trip from Chicago to St. Louis. The entire train left the tracks carrying the cast, baggage, and props. The train was perched on an embankment, teetering over a ditch. Bell was in a Pullman car, and miraculously the cars did not roll over. Bell told a reporter, “It was indeed a hairbreadth escape. We are all thankful that we are not in the morgue at Alton now, and do not regret for that reason the loss of our baggage.”
In 1899 he was first elected to become a director on the Lambs’ Council. In this era, officers served one-year terms. In 1900, he served as The Boy underneath Shepherd DeWolf Hopper. He held the office for two years. In 1908 he returned to serve on Council for nine years.
Bell was among the cast of the 1898 Lambs All-Star Gambol, the first touring gambol, which raised thousands of dollars to pay for the next clubhouse. This was a minstrel show–popular at the time–not a bright spot in Club history.
The 1910 election to find a new shepherd to follow the legendary Augustus Thomas was the most divisive in Lambs’ history. The Club at the time had around 1,200 members and had been in the Forty-Fourth Street clubhouse for just six years. The headline in the New York Herald of October 14 declared “POLITICS DIVIDES FLOCK OF LAMBS.” Joseph R. Grismer, elected in 1893, was a veteran actor who had transitioned into managing and producing, and had become so established that he was a director of the Commercial Trust Company of New York (today called the Bank of America after mergers). Grismer represented stability and management, with the backing of Lambs from the business side of Broadway. However, there was a faction of the Club who believed an actor should lead an actors’ club, among them John Drew and David Warfield. They backed Bell, even though he had come through some scrapes, on an independent ticket. The Lambs had a decision to make: managers make the big money, actors did not.
Both had served the Lambs as officers, Bell had served as Boy and Grismer as treasurer. As Historian Lewis Hardee wrote, “Seldom were serious challenges mounted to the regular ticket once it had been announced by the nominating committee.”
Then as now, members could not speak to the press. But the newspapers picked up on the news that the famous Lambs were divided, and that made good copy. The Telegraph reported, “Excitement runs high as the Lambs Club over the approaching election. On such occasions the actors in the club make a great fuss and hullabaloo and deliver themselves of monologues on the bulwark of the organization, the constitution, and special privileges, and then the [establishment] candidate invariably wins.”
Lambs flocked to the Clubhouse to vote on October 10. Those members in arrears with their dues were rounded up and made to pay up so they could vote ($4,000, about $136,000 today, was brought in). All day long, men came in and out, electioneering was ongoing, and the clubhouse was abuzz with the voting. At midnight the polls closed. In the wee hours, the announcement was made: Grismer had garnered the most votes in Club history, 256 to Bell’s tally of 203. In hindsight more than 115 years later: Grismer was the wiser choice who led the club through difficult times, ultimately loaning the club vast sums of cash to pay its bills. Today, he is one of the Immortal Lambs, while Bell is overlooked.
Bell continued acting and would serve the rest of his life as a member of the Lambs Council.
He was an early silent film star. Besides, playing the starring role of Mr. Pipp in the silent film comedy, “The Education Of Mr. Pipp” (1914), he was also featured in the short documentary film, “The Lambs’ All-Star Gambol” (1914), which also starred George Ade, David Belasco, Irving Berlin, John Philip Sousa, Augustus Thomas, and among many other Lambs. Sadly, the film is lost.
His last film role was playing ‘Lemuel Morewood’ in the comedy film drama, “Father And The Boys” (1915). The film was directed by Joseph De Grasse, based on the play by Lamb George Ade.
He was a fervent golfer in Siasconset, Massachusetts, and an avid New York Giants baseball fan, as was his best friend and frequent co-star DeWolf Hopper.
He was married twice, first to Lillian Dunton Brooks until his wife divorced him in March 1883, and second to the opera singer Laura Joyce “Hannah” Maskell Bell (1858-1904), in Jersey City, New Jersey, on April 21, 1883. Together the couple had two children, Herbert James Taylor Bell and Laura Seymour Bell Schlichting.
On his deathbed, Bell was visited by newspaperman Frank Ward O’Malley. The reporter was ready to depart his sleeping friend, when Bell woke up and smiled. “Why hello, why didn’t you say you were here, old man?” Bell whispered. “I was just dozing a bit. How’s the Lambs Gambol coming on? What’s doing everywhere?”
Digby Bell passed away of cancer in New York on June 20, 1917, at the age of 67. He is interred in the family plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
–Written and researched by Shepherd Kevin C. Fitzpatrick (2026) with some material from Historian Lewis Hardee, Jr.