Hi, I’m Antony J Bell. My journey into the First World War began not in a textbook, but with a name carved on a memorial: Sarah Ann Jennings, my great-grandmother. She was one of the thirty-five women killed in the 1916 Barnbow munitions factory explosion. My novels are my attempt to give a voice to her and the thousands of ordinary people whose incredible stories of courage, sacrifice, and love have been lost to the silence of history.
My work is born from a desire to explore the human cost of the First World War, a conflict that left an indelible mark on my own family. This deeply personal connection fuels my writing, which seeks to illuminate the forgotten sacrifices made not just in the trenches of France, but in the factories, homes, Towns and Cities of Yorkshire.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.9 out of 5 stars on Amazon
For the invisible army of women fighting the Great War, the home front is the front line.
In the smoke-stained factories of wartime Yorkshire, women are paid a penny a shell to fill the ammunition bound for the Western Front — working long shifts in rooms thick with TNT dust, where one mistake can mean catastrophe.
For Eliza, it is survival.
For Sarah, independence.
For Lucy, devotion to a brother lost on the Somme.
As exhaustion mounts, the greatest danger is not across the Channel — but inside the factory walls.
Rooted in real events, A Penny a Shell is a story of courage, sacrifice, and the women history almost forgot.
***A Penny a Shell has just been named a Finalist in the 2025 Wishing Shelf Book Awards***
The Fate of Rosie Morn
The sea does not care who you are.
Seventeen-year-old Will Topping joins the crew of the Rosie Morn to prove he belongs — not a boy, not a burden, but a man among fishermen. But life at sea is harder than he imagined, and the crew are slow to trust him.
As the war closes in and the dangers beneath the water grow ever closer, Will must learn quickly or be left behind. Out there, mistakes are not forgiven.
And when the moment comes, he will discover that belonging is not something you claim — it is something you earn.
Inspired by the true story of the Royal Naval Reserve trawlers, this is a tale of courage, fear, and a boy finding his place in a world that does not wait for him.
On the morning of 16 December 1914, Scarborough is silent.
Then the first shell falls.
Fourteen-year-old Georgie Taylor wants to prove he matters — as a Scout, as a brother, as more than a child left behind. But when war reaches the Yorkshire coast, the games of summer vanish overnight.
As fear and suspicion spread through the town, Georgie must decide what courage really means. And in the chaos of that winter morning, he will face the moment that defines him.
Inspired by the real bombardment of Scarborough, this is the story of a boy caught in the first enemy attack on British soil in 250yrs— and the cost of growing up too soon.
What Is Asked, What Is Given
Scarborough, 1915. Eliza is too young to go overseas, and the medical officer can see it. He signs her papers anyway.
Behind the lines on the Somme, she learns to press a bandage in a moving ambulance and stitch a wound by lamplight. Among the wounded she finds Danny, a boy from home. She patches him up, hands over his file, and watches him march back to the front.
By 1917 she is at Étaples, the vast base camp on the French coast where a million men pass through the Bull Ring on their way back up the line. Here the war doesn’t break men. It processes them. When the camp erupts in mutiny, Eliza is neither rebel nor loyalist. She is a witness. And when she is ordered to help certify a condemned man fit to face a firing squad, she has to decide what she still owes the system she serves.
A quiet, unflinching novel about ordinary Yorkshire people inside an industrial war, and about the small, dangerous ways a person can refuse.
The war asked obedience. She gave care. And then she refused to give more.
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