Glove hook : Miss Isabel Margaret Platt-Hepworth

Small metal glove hook with mother of pearl handle. Glove hooks were designed to help women button the wrists of tight fitting gloves without assistance.

On 22 December 1939, 24 year old Isabel Margaret Platt-Hepworth married Captain Alfred Thomas Jakins Bell at St Mark's Church, Darling Point with a reception held afterwards at Rose Bay Golf Club. Their marriage came 10 days after Bell proposed and was organised quickly as he was expecting to be posted on overseas service soon afterwards. During the remaining war years the wedding dress was worn by five other brides as Isabel lent it out to friends restricted by clothes and fabric rationing.

Captain Bell, born in 1913, was a regular army officer from Melbourne, trained at Duntroon and educated in Civil Engineering at Sydney University. It was during his years in Sydney, where he also studied Japanese, that he met Isabel, daughter of a Sydney solicitor. Before her marriage, Isabel worked in her father's office and had earlier won a scholarship to study law at Sydney University. Her father however believed they were too well-off to allow her to accept the scholarship and she never furthered her studies. In the late 1930s Bell joined the British Army in India to gain experience and it was on the ship home in 1939 that news of war reached him. He subsequently enlisted in the Second AIF on 25 October and was assigned the number VX41. Based in Melbourne as adjutant to Colonel Steele, Commander Royal Engineers of 6 Division, Bell made frequent trips to Sydney to oversee the formation of 2/1 Field Company. It was on one of these trips in mid December that he proposed to Isabel and they were married the next time his work took him north. On the evening of their wedding they took the train back to Melbourne and Isabel moved in with her mother-in-law. Shortly afterwards her husband was posted overseas. Bell served in Palestine, Greece, Crete and Syria before returning home briefly before joining the New Guinea campaign. After the war Bell volunteered to serve with BCOF and then remained in the Army until 1967. He retired with the rank of Colonel.