bell received a phd scholarship from the university of auckland in 1970. seeing as how bell had wanted to study linguistics but lacked the sufficient background to do so, the scholarship allowed him to have the sufficient amount of funding to study abroad to do the coursework for the field. bell ended up going to london, england and began attending and auditing courses that were being taught by well-known london linguists, including randolph quirk, ruth kempson, neil smith, dick hudson, and bill downs.