During the early stages of his career, which was all spent playing as an amateur right-back at non-League club Worthing, Bell was unable to earn a single cap for England Amateurs due to the presence of Birmingham's Watty Corbett, one of England's best right-backs who was at the peak of his career at the time.[1]
Having represented the Surrey county in an international trial match at Chelsea in February 1908, Bell was selected as a member of Great Britain's 18-man squad that participated in the football tournament of the 1908 Summer Olympics in London, but Corbett once again blocked him from playing in any matches as the team won gold.[1][2]
In the 1909 international trial at Birmingham, Bell captained the South against the North,[1][3] and remained an unused substitute against Germany in March 1909.[1] The following month, on 12 April, he took advantage of Corbett's absence to finally make his international debut for England Amateurs, in a friendly match against the Netherlands, keeping a clean-sheet in a 4–0 win.[1][4] Having earned four of his five international caps within 40 days, from 12 April until 22 May 1909, he then had to wait for nearly a year for his fifth cap in a 2–2 draw with Belgium on 26 March 1910.[1][4] After his match against France on 22 May, which ended in a resounding 11–0 victory, the journalists of the French newspaper L'Auto (the forerunner of L'Équipe) stated that "Bell got caught out a couple of times, but was still a dangerous back".[5][6]
On 1 November 1913, Bell played for the so-called English Wanderers in a friendly against Lions des Flandres, a regional scratch team representing Northern France, helping his side to a 1–4 win.[7] He captained the Surrey county side for seven seasons, from 1908 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.[1]
