Thomas Bell was born in Parkhead on the east end of Glasgow, Scotland, which was at that time still a semi-rural village. His father was a stonemason who was frequently unemployed, while his mother came from a family of coal miners and worked at home spinning cotton and silk. Young Tom enrolled in school in the spring of 1889 and left in the spring of 1894, at the age of 11, going to work first as a milk delivery boy and then as an employee at a soft drink bottling plant to help support his impoverished family.