Autobiographical Sketch (1970)

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH A. V. HILL* I. Forbears I was born in Bristol, England, on 26th September 1886, the son of Jonathan Hill and Ada Priscilla (Rumney). My known ancestors were all from the south-west ofEngland and South Wales; apart from the first of them, James Hill, who came from Northern Ireland in the middle ofthe eighteenth century and founded a timber and mahogany business in Bristol. His sonJames (born 1771) carried it on, and it remained with the Hill family till 1924. Other families thatjoined the Hills by marriage were Hawker, Bayley, Griffiths andRumney. The secondJames married in 1795 a daughter ofThomas Hawker; he was a son ofJohn Hawker ofWoodehester (Glos.) described as a 'house carpenter'. Thomas was apprenticed in Bristol in 1747 to a butcher, and by title ofhis apprenticeship became a burgess, or freeman, ofthe City of Bristol in 1756 [1]. Starting with him, five ofmy ancestors, ending with my father in 1880, became burgesses. The freedom ofBristol never had any snob value, though before 1835 it had various practical advantages. Burgesses are still appointed; but its valuenowis sentimental andhistorical, in the connexion it implies with a city which has been famous in history for eight hundred years [2]. There are many Bristols in the United States, and Americans interested in seafaring and discovery will rememberJohn Cabot andhis son Sebastian who sailed from Bristol, England; in 1497John Cabot exploring for King Henry VII discovered Newfoundland. The life of Bristol has always depended on its mariners and their trade. Ships from Bristol joined at Plymouth against the Spanish Armada, the first steamship1 to cross the * Present address: nA Chaucer Road, Cambridge, CB2 2EB, England. 1 This, the Great Western, was designed and built at Bristol by I. K. Brunei. The second ship, the Great Britain, crossed the Atlantic in 1845 and later ran aground on the Falkland Islands, where she remained for many years. In 1970, however, she was put on a raft and brought across the Atlantic Ocean. She is today in the dry dock at Bristol where she was built, and can now be seen. 27 Atlantic was launched at Bristol in 1837, and the phrase 'ship-shape and Bristol-fashion' is traditional [3]. Americans also may recall that Edmund Burke, one of our greatest political thinkers, in the 1770's when he was Member of Parliament for Bristol, pleaded for conciliation with the American colonies. My mother's Rumney descent, also connected with Bristol, goes back to John Rumney in the eighteenth century; he lived in the parish of St. George at Easton-in-Gordano just west of the Avon estuary. Earlier records ofhis family were destroyed in riots in 183 1. The name is uncommon and almost certainly derived from the little town of Rumney on the River Rhymney, fifty miles across the Bristol Channel in South Wales. The 'prepositor' [4] ofBristol in 1221 wasJohn de Rumney and the Mayor in 1276 was Peter de Rumney, and there were others in later times. John Rumney's son Charles (b. 1792) was apprenticed in 1807 to a Lawrence Houghton, boatbuilder and shipwright, 'to learn the art and mystery of boatbuilding'. William Rumney, another member of the family, a pilot in the Bristol Channel, was drowned off Clovelly in N. Devon in 1830 aged 33. Later, Charles built ships near Bristol and possibly at Bideford. My mother's father, Alfred Jones Rumney, son of Charles, was apprenticed (1846) as awoollendraper inBristolandlaterfollowedthe trade ofwoollen merchant there—with singular lack ofsuccess. He might well have made good as a scholar, writer or teacher and he had a lively sense ofthe ridiculous; this fortunately passed on to my mother who often needed it. His family was miserably poor, but his four daughters were people ofcharacter, originality and resource. The other side of my mother's descent (Huggins) came from midDevon . There were many Hugginses there ofwhom the first in our record wasJohn Huggins who married Elizabeth Pope ofBow, or Colebrook. Their son William (b. 1761), described as a yeoman, married Grace Townsend ofWhitstone four miles west of Exeter, who lived to 90 and died, according to legend, from breaking her leg climbing over a hurdle while chasing geese out...