Sir Rowland Hill: The Story of a Great Reform

by Eleanor C. Hill Smyth

The earliest of the postal reformer's forefathers to achieve fame that outlives him was Sir Rowland Hill, mercer, and Lord Mayor of London in 1549, a native of Hodnet, Shropshire, who founded a Grammar School at Drayton, benefited the London Blue Coat School, was a builder of bridges, and is mentioned by John Stowe. From his brother are descended the three Rowland Hills famous in more modern times—the preacher, the warrior, and the author of Penny Postage. Some of the preacher's witticisms are still remembered, though they are often attributed to his brother cleric, Sydney Smith; Napier, in his “Peninsular War,” speaks very highly of the warrior, who, had Wellington fallen at Waterloo, would have taken the Duke's place, and who succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief when, in 1828, Wellington became Prime Minister. A later common ancestor of the three, a landed proprietor, married twice, and the first wife's children were thrown upon the world to fight their way as best as they could, my paternal grandfather's great-grandfather being one of the dispossessed. But even the blackest cloud has its silver lining; and the fall, by teaching the young people self-help, probably brought out the latent good stuff that was in them. At any rate, family tradition preserves memory of not a few men and women—Hills, or of the stocks with which they married—of whom their descendants have reason to be proud.

There was, for example, John Hill, who served among “the twelve good men and true” on a certain trial, was the only one of them who declined to accept a bribe, and, the fact becoming known, was handsomely complimented by the presiding judge. Thenceforth, whenever the Assizes in that part of the country came round again, John used to be asked after as “the honest juror.” At least two of my father's forebears, a Symonds and a Hill, refused to cast their political votes to order, and were punished for their sturdy independence. The one lived to see a hospital erected in Shrewsbury out of the large fortune for some two hundred years ago of £30,000 which should have come to his wife, the testator's sister; the other, a baker and corn merchant, son to “the honest juror,” saw his supply of fuel required to bake his bread cut off by the local squire, a candidate for Parliament, for whom the worthy baker had dared to refuse to vote. Ovens then were heated by wood, which in this case came from the squire's estate. When next James Hill made the usual application, the faggots were not to be had. He was not discouraged. Wood, he reflected, was dear; coal—much seldomer used then than now—was cheap. He mixed the two, and found the plan succeed, lessened the proportion of wood, and finally dispensed with it altogether. His example was followed by other people: the demand for the squire's firewood languished, and the boycotted voter was presently requested to purchase afresh. “An instance,” says Dr Birkbeck Hill, “of a new kind of faggot vote.”

Another son of “the honest juror” was the first person to grow potatoes in Kidderminster. Some two centuries earlier “the useful tuber” was brought to England; but even in times much nearer our own, so slowly did information travel, that till about 1750 the only denizen of that town who seems to have known of its existence was this second John Hill. When the seeds he sowed came up, blossomed, and turned to berries, these last were cooked and brought to table. Happily no one could eat them; and so the finger of scorn was pointed at the luckless innovator. The plants withered unheeded; but later, the ground being wanted for other crops, was dug up, when, to the amazement of all beholders and hearers, a plentiful supply of fine potatoes was revealed.

On the spindle side also Rowland Hill's family could boast ancestors of whom none need feel ashamed. Among these was the high-spirited, well-dowered orphan girl who, like Clarissa Harlowe, fled from home to escape wedlock with the detested suitor her guardians sought to force upon her. But, unlike Richardson's hapless heroine, this fugitive lived into middle age, maintained herself by her own handiwork—spinning—never sought even to recover her lost fortune, married, left descendants, and fatally risked her life while preparing for burial the pestilence-smitten neighbour whose poor remains his own craven relatives had abandoned. Though she perished untimely, recollection of her married name was preserved to reappear in that of a great-grandson, Matthew Davenport Hill. The husband of Mrs Davenport's only daughter, William Lea, was a man little swayed by the superstitions of his time, as he showed when he broke through a mob of ignorant boors engaged in hounding into a pond a terrified old woman they declared to be a witch, strode into the water, lifted her in his arms, and, heedless of hostile demonstration, bore her to his own home to be nursed back into such strength and sanity as were recoverable. A son of William Lea, during the dreadful cholera visitation of 1832, played, as Provost of Haddington, a part as fearlessly unselfish as that of his grandmother in earlier days, but without losing his life, for his days were long in the land. His sister was Rowland Hill's mother.

On both sides the stocks seem to have been of stern Puritan extraction, theologically narrow, inflexibly honest, terribly in earnest, of healthy life, fine physique—nonagenarians not infrequently. John Symonds, son to him whose wife forfeited succession to her brother, Mr Millington's fortune, because both men were sturdily obstinate in the matter of political creed, was, though a layman, great at extempore prayer and sermon-making. When any young man came a-wooing to one of his bonnie daughters, the father would take the suitor to an inner sanctum, there to be tested as to his ability to get through the like devotional exercises. If the young man failed to come up to the requisite standard he was dismissed, and the damsel reserved for some more proficient rival—James Hill being one of the latter sort. How many suitors of the present day would creditably emerge from that ordeal?

Through this sturdy old Puritan we claim kinship with the Somersetshire family, of whom John Addington Symonds was one, and therefore with the Stracheys; while from other sources comes a collateral descent from “Hudibras” Butler, who seems to have endowed with some of his own genuine wit certain later Hills; as also a relationship with that line of distinguished medical men, the Mackenzies, and with the Rev. Morell Mackenzie, who played a hero's part at the long-ago wreck of the Pegasus.

A neighbour of James Hill was a recluse, who, perhaps, not finding the society of a small provincial town so companionable as the books he loved, forbore “to herd with narrow foreheads,” but made of James a congenial friend. When this man died, the task fell to his executors, James Hill and another, to divide his modest estate. Among the few bequests were two books to young Tom, James's son, a boy with a passion for reading, but possessed of few books, one being a much-mutilated copy of “Robinson Crusoe,” which tantalisingly began with the thrilling words, “more than thirty dancing round a fire.” The fellow executor, knowing well the reputation for uncanny ways with which local gossip had endowed the deceased, earnestly advised his colleague to destroy the volumes, and not permit them to sully young Tom's mind. “Oh, let the boy have the books,” said James Hill, and straightway the legacy was placed in the youthful hands. It consisted of a “Manual of Geography” and Euclid's “Elements.” The effect of their perusal was not to send the reader to perdition, but to call forth an innate love for mathematics, and, through them, a lifelong devotion to astronomy, tastes he was destined to pass on in undiminished ardour to his third son, the postal reformer.

Thomas Wright Hill was brought up in the straitest-laced of Puritan sects, and he has left a graphic description of the mode in which, as a small boy of seven, he passed each Sunday. The windows of the house, darkened by their closed outside shutters, made mirrors in which he saw his melancholy little face reflected; his toys were put away; there were three chapel services, occupying in all some five and a half hours, to which he was taken, and the intervals between each were filled by long extempore prayers and sermon-reading at home, all week-day conversation being rigidly ruled out. The sabbatical observance commenced on Saturday night and terminated on Sunday evening with “a cheerful supper,” as though literally “the evening and the morning were the first day”—an arrangement which, coupled with the habit of bestowing not Christian but Hebrew names upon the children, gives colour to the oft-made allegation that our Puritan ancestors drew their inspiration from the Old rather than from the New Testament. The only portion of these Sunday theological exercises which the poor little fellow really understood was the simple Bible teaching that the tenderly-loved mother gave to him and to his younger brother. While as a young man residing in Birmingham, however, he passed under the influence of Priestley, and became one of his most devoted disciples, several of whom, at the time of the disgraceful “Church and King” riots of 1791, volunteered to defend the learned doctor's house.[1] But Priestley declined all defence, and the volunteers retired, leaving only young Tom, who would not desert his beloved master's threatened dwelling. The Priestley family had found refuge elsewhere, but his disciple stayed alone in the twilight of the barred and shuttered house, which speedily fell a prey to its assailants. Our grandfather used often to tell us children of the events of those terrible days when the mob held the town at their mercy, and were seriously opposed only when, having destroyed so much property belonging to Nonconformity, they next turned their tireless energy towards Conformity's possessions. His affianced wife was as courageous as he, for when while driving in a friend's carriage through Birmingham's streets some of the rioters stopped the horses, and bade her utter the cry “Church and King,” she refused, and was suffered to pass on unmolested. Was it her bravery or her comeliness, or both, that won for her immunity from harm?