BRUCE CASTLE SCHOOL, TOTTENHAM.
By permission of Messrs. De La Rue.
An old Hazelwood pupil, Mr E. Edwards, in his written sketch of “Sir Rowland Hill,” said of the school that no similar establishment “in the world, probably at that time, contained such an array of costly models, instruments, apparatus, and books. There was an observatory upon the top of the house fitted with powerful astronomical instruments. The best microscopes obtainable were at hand. Models of steam and other engines were all over the place. Air-pumps and electrical machines were familiar objects. Maps, then comparatively rare, lined the walls. Drawing and mathematical instruments were provided in profusion. Etching was taught, and a copper press was there for printing the pupils' efforts in that way. A lithographic press and stones of various sizes were provided, so that the young artists might print copies of their drawings to send to their admiring relatives. Finally, a complete printing press with ample founts of type was set up to enable the boys themselves to print a monthly magazine connected with the school and its doings.” Other attractions were a well fitted-up carpenter's shop; a band, the musicians being the pupils; the training of the boys in vocal music; a theatre in which the manager, elocution teacher, scene painter, etc., were the young Hill brothers, the costumière their sister Caroline, and the actors the pupils; the control of a sum of money for school purposes; and the use of a metallic coinage received as payment for the voluntary work already mentioned, and by which certain privileges could be purchased.[6]
My grandfather inspired his sons and pupils with a longing to acquire knowledge, at the same time so completely winning their hearts by his good comradeship, that they readily joined him in the long and frequent walks of which he was fond, and in the course of which his walking stick was wont to serve to make rough drawings of problems, etc., in road or pathway. “His mathematical explanations,” wrote another old pupil in the “Essays of a Birmingham Manufacturer” (W. L. Sargent), “were very clear; and he looked at the bearings of every subject irrespective of its conventionalities. His definition of a straight line has been said to be the best in existence.”[7]
THOMAS WRIGHT HILL.
By permission of Messrs. Thos. De La Rue.
In my father's “Life,” Dr Birkbeck Hill, when writing of his recollections of our grandfather, said that it seemed “as if the aged man were always seated in perpetual sunshine. How much of the brightness and warmth must have come from his own cheerful temperament?... His Sunday morning breakfasts live in the memory like a landscape of Claude's.” At these entertainments the old man would sit in his easy-chair, at the head of the largest table the house could boast, in a circle of small, adoring grandchildren, the intervening, severe generation being absent; and of all the joyous crowd his perhaps was the youngest heart. There were other feasts, those of reason and the flow of soul, with which he also delighted his young descendants: stories of the long struggle in the revolted “American Colonies,” of the Great French Revolution, and of other interesting historical dramas which he could well remember, and equally well describe.