James Peter Hill, 1873-1954

Abstract

James Peter Hill was born at Kennoway, Fifeshire on 21 February 1873. He was the younger son of John Hill of Langside, and his wife Catherine Campbell Mclnroy. Both his parents came from the highlands, his father being born at Scone in Perthshire. John Hill was a farmer, well known as an authority on the breeding of prize cattle—particularly shorthorns for which he won many medals—and as an expert judge of horses. J. P. Hill went first to the village school at Kennoway where he was chiefly distinguished as a ‘grand runner’ and he showed his adventurous spirit as a boy of about ten years old by pursuading his father to allow him to sail from Leith to Archangel in a small steamer captained by an old family friend. In later years he always told of his trip as ‘cabin boy’ with great amusement. Hill then went to the Royal High School, Edinburgh, and, probably because the school did not then provide science teaching, attended classes in biology at the Heriot Watt College during the years 1887-9, gaining ‘qualifying teaching certificates’ of the Science and Art Department, London, in ‘Botany, Vegetable Morphology, Physiology and Animal Behaviour.’ At school Hill was a good athlete, playing football for the 1st fifteen.