Conclusions

I descend from the Hills of Carnmoney and know of no very close relation with Alec’s family, but I took an interest because the surname and some professional interests coincide. Meteorological observables such as wind speed and solar radiation are studied today with different instruments, such as laser radar Doppler sensors and sensitive multispectral detectors. But some issues – academic squabbles, idle or incompetent staff, painful reduction and plotting of data, tough field trips, hotel rooms of varying standard – are always with us.

I wrote this for and from three main interests: Antrim family history, meteorology, and Kipling, in that order. Few readers will be deeply engaged by all three. I have zipped round a quintet of peoples now distant from us: slaveowning businessmen in the beaten Southern states of America, their opponents including “mercenaries” and Irish emigrants (often Catholics disadvantaged by British-imposed laws), Indians enjoying the good and bad of the British Empire, the British “superiors” of these Indians, and earlier Irishmen (mainly Presbyterian) willing to run high risks – sometimes emigrating, but sometimes staying – at and just after the Rebellion. It is artificial, but worthwhile I hope, to string them on this common thread.

Kipling specialists will not find much new here, but Alec may deserve a second look. He died young after years of hot-weather drudgery, and his surviving letters – far fewer than Edmonia’s – are less promising as evidence about Kipling’s inner and romantic lives. In the vast literature, he can appear (or rather disappear) within the cliché of Anglo-Indians running their doomed hierarchical Empire, dining and bitching in the Simla clubs, exposing their prejudices in the Pioneer, and refusing equality to their Indian colleagues.

Kipling spent a few months as the Hills’ house guest, and another few travelling with them. He and Alec worked hard, showed substantial talent, and reached prominence when strikingly young. We recall From Sea to Sea’s Professor, the setting of Rikki-tikki-tavi, and perhaps also Pedler’s expertise in cobra poison. The letters say when Edmonia formally met Kipling, but not when Kipling first heard of Alec or met him through Sir Edward Buck, or what part Alec took in Simla and city life before marriage. There is – to my knowledge – no evidence that Alec sketched or painted or shot, and not much (the Lipp piano, the tennis set, and Edmonia’s 1887 badminton prize) about organised sports or musical tastes. Photography, timeconsuming and difficult for anyone in the 1880s, was more than a hobby: one of his day jobs was greatly concerned with solar effects and “actinometry” – the physics and chemistry of sunlight.

His writings – wider, as we have seen, than Indian meteorology – were copious, reasonably careful and polished, with sparks of self-awareness and humour. Readers of Pinney’s selections will see that Kipling, amid a torrent of everyday banter, complaints and private allusions, shows – when he wants to – the pared vigour and descriptive power that still attract readers of various and incompatible views. The Hills do not reach that level. But Ted wrote some compressive and expressive passages, and Alec, though his letters are too few to be judged, leaves a pleasant taste: tahsildars and bathtubs, cyclones and the “flutings of the cloud-shadows”.


Acknowledgements

Members of at least three generations of Hill descendants are alive in Abbeville and elsewhere in America, but they are not responsible for interpretations and opinions here, and I have respected their privacy. I thank Professor Kerby Miller for revisiting his files on Abbeville and Irish emigrants; the staff of the British Library, NOAA Central Library, and PRONI Belfast; Graham Duncan of South Caroliniana Library; Professor Chris Baker of Birmingham University, and Mrs Janet Baker; Evelyn Barrett of Belfast Central Library; Stephen Bell and Richard Wallace of Ballynure Historical Group; Mark Beswick of the Meteorological Archive of the Meteorological Office in Exeter; Wesley Bonar and his team at Sentry Hill; Hilde Langenaken and Nathalie Chevenne of the Royal Belgian Observatory; friends and colleagues in the North of Ireland Family History Society; Angela Patterson of Railway Street Presbyterian Church, Lisburn; Professor Harish Trivedi; Frank Vanlangenhove of Ghent University Library; and Dr David Willetts.

George F W Thibaut (1848-1914) was Professor at the Government Sanskrit College, and from 1888 to 1895 a Professor in Allahabad.


Further reading

Edmonia Taylor Hill, “S. A. Hill, M. A., F. R. M. S., F. C. S. – A Memoir”, American Meteorological Journal, vol. 9, pp. 112-121, 1892; here referred to as "[EHT]". This says nothing about John Hill or others in Alec’s family, and nowhere identifies its author as Alec’s wife. One expects her to meet the in-laws, and Thomas Pinney suggests: “Mrs Hill’s diary records that after she landed at Liverpool on 4 October [1889] she went to Belfast (presumably to see her husband’s family) before going on to London, where she arrived on 12 October”. I would be grateful to receive any evidence that she did visit or write to Ballyboley.

Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea. Most of these essays were published in the Allahabad Pioneer and Kipling reworked them in book form. For this and much else (e.g. Alan Underwood’s note on Rikki-tikki-tavi) see http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk. Andrew Lycett (Rudyard Kipling, 1999, 2nd edition 2015), and Neelum Saran Gour ("Kipling in Allahabad", in Harish Trivedi and Janet Montefiore, eds, Kipling in India: India in Kipling, Routledge, 2020) comment on the Kipling-Hill correspondence.

Thomas Pinney, ed., The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, University of Iowa Press.

Short obituaries are in Nature (1890) and the RMS Quarterly Journal (1891). Edmonia’s diaries and Alec’s photographs are in American libraries (Cornell University, #4610 in Rare and Manuscript Collections; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division). There is almost no chance that anything approaching the complete Kipling correspondence will emerge; letters were scattered, copies (if made) were often faulty, and Kipling’s widow probably destroyed much evidence.

More technical papers by Alec and colleagues are available online: the Indian Meteorological Memoirs, Nature, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the Proceedings and Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Symons’s Meteorological Magazine, the Indian Medical Gazette, the Reports on the Administration of the Meteorological Department of the Government of India, and Black’s Memoir of the Indian Surveys 1875-1890.


This version 28 December 2021.