Hill
On the hill, and the Penny Post and the National Trust.
- Origin
- West Midlands, England
- Famous bearer
- Sir Rowland Hill (1795–1879), postal reformer, founder of the modern penny postal system
- Register
- English family
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of Hill
Seat vacantChief
No one leads the Hill community yet. When the movement opens, you can stand for its leadership, or help elect whoever does.
Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once Hill has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
The Hill clan is being rebuilt. Join the waiting list for the movement today, and you help decide who leads it and what it does.
Help rebuild the Hill clan →What does the Hill name mean?
Locative, Old English hyll.
The history of Hill
Too large for one story, every shire has its Hill Parish. Two Hills of the nineteenth century reorganised the country between them: Sir Rowland Hill (1795–1879), the Birmingham schoolmaster whose 1837 pamphlet Post Office Reform led, in 1840, to the founding of the modern penny postal system; and Octavia Hill (1838–1912), the Wisbech-born housing-and-open-spaces reformer, co-founder of the National Trust in January 1895. The two Hills are not closely related; both are descended from the standard southern-English locative-Hill pool. Octavia was Rowland's contemporary as a public reformer but is not a relation. The surname's twentieth-century institutional weight, in postal and conservation history, runs from these two.
Champions of the Hill name
The bearers whose lives are inseparable from this surname. Each has its own page — biography, achievements, geography, connection to the family.
Notable bearers of the Hill name
- Sir Rowland Hill (1795–1879), postal reformer, founder of the modern penny postal system
- Octavia Hill (1838–1912), housing reformer, co-founder of the National Trust
Stories of Hill
Rowland Hill and the Penny Post
1840On the morning of the sixth of May 1840, at the front counter of the General Post Office in St Martin's-le-Grand in central London, the postal clerk at the head of the queue sold to a Mr James Chalmers the first sheet of the Penny Black, the world's first prepaid adhesive postage stamp, designed by Sir Rowland Hill, the principal architect of the Postal Reform Act of August 1839. The stamp, a black engraving of Queen Victoria's profile by William Wyon, cost one penny and could be used to send any letter under half an ounce to anywhere in the United Kingdom. Until that morning, the British postal system had charged the recipient on delivery at a graduated rate by distance and weight that placed a one-page letter from London to Edinburgh at one shilling and three pence (about half a day's labourer's wages in 1839). The reform collapsed the cost to one penny flat-rate, prepaid by the sender. The volume of British post almost doubled within the first year, quadrupled within seven, and increased thirtyfold by 1900. The Penny Post is, by every careful judgment of the historians of communication, the foundational modern mass-communication reform of the nineteenth century and the template for every later postal system in the world. Rowland Hill was knighted in 1860 and given a Parliamentary grant of £20,000 at his retirement in 1864.
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Octavia Hill founds the National Trust
1895On the afternoon of the twelfth of January 1895, in the upstairs drawing-room of the Westminster town house of the Duke of Westminster (Grosvenor House on Park Lane), Octavia Hill, the fifty-six-year-old Wisbech-born housing-and-open-spaces reformer, together with the Reverend Hardwicke Rawnsley (the Lake-District canon and campaigner against Lakeland railway development) and the solicitor Sir Robert Hunter (the senior counsel of the Commons Preservation Society since 1865), formally constituted the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty as a registered company under the Companies Act. The Trust's founding purpose, by the first paragraph of its Memorandum of Association, was to promote the permanent preservation, for the benefit of the nation, of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest. The first acquisition of the Trust, in March 1895, was a small piece of clifftop land at Dinas Oleu above Barmouth in Merionethshire, given by the donor Mrs Fanny Talbot for the public use. By 2025 the Trust owns, by the register, about 1.5% of the total land area of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (about 250,000 hectares), over 500 historic houses, a quarter of the Lake District, 780 miles of coastline, and has, by its membership register, the largest single voluntary conservation membership of any organisation in the world.
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