Maurice Hill was born in Cambridge on 29 May 1919. His father was A. V. Hill, the distinguished physiologist, who was at that time a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. In 1913, A. V. Hill married Margaret Keynes, the sister of Maynard Keynes, the economist, and of Geoffrey Keynes, the surgeon and author of erudite bibliographies of William Harvey, John Donne and others. Margaret’s father was J. N. Keynes (1852-1949), Registrary to the University, a Fellow of Pembroke College until his marriage, and the author of a well-known book on statistics. His wife Florence Ada Keynes (
née
Brown), who was one of the earliest students of Newnham College, was Mayor of Cambridge in 1932 and published two books, one when she was 86 and the other three years later. Maurice was the youngest of a family of four children, having one brother and two sisters. Shortly after Maurice’s birth, the family moved to Manchester where A. V. Hill became Professor of Physiology and received a Nobel Prize. In 1923 they moved to Highgate when A. V. Hill became Professor of Physiology at University College London. At the age of six Maurice went to Byron House School. His school reports have been preserved; they give a picture of an intelligent little boy with an ‘open, happy nature’, interested in many things but finding neatness in writing hard to attain. In 1928 he went to Highgate Junior School where he stayed for almost three years. His performance and reports were undistinguished and he was sent for a year and a half to Avondale, a boarding school at Clifton, near Bristol. Here his work at once improved and he was consistently near the top of his class. In 1932 he returned to Highgate and started in the Senior School as a day boy. He remained there till 1938. From the start he found an interest in physics and mathematics.
Charles Arthur Lovatt Evans, 1884-1968
