The business papers of Henry and Henry William Hill.
We recently uncovered and acquired on behalf of a client the enormous and extensive collected papers of Henry and Henry William Hill. The father and son both played a detached role from the family enterprise of W.E. Hill & Son (William Ebsworth Hill was the brother of Henry), focussing on their musical life and serving as an intermediary between musicians and the violin dealing firm. The papers are providing a vast project, and prove to be an enormous treasure-trove of information about musical life in London as well as the violin trade, and are of similar importance as the Novello Papers now in the British Library. It is intended that they will be available for public research in the future, but the scope of the papers and delicate conservation issues surrounding much of the early material means that they will be unavailable for the foreseeable future.
An excerpt from William Henry Hill’s unpublished typescript monograph on François Xavier Tourte written circa 1900-1910 is illustrated.
