Obituary. Anthony Haydock Hill

His many colleagues and friends who had just attended the First International Conference of Southeast Asian Historians in Singapore, were shocked to hear of the sudden death of Dr A.H. Hill. At the conference he had read a paper on “The Coming of Islam to South-east Asia” and before the meeting of the post-conference committee he had made the trip to Java to gather material for his research work. Dr Hill was killed on the 26th January 1961, when the Garuda Indonesian Airways DC 3, in which he was travelling from Djakarta to Bandung, crashed on the slopes of Gunong Burangrang, a mountain close to the famous Tangkubanprahu volcano near Bandung.

Tony Hill was educated at Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, from where he graduated with the degrees of M.A. and B.Sc. After a period of school teaching he took the Diploma of Education at the University of London and was appointed by the Colonial Office to the Malayan Education Department in 1937. After an introductory four months at Victoria School in Singapore, he left in January 1938 to become the science master at Anderson School, Ipoh, where he started the school’s science department: the appointment for which he had been originally recruited in England. It was whilst he was at Ipoh that he developed his interest in Malay studies, having begun to learn Malay under Sir Richard Winstedt at the School of Oriental Studies in London. A member of the Perak Battalion in the Volunteers, he was mobilised in December 1941 and took part in several actions against the Japanese as they advanced down the peninsula. Amongst the fortunate few to escape from Singapore, he left after the surrender in a small boat by way of Karimun, Bengkalis and Pahang, and was thence evacuated to Tjilatjap in Java and from there to Australia.

As he had been amongst the last to leave Singapore, he was amongst the first to return in early September 1945. He served with the British Military Administration before rejoining the Malayan Education Service, with whom he continued to serve, mainly in Trengganu, until he was boarded out owing to ill health in 1954.

After a short period in Sarawak as secretary to the Bishop of Labuan and Sarawak, he became in 1956 a Lecturer in Malay at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. He had by then been awarded the further degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Oxford for his work on the Hikayat Abdullah, published in the Journal in 1955. In 1959 he moved to the University of Sydney, New South Wales, where he took up an appointment as lecturer in the Department of Indonesian and Malayan Studies, later becoming in addition Hunter-Baillie Fellow in Oriental and Polynesian Languages at St. Andrew’s College. It was in the vacation from Sydney University that he attended the Singapore conference and made the trip to Java, where the fatal accident occurred. At the of his death he was working on an annotated edition of the Shair Ken Tambohan.

His death has been a great loss to Malay studies and also to the many persons who knew his friendship and generosity.

J.W.G.C.