In Memoriam General Alec Jeffrey Hill

Alec Jeffrey Hill AM, MBE, ED

(1916–2008)

Alec Jeffrey Hill was born on 2 July 1916 and educated at Sydney Grammar School, the University of Sydney and Balliol College, Oxford. He was proud of the latter in particular, and remained a ‘Balliol man’ all his life. His father served in the Great War and died while Alec was still a boy. In 1936 Alec received a commission in the Militia, joining the NSW Scottish Regiment. He joined the 2nd Australian Imperial Force when the war came, and served for the duration. He was a ‘Rat of Tobruk’, serving as a company commander with the 9th Division there and at El Alamein, and subsequently in the war against Japan in New Guinea and Borneo as brigade major of the 20th Brigade. Alec returned to Sydney after demobilisation, and taught geography and history at his old school, Sydney Grammar, becoming senior history master, and was heavily involved with school cadets and with the post-war Citizen Military Forces. He also served a term as Honorary ADC to the Governor of New South Wales.

In 1966 he accepted an appointment at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, as a lecturer in history. The 1960s saw the transition from the old pattern military education that was more or less unchanged since the college’s foundation, to the establishment of a university faculty—the Faculty of Military Studies—under the auspices of the University of New South Wales. While it represented a major change for RMC, and was not without its difficulties, the faculty nonetheless still reflected the certainties and stabilities of the existing patterns of university life, and with his military and educational backgrounds Alec Hill was an outstanding fit whose contributions were appreciated by both the uniformed and civilian sides of the house. Until his retirement in 1979, Alec taught military history to an entire generation of staff cadets, along the way shaping individuals who would become the leading Australian military historians of their day; notably amongst them David Horner, Chris Clark and Peter Pedersen. While doing so, he worked on a major biography of the commander of the Desert Mounted Corps in the Great War, General Sir Harry Chauvel. Published in 1978, Chauvel of the Light Horse is claimed to be the first modern scholarly biography of a senior Australian military figure, and a book that advanced military historiography in this country through the then unfashionable notion that generals were at least as important as privates in winning battles.

Alec was awarded an MBE during the war. In January 2006 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia ‘for service to education in the field of military history, to the Australian War Memorial as a writer and mentor to historians, and as a contributor to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, for which he wrote some thirty-eight articles. Alec Hill died on 27 August 2008, and is survived by his wife, Patsy, and by many friends, admirers and former students who will long remember his gentle manner, incisive mind and great personal charm.

Professor Jeffrey Grey