Frank Harrison Hill

Frank Harrison Hill (1830–1910) was an English journalist.

Baptised on 4 March 1830 at Boston, Lincolnshire,he was younger son of George Hill, merchant there, by his wife Betsy, daughter of Pishey Thompson. Educated at Boston grammar school, Hill in September entered as a divinity student the Unitarian New College, Manchester, where he studied under James Martineau. In June 1851 he completed the five years' course of study for the ministry, but he may never have preached. Meanwhile in 1848 he had matriculated at the University of London, and having graduated B.A. in the first class in 1851 acted from 1853 to 1855 as private tutor in the family of Dukinfield Darbishire of Manchester; the elder of his pupils, S. D. Darbishire, was subsequently known as the stroke of the Oxford University boat (1868–70), and afterwards practised as a doctor at Oxford. Somewhat later Hill became tutor in the family of Mrs. Salis Schwabe, also of Manchester.

Hill is thought to have owed his introduction to journalism to Henry Dunckley and Richard Holt Hutton. On the death in 1861 of James Simms, editor of the Northern Whig, the journal of the Ulster liberals, he took up the post in Belfast; at the time, the American Civil War was influencing party politics at Westminster, and, alone of Irish journalists, Hill supported the Union.

Through Martineau, Hill made the acquaintance of Harriet Martineau, then on the staff of the Daily News and like himself a staunch supporter of the northern states. He also came to know Henry Crabb Robinson, Robert Browning, and William Johnson Fox. At the suggestion of Frank Finlay, who was proprietor of the Northern Whig and his wife's brother, Hill was summoned at the end of 1865 to London to become assistant editor of the Daily News. Under John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, the Liberal Party was demanding measures that went further than the older Whig tradition, and Hill championed such a line. At the same time he wrote for the Saturday Review.

...
Wikipedia