A SERIOUS CHILD

By January 1856, Mrs Gill was living at Brighton, on the south coast of England. She appears to have left her husband to his hunting, drawing, photography, and mistress in Ajanta. William was now twelve years old, so his mother entered him as a day pupil at nearby Brighton College. He was a serious boy and asked his older sister Frances to make him a large card bearing the words England expects every man to do his duty, which he hung on the wall of his bedroom. To ensure that he got up promptly each day, to do homework before breakfast, William devised an alarm mechanism to pull the bedclothes off him automatically.

William Gill soon 'showed signs of unusual ability, and a special aptitude for Mathematics, combined with a taste for History and Geography,' as his obituary in the Brighton College Magazine put it. For the next five and a half years, he studied diligently at Brighton, gaining prizes for Mathematics, Divinity and Drawing, and becoming head of the Modern Department. He left in June 1861 with the first prizes for Mathematics and Divinity, and a glowing testimonial from the headmaster, Dr Griffith, who stated: 'I have written no testimonial with greater confidence and satisfaction than this.'

Remembered at Brighton College as having 'a most modest and retiring disposition,' William then went to a private tutor, Rev. E. A. Claydon, for six months. Early in 1862 the young Gill was admitted to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He was commissioned in the Royal Engineers in June 1864, gaining the equivalent of 88% in his examinations. He was not quite 21.

William spent most of the next nine years with the Royal Engineers on home soil, apart from an eighteen-month trip to India. He was sent to the land of his birth in September 1869, and served there until March 1871. He returned, doubtless via the newly opened Suez Canal, having inherited a huge fortune from a distant relative on his mother’s side of the family, Frederick Heusch of Wimbledon, who had no children of his own. This fortune was so great that, when he died, William Gill left more than £160,000, equivalent to £7.4 million today. As Gill’s obituarist put it in The Royal Engineers Journal:

Handsome fortunes do not abound in the Corps, and this circumstance was the subject of various stories more or less mythical. It enabled Gill for the rest of his too brief career to give scope to the intense desire for exploration and adventure which was born with him, but which was in every opportunity turned by him into that channel which seemed best calculated to serve the need of England at the time. It seemed indeed as if Gill had adopted as his motto, but with a difference, the favourite maxim of treason: England’s necessity was his opportunity.

William Gill - a great-great-uncle of the author