When a small boy dashed into the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester shouting “Dad, Dad, they’ve got a Man City plane!”, he summed up the gift Richard Hills, who has died aged 82, bequeathed to the city.
The 1920s Avro Avian, painted by chance in the same pale blue as the football team’s strip, is one of a hoard of mechanical marvels that the museum’s first curator amassed with unflagging skill and enthusiasm. “If we can’t sell it, give it to Dr Hills,” became a standard line for modernising businesses – including this newspaper – faced with the question of what to do with redundant machinery. Although primarily an academic and teacher, Hills – as founding director of the museum from 1968 – became Britain’s expert on where to find space for historically vital but temporarily unloved leviathans, gifting Manchester knowledge mixed with fun.
Patient and meticulous, he also tracked down archives telling the story of the world’s first industrial city and found display room for humble components, pins or spanners, that had played their part.
But his heart was in exhibits that actually worked, engines puffing, looms weaving. An infectious networker, he brought home a Manchester-built locomotive from the Isle of Man in 1975 with the help of a cousin who was a member of the House of Keys; he later flew to South Africa to secure a 120-ton Beyer-Garratt locomotive, dating from 1929, one of the 1,116 built in Gorton, the industrial quarter of Manchester. He arranged the engine’s passage just in time on a boat that had been due to carry oranges.
Hills was born in Lewisham, south-east London, where his father, Leslie, was an Anglican vicar, but spent his childhood in the care of an aunt in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, after his mother, Peggy, died of cancer when he was two. His maternal grandfather, Sir John Ontario Miller, had been orphaned at the age of six but rose to high office in Indian civil service. Hills, whose father was posted as a military chaplain throughout the second world war, showed similar resolution.
He boarded at Charterhouse school, in Surrey, read history at Queens’ College, Cambridge and served as a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery on national service from 1955 until 1957. He started training as a teacher at Cambridge but nearly lost a leg in a rock fall while leading an Outward Bound party on Great Gable, in the Lake District. He returned to teaching after bone and skin grafts and a year’s convalescence.
After stints at schools including Worcester College for the Blind (now New College Worcester), he took a diploma in the history of science and technology at Imperial College, London, which led to the first of his 15 books, Machines, Mills and Uncountable Costly Necessities (1967), a history of the drainage of the Fens.
In the meanwhile, he developed a passion for rebuilding ancient machinery, which had started at school with work on a steam model of Robert Stephenson’s locomotive Invicta. Hills’ personal transport followed a similar course: he graduated from a vintage motorbike through various old Alvis cars to a 1924 Lancia Lambda which he repaired, maintained and ran for 52 years.
His talents were spotted in 1965 by Prof Donald Cardwell, head of the history of science department at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (Umist), who was keen to realise the dream of a grand industrial museum, an idea first proposed in Manchester in 1834.
Hills was given a research post in the department and tasked with helping set up what was originally called the North Western Museum of Science and Industry. Over the next 20 years, Cardwell, Hills and the museum’s dauntless chief technician, Frank Wightman, made this happen beyond anyone’s most optimistic hopes.
The hunt for exhibits was paralleled by a search for space, as the museum moved from temporary rooms to Oddfellows Hall on Grosvenor Street in 1969 to, finally, in 1983, the site of the world’s first railway passenger station on Liverpool Road. There it remains as one of north-west England’s most popular attractions. One exhibit from 1925, a Galloway mill steam engine, which was one of the last built, had to be dismantled and shifted to three different rented warehouses before permanent room was eventually found.
Visitor numbers rose from 15,000 in 1972 to 70,000 in 1978, with Hills’ team ingeniously meeting challenges such as dangerous overcrowding around working machines. They were a friendly group. When the museum’s cat had to be removed from a mural at Oddfellows Hall because its presence was thought frivolous, it was only lightly painted over and became known as the “ghost cat”.
Hills’ unflagging work, documented in his history of the museum in the digital collection at Chetham’s library, eventually took its toll, and in 1983, with the move to Liverpool Road secured, he retired as director. He wanted more time for writing – the resulting books included a three-volume biography of James Watt (2002-05) – and for leading hill-walking groups, and to train as an Anglican priest. After ordination in 1988, he worked in parishes in industrial Urmston, Trafford and Great Yarmouth, and finally Mottram in Longdendale, on the edge of the Peak District, where he lived in a 17th-century weaver’s cottage full of industrial relics in various stages of repair.
After a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2005, Hills was helped by many local people and especially Berenice Pickford, a church member and former divisional commissioner in the Girl Guides. They were married in 2008 and enjoyed happy years until she died of cancer in 2016. Hills retained a wide range of friends and, like so many of the industrial pioneers whose work he preserved, played a vigorous part in many Manchester organisations. In 2015 he was appointed MBE for his services to industrial heritage.
He is survived by two stepdaughters, his sister, a niece and three nephews.
• Richard Leslie Hills, museum curator and industrial historian, born 1 September 1936; died 10 May 2019
