Speech and drama teacher Carol Hill set high standards and used the performing arts to help her students to achieve.
Hill, who was the first speech and drama teacher in the Government high school system, taught for 36 years.
She is credited with broadening the aspirations of her students at a school that was established to train black girls to become seamstresses and upholsterers.
Her career as an educator began in 1949 at May Francis’ Girls Institute of Arts and Crafts (GIAC). Teaching was a far cry from acting, the career she had initially envisioned for herself. But it proved to be rewarding.
She put her formal training in drama to good use, directing plays at school and for local theatre companies. Her interest in drama was the spark for her successful challenge of a whites-only seating policy at the Bermudiana Theatre in 1951.
Born on November 16, 1925, Hill is a member of one of Bermuda’s most prominent families. Her grandfather was Samuel David Robinson, a prosperous businessman and a founder of The Berkeley Institute.
Her father was Hilton Hill I, the owner of a carriage and harness business, a leading exporter of Bermuda produce, and a Member of Parliament, who died when Hill was two years old.
She, along with her older brother and sister, Hilton Hill II and sister Ruth Elise, were raised by their mother, Emma Elise (Robinson) Hill, in a “sheltered” environment at Old Holm, Princess Street, Hamilton. Her aunts Wenona and Agnes Robinson—the founder of the Sunshine League—lived in the adjoining property, Wantley.
Hill attended Berkeley Institute and completed her high school education at Alma College, an all-girls’ boarding school in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada.
She went on to study speech arts and drama at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto. Hill’s love of drama and poetry began in her childhood. A shy girl who recited poetry to herself in front of the mirror at home, she was inspired by her “favourite” aunt, Wenona Robinson, a speech teacher at Central School and a Girl Guide leader, who was also known throughout the community for her dramatic readings.
Hill studied for two years at the Royal Conservatory, graduating in1948 with an associate degree. She had hoped to continue her studies at the Royal Conservatory, with a view to trying her luck as an actress. (Hill was a member of the Conservatory’s first drama class, where Kate Reid and Barbara Hamilton, who went on to become established actresses, were fellow students.)
Instead, she acceded to her mother’s wish that she return home to take up the family mantle of public service. In 1949, Hill began teaching at GIAC at Alaska Hall, on Court Street, after educator Dr. Marjorie Bean asked her to help out.
Facilities at GIAC were basic at best. Hill told the Mid-Ocean News in a December 1999 interview: “We had trestle tables in the rooms and I taught upstairs in a room where we had two classes divided by a curtain.”
And she was not paid for the first year. That oversight was eventually rectified and Hill became a full-fledged teacher.
In 1958, GIAC was incorporated into the Government system. It moved to former British military barracks at Prospect, Devonshire and was renamed Prospect Secondary School for Girls, with Dorothy Thompson as headmistress, and a broader curriculum that included a GCE stream.
Facilities were still substandard, but classrooms were larger, there was an auditorium and Hill could put a more structured curriculum in place. She taught poetry, phonetics, public speaking and drama. Students in their final year were given the opportunity to take part in a play.
Hill mounted several memorable productions at Prospect, including Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which was staged in an outdoor theatre at Prospect, and Song of the Scaffold, a play about the French Revolution. She was given responsibility for student activities, including graduation and in 1951, introduced a formal graduation ceremony, a first for a Bermuda school.
Former students remember Hill as an inspirational teacher who brought out the best in them. Carol-Ann Furbert, who was Portia in Merchant of Venice and who followed in Hill’s footsteps as a speech and drama teacher, said she “just believed in us.”
“I was a very shy girl and there we were doing Shakespeare,” she said.
Francis Eddy, who had the lead role in Song of the Scaffold, said: “I was shy but I put my heart and soul into interpreting the character of a noviate nun. Under Miss Hill’s patient tutelage, we teenaged girls, who had never left the island, were transformed into pious dignified French-accented nuns.
“The thing that was so amazing about her was that she had her students study and give convincing performances of Shakespeare when we were inept at speaking everyday English. She clearly had her attention on raising our self-esteem through the plays and poems she chose.”
She described Hill as “elegance itself”. She was “impeccably dressed” and “always prepared.”
“When she entered the classroom, students stopped chattering and gave her their full attention.”
She added: “When I speak of Miss Hill to people who did not have the good fortune of having her as a teacher I tell them about the most important lesson she taught me.
“She said that we could speak the way we did among our friends and families but for the world we needed to speak proper English. I took that lesson to heart and it has served me well.”
Hill attributed her success in the classroom to the years she spent at Alma College, where her love of drama was allowed to flourish. At Alma, students were the “important ones” and that became her guiding principle at Prospect.
Outside of school, she was heavily involved in drama during the 1960s, directing plays for theatre groups such as the New Theatre Guild, the Companion Theatre, the Studio Foundation for the Arts and the Bermuda Musical and Dramatic Society (BMDS).
She was one of the first black members of the BMDS, for whom she directed three plays in the late 1960s, and also served in other capacities, backstage. In 1967, she appeared as the Wicked Witch in the Christmas pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk and acted in Ladies in Retirement in 1970.
In the late 1940s and early 50s, Hill directed her energies towards challenging segregation in Bermuda and the restrictive voting system. With her brother and sister-in-law, Hilton and Georgine Hill, she met regularly with a group of like-minded citizens to discuss ways of bringing about change. The meetings culminated in the production of a document entitled An Analysis of Bermuda’s Social Problems.
In 1951, the Hill trio and others were instrumental in helping to change the segregationist policies of the Bermudiana Theatre Club, which presented plays in repertory with a cast of professional actors from the U.S. and Canada.
They staged a protest, carrying picket signs on Front Street, after they were denied tickets to attend a play on nights reserved for white audiences.
The protest won the support of Actors Equity, her old classmate Kate Reid, as well as the U.K government and the segregationist practices were eventually dropped.
Their actions were a precursor to the successful 1959 Theatre Boycott and led to Georgine and Carol Hill’s appearance in Errol Williams’ 2002 documentary about the boycott, When Voices Rise.
For her work as a social activist, Hill was honoured by Bermuda’s Anti-Apartheid Group in 1988 and by Imagine Bermuda in 2009.
As one whose life was defined primarily by the arts, she helped found the Festival for the Advancement of Performing Arts and the Spring into the Arts programme in schools. Both were aimed at raising artistic standards. In 2002, she was honoured by the Education Ministry for her work with Spring into the Arts.
Hill retired from teaching in 1985. During the first years of her retirement, she wrote Rays of Hope, a history of the Sunshine League. All proceeds from the sale of the book, which was published in 2000, were earmarked for the League.
Hill was a recipient of a Queen’s Certificate and Badge of Honour in 1989, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bermuda Arts Council in 1999, and a MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2000.
She was one of two Bermudians singled out for recognition by the Ministry of Community and Cultural Affairs on Citizens Recognition Day in May 1998.
And in 2008, Hill and her sister-in-law Georgine Hill, who taught art at PSSG, were feted by former students at an appreciation tea.
