Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement/Hill, Joseph Sidney
HILL, JOSEPH SIDNEY (1851–1894), missionary bishop, was born at Barnack, near Stamford, Northamptonshire, on 1 Dec. 1801. His father, Henry Hill, died young, and Hill was sent to the Orphan Working School at Haverstock Hill, London. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a trade; but, resolving to be a missionary, he was received into the Church Missionary Society's preparatory institution at Reading in 1872, and into its college at Islington two years later. In 1876 he was ordained deacon by the bishop of London, married, and sailed for the Church Missionary Society's mission at Lagos, West Africa. In the following year he was invalided home, and in 1878 was appointed to the society's New Zealand mission. In 1879 he was admitted to priest's orders by the bishop of Waiapu, New Zealand. He resigned his connection with the Church Missionary Society in 1882, took up evangelistic work in the colony, and was for some time chaplain of the prison at Auckland, New Zealand.
Hill returned to England in 1890, and again volunteered to go out to West Africa under the Church Missionary Society. The affairs of the society's mission on the Niger were in a position of some complexity. In the hope of solving the difficulties the archbishop of Canterbury (Benson) sent Hill to the Niger as his commissioner, and as the designated successor of Bishop Samuel Adjai Crowther [q. v.], the society appointing him director of the Niger mission. He discharged a delicate task with skill, and on his return home was consecrated bishop in Western Equatorial Africa on 29 June 1893. He left for West Africa in the November following, fell ill soon after landing at Lagos, and died there on 5 Jan. 1895. His wife, Lucilla Leachman, survived him but a few hours.
[Faulkner's Joseph Sidney Hill; Stock's History of the Church Missionary Society, vol. iii.; Record, 1894, pp. 33, 34.]