Polly Hill

Polly Hill (14 June 1914 – 21 August 2005) was a British social anthropologist of West Africa, and an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Life and career Hill came from a family of distinguished academics – her father, A. V. Hill, had earned a Nobel prize in physiology and her mother Margaret Hill was a leading social reformer. Hill's maternal grandfather was economist John Neville Keynes, and maternal uncles were economist John Maynard Keynes and surgeon Geoffrey Keynes. Her brothers were the physiologist David Keynes Hill and the oceanographer Maurice Hill, while her sister Janet married the immunologist John Herbert Humphrey. She graduated with a 2:1 in Economics from Newnham College, Cambridge in 1933. In 1938 she was a research assistant at the Fabian Society, publishing a book on British unemployment. Hill spent eleven years (1940–51) as a civil servant in London, in the statistics department of the Colonial Office. She lived for a period during the war in Henry Moore's studio. After an interlude in journalism (1951–53) for the weekly West Africa, she spent nearly eleven more years as a Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow at the University of Ghana (initially University of the Gold Coast) between 1954 and 1965.