Robert Wylie Hill

Robert Wylie Hill (1851–1939), founder of the eponymous Glasgow department store, came from an impeccably well-connected Glasgow commercial dynasty. 1 His grandfather, Robert Wylie, great-uncle William Lochhead, and uncles John and Robert Downie Wylie, were sometime-partners in famous Glasgow house-furnishers and undertakers Wylie & Lochhead. 2 Hill's father was also briefly a partner, 3 while Hill and his sister (Margaret Downie Hill) both married into the wealthy Rowat family of Paisley textile manufacturers, whose members included Robert James Rowat, a client of Mackintosh's. 4 Jessie Wylie Newbery (née Rowat), embroidery designer, and wife of the director of the Glasgow School of Art, Francis H. ('Fra') Newbery, was his niece, and Hill himself married Isabella Muir Rowat, Jessie's cousin. 5

Previously in business as Stewart & Hill, in 1879 he set up by himself as 'R. Wylie Hill & Co., commission merchants', before opening his 'American & Continental Stores' at 343 Argyle Street in 1880. 6 He imported 'woodenware, basket goods, carpet brooms ... agricultural implements ... mangles, [and] wringers', and in 1884, even had a 'large new iron sailing ship trading with Australia'. 7 A disastrous fire in 1888, causing £100,000 damage to his Buchanan Street and surrounding premises, was commemorated in a poem by William McGonagall. 8 The rebuilt Wylie Hill store had a pond in the toy department to demonstrate mechanical ship-models, and sold everything from enamelled kitchenware to Indian-grown, own-brand tea. 9

Hill joined the landed gentry, purchasing the 1700-acre Balthayock Estate, near Perth, in 1894. 10 There, he raised prize-winning shorthorn cattle, planted trees and improved drainage. 11 He (and the Rowats) also patronised 'Glasgow Boy' E. A. Walton, whose portrait of Hill's daughter, Muriel, was exhibited in Dundee in 1896. 12 Hill finally retired from his company in 1925. 13