Tim Foster spoke of his Godfather, Tom Hilton, at the funeral:

Thomas Hilton

It is appropriate and fitting that Tom’s life has been commemorated by his extraordinary commitment to Price’s School. It is by these things that he is known, and by his influence and mentorship to different generations of pupils and students. This has spread out and beyond this place and into the lives and the families of those pupils who knew him.

It is however the life that he made with his wife Peggy and their life together which has supported and shaped so much of Tom’s sense of duty and responsibility. In so many ways, Toms involvement with the complexity of the transformation of Prices during the mid twentieth century was one in which the presence of his life and work were co-located and strengthened by his devotion to Peggy. 

The site of their future house was a meadow in Wallington, which Peggy discovered one bright evening on her way home from visiting her Mother in Hospital; it was to become a place which, with Tom’s forward-looking choice of a young architect, would be unique to them and wholly suited to their lives together. Tom’s degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge gave insights and skill in planting and gardens. He used these skills and his real intuition to create a superbly landscaped garden. This with the sympathetic and ‘modernist’ design of the house and its windows, brought his garden ‘into the house’. It was truly a place of light - mixing the old with the new in such a way, that in late ’fifties England, with its stifling ‘cosiness’, was sensational. The plans made by the architect specifying choice of colours, was maintained in throughout in the interior spaces. This was Tom - Tom had the ability to encourage in others, the conditions for their skills and expertise to flourish and to trust and adhere to a decision made. These ‘certainties’ were stabilising and humane forces in his teaching, but this house embodied the manifestation of them. This place was the focus for Tom and Peggys life. It did in many ways, transcend age.

As my Godfather, and as a friend and contemporary of my father, Tom proved to be perceptive, sensitive and supremely loyal. In the company of others he had an easy ability to relax within groups of people, to greatly appreciate the views, opinions and idiosyncratic attitudes of all. He warmed to and appreciated the diversity of his fellows, possibly I think, as a result of his Lancashire roots and his Fathers pub in Shaw, where he must have observed people from an early age. In his retirement with Peggy, he was a regular during the ‘eighties at the Lamb in Burford and at The Carnarvon Arms on Exmoor, where his presence with ‘the regulars’ became a vehicle for his contentment and good listening skills to be exercised. His arrival was looked forward to by friends.

Peggy was always a mediating influence to his sometimes definite stance and yet was always the focus for his great and humane sense of duty. Her quiet ability for strategic thinking was one of the many ways that their lives were complimented by each other. Another was by her ability to define a set of routines and certainties, which met his absolute observances about punctuality (which were always more about his consideration for others, and good manners, rather than fussiness). He would arrive and depart, in later years from the pub, with these same reassuring patterns. This gave a confidence and an expectation which were the kinds of strengths which others responded to and admired. Tom always made great pains to make people aware of his thanks – in recent times this is my memory of him – this skill to make people glow from within, and to be thankful for what is given.

Tim Foster