Captain William John Gill (10 September 1843 – 11 August 1882) was an English explorer and British army officer. He was born in Bangalore, India, the second child and elder son of the army officer, artist and photographer Major Robert Gill (1804 - 1879) and his wife Frances Flowerdew Gill (née Rickerby) (1817 - 1887).
Biography
Early life and education
William Gill's father, Robert Gill, served in the 44th Madras Native Infantry and married William's mother, Frances Rickerby, in 1841. Robert Gill was on furlough in Bangalore when William was born there on 10 September 1843. The following autumn, Robert Gill was appointed by the East India Company to copy the murals in the Buddhist rock-cut temples at Ajanta in the Aurangabad district, Maharashtra. This was in response to a petition by the Royal Asiatic Society to the Court of Directors of the East India Company to make copies of the frescoes before they were destroyed by decay and tourism.
The Gill family lived for some years in the Bara Duree, the local palace at Ajanta that had served as a field hospital and temporary residence for the Duke of Wellington during the battle of Assaye (1803). Mrs Gill was still there with the children in 1850, when William was seven years old, but by 1856 she had moved to Brighton, leaving William's father to his hunting, drawing, painting, photography and his first Indian mistress Paroo in Ajanta. Mrs Gill and the children lived adjacent to Brighton College, which William attended as a day boy. He left the school in June 1861 with the first prizes for mathematics and divinity.
After six months studying under a private tutor, William Gill, aged 19, was admitted to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. In June 1864, when not quite 21, he was commissioned in the Royal Engineers. Gill spent the following nine years as an officer in the Royal Engineers, mostly based in Britain but also serving 18 months in India, from September 1869 to March 1871. Shortly before his return from India, he inherited a considerable fortune from Frederick Heusch of Wimbledon. Heusch, a childless man of Dutch descent, was a distant relative of William Gill's mother. Gill decided to stay in the army and use his fortune to pursue his love of travel and exploration while at the same time gathering intelligence to serve British national interests.
Persia
William Gill's first major expedition began in April 1873, two years after his return from India. He accompanied the distinguished cavalry officer Colonel Valentine Baker on an eight-month exploration of Persia and adjacent territories. Baker and Gill travelled to Tbilisi (Tiflis) in Georgia thence to Baku in Azerbaijan. Having crossed the Caspian Sea, they travelled to Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, from which they hoped to explore and survey the Atrak valley. This proved impossible at that time, so they headed towards Tehran in Persia (now Iran), crossing the Alborz mountains via a pass more than 2 miles above sea level. They skirted Mount Damavand, descended into the Mazandaran forests, recrossed the mountains to Damghan, then visited Mashhad. They then travelled to the fortress of Kilat-i-Nadir, which until then had been shown on British maps in two separate locations. Next, Baker and Gill trekked to Dargaz in the Kopet Dag Mountains. Dargaz was shown on the best British maps merely as a small town whereas in reality it was a large and thriving autonomous Kurdish district. Here William Gill was lucky to survive when he dropped his shotgun and it discharged at his feet. (His thick leather boots saved him.) Later, Baker and Gill succeeded in their original ambition of exploring the upper Atrak valley. This again revealed the poor quality of existing British maps of the region. Baker and Gill's survey work was to prove important in settling a boundary dispute between Persia and Russia, as it enabled Britain to support the Shah of Persia's position on a factual basis.
Parliamentary ambition
In April 1874, a few months after his return from Persia, William Gill stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Conservative party in a by-election at Hackney, a safe Liberal seat. He substantially raised the Tory vote but failed to get elected. He made a second attempt to become a Member of Parliament six years later in Nottingham but again failed.