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Biography
JILL, DUCHESS OF
HAMILTON
God, Guns &
Israel (Sutton,
UK) is Jill Hamilton sixth book to be published since 2000 in
Britain and Australia. Since then she has published Marengo,
the Myth of Napoleon’s Horse (Fourth Estate, 2000) which
went into paperback in 2001. English Plants for English
Gardens (Frances Lincoln, 2000); Redouté's
Flowers
(Cassell, UK 2001, Hazan France 2001); First to Damascus,
the Story of the Australian Light Horse and Lawrence of Arabia,
(Simon & Schuster under their Kangaroo imprint, 2002 --
three printings); From Gallipoli to Gaza, the Desert Poets of
World War One (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Thomas
Cook the Holidaymaker, (Sutton) is due to be
published in January 2005, and Frances Lincoln are publishing her British
Native Trees & Shrubs for Gardens which she is
co-authoring with Professor Christopher Humphries of the Natural
History Museum in March 2005.
In the 1990s her
books included Scottish Plants for Scottish Gardens,
the Stationery Office, 1996; The Flower Chain; The
Early Discovery of Australian Garden Plants, Simon &
Schuster, 1998. Frances Lincoln published The Gardens of
William Morris in 1998, which analyses William Morris’s
contribution to garden design and his favourite flowers and plants.
She was born in
Sydney and first came to England and trained as a newspaper
journalist in Sydney under Donald Horne. In 1964 she was sent
to London as a correspondent for the Murdoch Press for Australia.
Assignments took her to America, India, Russia, Tahiti, Vietnam and
Afghanistan. Among the people she interviewed during her career
were Nehru, Indira Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Marlon Brando, Richard
Burton, Nancy Mitford and P. G. Wodehouse. In November 1963 she
attended a dinner for President Kennedy in Miami four nights before
he was assassinated. Two years later, when working in Vietnam, she
was one of the first women to write about the effects of bombing
raids, having flown in a raid from Danang.
A passionate
campaigner for conservation in 1996, after her divorce from the
Duke of Hamilton, she wrote Scottish Plants for Scottish Gardens,
one of the first popular books to stress the importance of gardeners
growing local native flora. Because the book also promoted an
awareness of plant animal relationships she was made a
vice-president of Butterfly Conservation. Between 1994 and 2001 she
expanded this theme in five gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show for
which she won various prizes including a silver and silver gilt
medal. She is also an active vice president of the RSPCA in Britain.
Her experience from
working in Vietnam inspired her to set up a shrine to fallen
soldiers. In 1995, as no public memorial devoted exclusively to the
thousands of Australian troops killed in Europe, Egypt and the
Middle East in World War I and World War II had been built in
England, she organised an Australian War Memorial at Battersea Park,
London, and a dawn service on Anzac Day. This grew each year and
after three years was completely taken over by Australia House. Two
months after Anzac Day, 1997, the Prime Minister of Australia, John
Howard, came to Battersea to lay a wreath and make a speech. He
thanked her for bringing the custom of the dawn service to England.
There service is now due to be held at Hyde Park Corner.
With Penny Hart, Mike
Sadka and Professor Chris Humphries she started the charity Flora
for Fauna to encourage gardeners to grow native plants to help
wildlife. The FFF website, the Postcode Plants Database, http://www.nhm.ac.uk/science/projects/fff/
continues to be one of the most popular environmental websites in
Britain as it allows visitors to enter their postcode and find the
plants historically native to that area. Keying in a postcode
produces lists of suitable trees and shrubs. For instance if
‘SN10’ is keyed in, the database search engine returns a list of
the local native trees and shrubs - and some of the butterflies and
birds they support.
Four years of
research in London, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Turkey have led to her
giving three seminars at SOAS, the School of Oriental & African
Studies at London University, organized by Professor Haleem, the
Director of Islamic Studies.
In
2004 she enrolled to do her MA at SOAS, gaining a distinction in
Applied Economics of the Middle East, and a Merit in the
Arab-Israeli Conflict and Zionist History. In September 2005 she
started doing her PhD.
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