Joseph Exhall Greenhill
Birth date
1841
Death date
1907
Biography
Greenhill was a respected scientist, inventor, and headmaster, who made a significant contribution to the study of the Old Stone Age in east London.
He grew up in poverty, and by the age of 10 was living in a workhouse. Despite this challenging childhood, he became highly educated and relatively wealthy. By the age of 30 he founded his own private school, Vermont College, on Down’s Park Road, Clapton, on the current site of the Pembury Estate.
He had a passion for gadgets and inventing, driving his own car long before any were widely sold. He built his own musical instruments, experimented with phonographs, wireless telegraphy, and started the X-Ray department at the London Hospital, Mile End.
After a chance discovery of stone tools at the site of the Orphanage Asylum in Lower Clapton in 1880, he became an enthusiastic collector of artefacts and fossils from the Old Stone Age. Within eight years he collected 300 items from the Clapton area.
A community fundraising effort successfully purchased Greenhill’s collection of artefacts from his widow, and in 1909 this was gifted to Hackney Council to be displayed in Central library. These items are now in the care of Hackney Museum.
For further biographical information, see White, Mark. (2023). Collectors, class and conflict at the lower palaeolithic discovery at Stoke Newington, 1878-1884. World Archaeology. 54. 1-12.
Greenhill is buried in Abney Park Cemetery. Copies of his writings on prehistoric Hackney and photographs of his inventions are held in the collections at Hackney Archives.
He grew up in poverty, and by the age of 10 was living in a workhouse. Despite this challenging childhood, he became highly educated and relatively wealthy. By the age of 30 he founded his own private school, Vermont College, on Down’s Park Road, Clapton, on the current site of the Pembury Estate.
He had a passion for gadgets and inventing, driving his own car long before any were widely sold. He built his own musical instruments, experimented with phonographs, wireless telegraphy, and started the X-Ray department at the London Hospital, Mile End.
After a chance discovery of stone tools at the site of the Orphanage Asylum in Lower Clapton in 1880, he became an enthusiastic collector of artefacts and fossils from the Old Stone Age. Within eight years he collected 300 items from the Clapton area.
A community fundraising effort successfully purchased Greenhill’s collection of artefacts from his widow, and in 1909 this was gifted to Hackney Council to be displayed in Central library. These items are now in the care of Hackney Museum.
For further biographical information, see White, Mark. (2023). Collectors, class and conflict at the lower palaeolithic discovery at Stoke Newington, 1878-1884. World Archaeology. 54. 1-12.
Greenhill is buried in Abney Park Cemetery. Copies of his writings on prehistoric Hackney and photographs of his inventions are held in the collections at Hackney Archives.
