The first batch of papers of Professor A V Hill were deposited by him in September 1966 in two sections entitled "First World War Papers" and "Second World War' Papers". These titles were chosen since the papers clearly relate to A V Hill's work on anti-aircraft defence although the periods covered in both sections are wider than the durations of the first and second world wars.
Several further accessions including memoirs and pamphlets were added to the original deposit made by Professor Hill up until 1974. These papers, largely in the form of letters, were catalogued in Sections 3 and 4 being correspondence from 1919 to 1970 arranged alphabetically by correspondent in Section 3 and by subject in Section 4. Section 5 was made up largely of AV Hill's autobiographical writings with other miscellaneous items incorporated.
Some 768 pamphlets, the bulk of them containing articles by A V Hill, had also come into the Archives Centre during this period. The first 417 of these are bound into volumes and arranged chronologically from 1909 to 1935 and the remainder were sorted basically in numerical order until the final box which contains a miscellany of articles by A V Hill and others relating to muscular exercise. The pamphlets form Section 6 of the catalogue and are listed in detail in a full catalogue held at Churchill Archives Centre.
The papers in these first six sections, deposited between 1966 and 1974 have been designated AVHL I.
In 1977 after A V Hill's death, his son, Professor David Hill, made a further large deposit of papers to add to the above collection of his father's papers. This was designated AVHL II and catalogued in the 6 Sections under which Professor D K Hill had himself described the material in his accompanying letter of 20 September 1977. A seventh section was added to AVHL II to accommodate the Feng Effect papers given to the Archives Centre by Dr R C Woledge in June 1980; and an eighth for miscellaneous oddments: deposited by Professor David Hill in 1985, Polly Hill in 1995 and Katy Hill in 2004.
The most interesting and extensive material in the collection is probably the correspondence but the World War I and II material in AVHL I Sections 1 and 2 is of considerable importance and the articles in AVHL I Section 6, while most may be obtainable elsewhere, form a remarkably comprehensive collection. There are also interesting papers relating to the Journal of Physiology (in AVHL II Section 6) and papers on A V Hill's experimental work on the Feng Effect (muscle contraction) are also worthy of note.