Christopher Hills

The Gallery & Antiques showroom at 101 Harbour Street, Kingston was built on the site of Simon Bolivar's Jamaica residence where, in 1815, the revolutionary wrote his famous letter Carta de Jamaica.

Christopher Hills (April 9, 1926 – January 31, 1997) was an English-born author, described as the "Father of Spirulina" for popularizing spirulina cyanobacteria as a food supplement.

He also wrote 30 books on consciousness, meditation, yoga and spiritual evolution, divining, world government, aquaculture, and personal health.

Hills was variously headlined by the press as a "Western Guru Scientist", "Natural Foods Pioneer", "Evolutionary Revolutionary" and a "Modern Merlin".

As a commodities trader and art patron in Jamaica, he retired from business at an early age to follow a spiritual quest that took him around the world as a speaker, author, entrepreneur and pioneer of algae as an efficient source of food and fuel for humanity.

Born in Grimsby, England to a family of fishermen, Hills grew up sailing the North Sea.

In 1940 he enrolled as a cadet in nautical school and joined the British Merchant Navy during World War II.

At sea, Hills had several life and death experiences that formed his views on karma, divinity and destiny.

At the end of the war, as navigating officer for an Esso oil tanker docked in Curaçao, he set up shop as a commodities trader with branch offices in Venezuela and Aruba.

When a client reneged on a deal, Hills moved to Jamaica.

There with the help of the philanthropist Percy Junor he founded commodity companies specializing in sugar, bananas, insurance, telegraph communications and agricultural spices pimento, nutmegs and ginger.

From 1949 to 1967, Christopher and Norah Hills became influential in Jamaica's commerce, art, politics and culture.

Believing that Jamaica's strength lay in its agriculture, Hills co-founded the Jamaica Agriculture & Industrial Party (AIP) as an alternative to the two major political parties: Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and People's National Party (PNP), both of which he felt were too busy warring with each other to look out for the middle class and the country people who were the backbone of Jamaica's rural economy.

Despite competing vigorously in the polls, the Hills couple were nevertheless close friends with JLP leader Sir Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley, head of the PNP, who both served as Jamaican Prime Ministers.

Norman Manley had been best man at the Hills' wedding.

Financing for the first export corporation came from British businessman Andrew Hay, then husband of best-selling motivational author Louise Hay who in the 1950s was a high-fashion model and family friend.

In 1950 Christopher Hills married an English woman, Norah Bremner, deputy headmistress of Wolmer's School in Kingston.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Hills Galleries supplied and exhibited local celebrity artists Ian Fleming and Noël Coward, enjoyed the patronage of British royals and such high-profile clients as Sadruddin Aga Khan, Winthrop Rockefeller, Elizabeth Taylor, Lady Bird Johnson, Grace Kelly and Errol Flynn.

Hills Galleries was also the main agent for Rowney's, Grumbacher and Winsor & Newton art supplies in the West Indies.

Through multiple exhibitions, the Hillses nurtured or launched the careers of a plethora of Jamaican artists, such as Gaston Tabois, Kenneth Abendana Spencer, Carl Abrahams, Barrington Watson, Albert Huie, Gloria Escoffery, and the revivalist preacher/painter/sculptor Mallica Reynolds.

Christopher Hills opened a Hills Galleries branch on Jamaica's north coast at Montego Bay, mooring his yacht, the Robanne at Round Hill, a popular resort for foreign leaders and industrialists vacationing in the Caribbean.

Her father, Bernard Bremner, was the Magistrate, Chief of Customs, and Mayor of King's Lynn, Norfolk who in 1951 co-founded the King's Lynn Festival with concert pianist Ruth Roche, Baroness Fermoy.

Lady Fermoy, wife of Baron Fermoy, is Diana, Princess of Wales' maternal grandmother.

The Hillses had two sons, both born in Jamaica.

The family sailed to England for events such as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and Mayor Bremner's presenting Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother with Freedom of the Borough, which encompassed the royal family's home at nearby Sandringham.

In 1951 Christopher and Norah Hills founded Hills Galleries Ltd, which, in cooperation with the Prime Minister's wife Edna Manley, became a nexus of the Jamaican art movement.

In 1955 Hills had just returned from sailing the Robanne to Havana when he met Adlai Stevenson who had given a speech honoring a visit to Jamaica by Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon.

At the gallery Stevenson fell in love with Hills' George III period Sheraton bow-fronted desk, immediately purchasing it for his own office in Chicago.

Over dinner, Hills shared his observations of simmering revolution in Cuba, while he and Stevenson compared their concepts of justice, democracy, conflict and dictatorships — a conversation that inspired Hills to publish his ideas for uplifting the world's underprivileged masses in his landmark volume Rise of the Phoenix.

Hills also became an advocate for Jamaica's Rastafari movement, who were being oppressed in the late fifties.

He gave Rastafarians jobs as woodcarvers, free paints to poor artists, such as the now-famed Ras Dizzy and bailed them out of Spanish Town Prison while encouraging rasta brethren to sustain themselves through art and music.

Christopher and Norah Hills were personally thanked for their years of support for struggling rastas by Mortimo Planno, the Rasta teacher of Bob Marley and one of the few Rastafarian elders to have met with Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Hills also reasoned Gandhian nonviolence with Leonard Howell, activist who founded Pinnacle, a Rastafarian community farm at Sligoville, a few miles from Hills' home.

It was there he met then Vice President Lyndon Johnson and CBS president William S. Paley, who in 1956, sponsored a Hills Galleries exhibition of Jamaican art at Barbizon Plaza in New York City, which awoke U.S. art collectors to Jamaica's dynamic sphere of artistic talent.

The exhibition was described by the Daily Gleaner as "Epochal in the establishment of a market for West Indian art."

The Hills family spent weekends and holidays at Port Antonio visiting friends and clients including their neighbor, novelist Robin Moore at Blue Lagoon.

There Hills met Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza who asked Hills to curate part of his art collection.

For five years many classic works of the baron's international art acquisitions decorated the walls of the Hills' home.

Von Thyssen also granted Hills' children access to his private island at San San near Port Antonio.

In 1958 Pinnacle was raided in a brutal crackdown by the authorities, ostensibly for growing marijuana, but in fact Rastafari at that time was regarded by The Crown as a threat to social harmony.