Religious Figure. He was a pioneer Anglican clergyman who became the first bishop in British Columbia, Canada. He was part of the 19th-century expansion of both the British Empire and the Church of England in North America. He was sent to the Pacific Coast of North America. On February 25, 1859, he was consecrated at Westminster Abbey as the first bishop of the Diocese of British Columbia and arrived in March of 1860. In 1858, around 30,000 rough and rowdy miners flooded British Columbia's first significant gold rush. Besides the miners, there were thousands of Native Americans. All was very different from his clean and proper English congregations. Right Reverend George Hills, Doctor of Divinity and Anglican Lord Bishop of British Columbia was named the First Bishop of Vancouver Island from 1879 to 1892 when the British Columbia diocese was split. He was educated at Durham University with a B.A. in 1836 with honors, M.A. in 1938, D.D. D. in 1839 and became an ordained priest in 1840. Before going to Canada, he was successively curate of North Shields, lecturer and curate at Leeds Parish Church, and a Vicar of Great Yarmouth, the largest parish in England. After arriving in Canada, he helped to establish schools and the railroad as well as suffering through a smallpox epidemic during very trying circumstances. Bishop Hills was by no means a man of religious tolerance and had a major disagreement with another clergy, Reverend Edward Cridge in respect to the Anglican Church's "High Church" vs. "Low Church," which ended in an ecclesiastical court and later before the civil court of the province in 1874. Bishop Hills won both cases and promptly asserted his authority by banning Reverend Cridge from conducting Anglican services in the Diocese. This resulted in Cridge joining the Reformed Episcopal Church, starting a new congregation, and 250 members of his congregation following Cridge. Though he had the satisfaction of winning the court cases, he experienced a professional loss as well as a social loss for himself and his wife. In 1865 he married Lady Maria Philadelphia Louisa King, daughter of Vice-Admiral Sir Richard King. His father had been a Naval Admiral. The couple had no children, and his wife died in 1888. Prior to the court case, he had originally planned to retire in Victoria with his wife, but upon his retirement, he returned as a widower with declining health to England in 1892. He became the rector of Parham under Bishop John Sheepshanks of Norwich, who had earlier been one of his most satisfactory choices for pioneer work in British Columbia. He died three years after retirement.