[2] Petrie preferred the country life and initially disliked London, but as she grew older she enjoyed visiting its museums and art galleries.

[2] When she was twenty-five, she was introduced by Henry Holiday to Egyptology Professor Flinders Petrie at University College London, who needed to employ someone with the accurate copying skills Hilda had by then acquired.

In 1957, Lady Petrie died of a stroke in University College Hospital, on the opposite side of the road to where she and her husband had worked to found and to fund what was England's first training school for archaeologists.

[5] Her role did not include running the domestic side of the expedition, which was undertaken by Flinders Petrie as it had been done for many years, with excavators expected to live on canned food and ship's biscuits.

[5] Her work was noted by Flinders Petrie in the introduction to the excavation report of that year: "My wife was with me all the time, helping in the surveying, cataloguing, and marking of the objects, and also drawing all the tomb plans here published.

[5] The team comprised Margaret Murray, and Miss Hansard, an artist, as well as Hilda, and attempted a difficult and hazardous excavation after the discovery the previous year of what appeared to be the approach to a huge underground tomb discovered in an area at the back of the temple of Seti I.

[1] The deep excavation was in constant danger of caving in and, when the wind blew, loose sand and shifting stone blocks threatened the workers below; the work was ultimately abandoned.

[1] She went from Saqqara to join Flinders Petrie and Lina Eckenstein at a temple site on a hilltop at Serabit el-Khadim, where there were large numbers of inscribed stones, statues and stelae.

[10] When the British School of Archaeology in Egypt was founded in 1905 in London by Flinders Petrie, Hilda worked there as a secretary to raise funds and recruit new subscribers, and it was during this time that both her children were born.

She left for Egypt again in January 1913 to rejoin Flinders Petrie at Kafr Ammar; three painted Twelfth Dynasty tombs had been found a few miles away at Riqqeh and urgently needed recording.

[5] The work was again difficult and dangerous, but it was possible and she published a chapter within the final report about the tombs and including her plans and her copies of the wall paintings and coffins.