Tilley was born in
Unley,
Adelaide, the youngest child of John Thomas Edward Tilley, a
civil engineer from
London, and his wife
South Australia-born wife, Catherine Jane Nicholas. He was educated at
Adelaide High School, then studied Chemistry and Geology under
William Rowan Browne at the
University of Adelaide, and the
University of Sydney, graduating in 1915. In 1916, during the
First World War, he went to
South Queensferry near
Edinburgh in
Scotland to work as a chemist Department of Explosives Supply. He returned to Australia in December 1918. He won an
Exhibition of 1851 scholarship to the
University of Cambridge in 1919, where he studied petrology under
Alfred Harker, and completed his PhD in 1922. From 1923 he was employed at
Cambridge University, first as demonstrator in petrology, and then lecturer in petrology in 1929. In 1931, following the retirement of Harker, he was appointed as the first professor of
Mineralogy and Petrology. Most of the remainder of his life was spent in
England, though he spent 1938–1939 in Australia and visited regularly after the
Second World War. In 1929, while investigating a
volcanic plug at
Scawt Hill, near
Larne,
Northern Ireland for the
Mineralogical Magazine, Tilley identified and named the new minerals
larnite and
scawtite. In 1938, he was elected a fellow of the
Royal Society of London and served as their vice president in 1949/50. He won the society's
Royal Medal in 1967. From 1948 to 1951, Tilley was president of the
Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland. He was president of the
Geological Society 1949/50. He was elected an honorary fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1957. He died at home in
Cambridge on 24 January 1973 aged 78, and his body was cremated. ==Family==