The daughter of the artist John Rabone HARVEY and sister of Herbert Johnson HARVEY, her first visit to St Ives was at some time between 1900 and 1910. In 1905, at the age of fifteen, she began six years of study at Birmingham School of Art. From there she moved on to a silversmiths firm in Birmingham, before joining the London couture house, Mechinka, at the outbreak of WWI. She studied under Henry Tonks at the Slade, first part-time and then on a full-time basis, and in the early 1920s unfortunately caught paratyphoid fever on a trip to Paris that necessitated convalescence at St Leonards-on-Sea and two winters spent abroad.

By 1924 she had married Charles Meeke and was living in Birmingham again, and the birth of a son at about that time seems to have interrupted her career. She was a painter, printmaker and miniaturist on ivory. After divorce in the late 1930s she exhibited a work Holidays, later re-named Holidays in Cornwall, at the RA, giving her address as Verbena Cottage, St Mawes. Hilda moved to St Ives in about 1945, living at 6, Bowling Green Terrace.  By 1950, however, she had moved to Yardley in Yorkshire.