If you can get hold of a copy of Humphrey Carpenter's JRR Tolkien- A Biography, pp. 28-76 gives a fairly detailed account of their relationship which was indeed close. After the First World War Hilary bought a small orchard and market garden near Evesham, the ancestral town of his mother's family - the Suffields.(There is a fairly hilarious account of Tolkien trying to drive his wife and family on a visit to Hilary in 1932).
Worcestershire - the county from which the Suffiled's came, is also closest of all English counties to The Shire.
Carpenter gives a poignant picture of the two old brothers in their declining years, and after Edith's death and JRR's return to Oxford, watching cricket and tennis on the telvision at Hilary's market garden home, and drinking whisky together.
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