Olive Willis - Career

Career

After Oxford, Willis taught history for one year at Queen Anne's School, Caversham, then in 1902 returned to her own old school, Roedean, where she remained for two years. After that, she became a supply teacher, teaching in a wide range of schools, including the Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls, which was then in Acton, and a school in Chesterfield.

In 1907, with her friend Alice Carver as a non-teaching partner, Willis founded a new girls' boarding school called Downe House. They raised £1,500 to rent and equip Down House in the village of Downe, near Orpington, Kent, a house which had previously been the home of Charles Darwin. The school began with one girl and five mistresses. Its aim was to achieve educational excellence in a framework which was relaxed but structured. Three more girls were added to the school by the Spring of 1908, and by 1910 there were thirty-six girls, of whom all but four were boarders. Willis herself taught English, Latin, Scripture, and history, while Carver was matron and kept house. Carver withdrew from their partnership in 1912, and Willis ran the school alone until 1919, when she took on a new partner called Lilian Heather, who had been at the school since 1907 as a part-time teacher of Science and Mathematics.

The school became popular with literary and academic parents. In 1913, Punch magazine's annual cricket match was played at Downe, with E. V. Lucas, a school parent, captaining one team and J. M. Barrie the other, his team including A. A. Milne. The school produced authors of its own. One of Willis's early pupils was the Anglo-Irish girl Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973), who became a significant novelist, and Audrey Richards (1899–1984), later a social anthropologist, was her exact contemporary. Other pupils included the sculptress Betty Rea (1904–1965), writers Aletha Hayter (1911–2006) and Priscilla Napier (1908–1998), the poet Anne Ridler (1912–2001), the philosopher Mary Scrutton, the archaeologist Aileen Fox (1907–2005), and the musician Evelyn Rothwell (1911–2008). The composer Robin Milford taught at the school, while Myra Hess gave piano recitals and played with the school orchestra.

In December 1921, with the help of an uncle and with a loan from two parents of girls at the school, Willis bought The Cloisters, Cold Ash, Berkshire, with sixty acres, for £11,976. The Cloisters had been designed by the architect James MacLaren Ross and was built during the First World War for a religious order called 'The School of Silence', but the order had been unable to keep up the payments on its mortgage. Willis was able to move her school there just four months after the purchase, in April 1922. For the Summer term of 1922, the school had eighty-three girls, and by 1925 there were 118. Downe House had arrived as a leading girls' school.

As a headmistress, Willis had an imposing presence, but a balanced personality, and she inspired respect in her girls. She wanted her school to be a place where "life should be normal", with some freedom and a natural pace. In education, Willis believed that girls should not try to be like boys, and she aimed at a serious attitude towards education, preparing some of her pupils for university life. She could be difficult to work with and knew little of housekeeping, but many of her staff, like her business partner Lilian Heather, were devoted to her. One employee, the eccentric Maria Nickel, was her chauffeur, handyman, architect and engineer, and slept in her bathroom.