Olive Willis - Early Life

Early Life

Willis was born in 1877 at 65 Thistle Grove, Kensington, London, a daughter of John Armine Willis (1839–1916), a school inspector who later became Chief Inspector of Schools for the west of England, and of Janet Willis, who was a daughter of James Coutts Crawford. There were five children in the family, four daughters and a son, and Willis was the second girl. John Armine Willis had been educated at Cambridge, where he was an officer of the Cambridge University Rifle Volunteers, and he liked to take his children on climbing holidays in Switzerland. Willis later remembered that they had "suffered from a surfeit of beautiful things on an empty stomach".

Olive Willis was a rebellious child. In 1891, she was sent as a boarder to the new Wimbledon House in Brighton, which while she was there became Roedean School, and was there for four years. From 1898 to 1901, she was at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read History, gaining a third class in her Finals.