Leonard Johnston Wills - Cambridge

Cambridge

Jack Wills went up to King’s College, Cambridge in October 1903 as a Scholar. He elected to read Natural Sciences in Part I with Geology in Part II. In 1906, he graduated BA with a First in the Natural Sciences Tripos Part I, and in 1907 made it a Double First with a First also in the Part II. In the same year he was awarded the Harkness Research Scholarship and began his postgraduate work.

In 1909, he was one of only two postgraduates to become Fellows of King’s College Cambridge, the other being the old Etonian economist John Maynard Keynes. In the same year Jack Wills was awarded the Walsingham Medal. His Fellowship lasted until 1915.

Thus his Cambridge career lasted from his going up to King’s in 1903 until the end of his Fellowship in 1915. During this period there were several family connections with Cambridge. The younger of his two sisters, Lucy Wills, went up to Newnham College in 1907, and his younger brother Alfred Gordon went up (also to King’s) in 1910. Jack Wills’s third sibling, the elder of the two sisters, Edith, married Morris Heycock, son of another Fellow of King’s, the chemist CT Heycock FRS. Jack Wills himself married Maud Janet Ewing in 1910, the daughter of the engineer scientist Sir James Alfred Ewing. Ewing was yet another King’s Fellow, and subsequently during the Great War was the originator of Room 40, Britain’s first cryptanalytic operation, the precursor of Bletchley Park in the Second World War and the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, now.