Leonard Johnston Wills - Family Background

Family Background

Jack Wills was born on 27 February 1884 in the Birmingham suburb of Erdington. His paternal great-grandfather, William Wills, had been a prosperous Birmingham attorney from a nonconformist, Unitarian, family. His grandfather had bought an edge-tool business in Nechells, AW Wills & Son, which manufactured such things as scythes and sickles and which his father continued to run. The family was comfortably off.

One of his great uncles was Sir Alfred Wills, a well-known Victorian mountaineer and judge. Sir Alfred was a founder member and early President of the Alpine Club, and was interested in the origin and shaping of the Alps – an interest which may well have influenced his great-nephew. Sir Alfred translated from French into English one of the classic early works on the geomorphology and glaciology of the mountains, Louis Rendu’s Théorie des Glaciers de la Savoie (1840). As a judge, Sir Alfred presided over the second 1895 Oscar Wilde trial and sentenced Wilde to two years in Reading gaol.

Jack Wills’s father, William Leonard Wills (1858–1911), was a science graduate of Owens College, Manchester. His mother, Gertrude Annie Wills née Johnston (1855–1939), was the only daughter (with six brothers) of a well-known Birmingham doctor, Dr James Johnston. The family had a strong interest in scientific matters. Jack Wills’s great grandfather, William Wills, had been involved with the British Association for the Advancement of Science and wrote various papers on meteorology and other scientific observations. Jack Wills’s father was particularly interested in botany, zoology, geology and natural sciences generally, as well as in the developing science of photography.