Lucy Wills - Early Life

Early Life

Lucy Wills was born on 10 May 1888 in Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham. Her paternal great-grandfather, William Wills, had been a prosperous Birmingham attorney from a nonconformist Unitarian family. His son, her grandfather, had bought an edge-tool business in Nechells, AW Wills & Son, which manufactured such things as scythes and sickles and which her father continued to run. The family was comfortably off.

Lucy Wills’s father, William Leonard Wills (1858–1911), was a science graduate of Owens College Manchester. Her 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. Lucy Wills’s great-grandfather, William Wills, had been involved with the British Association for the Advancement of Science and wrote papers on meteorology and other scientific observations. Lucy Wills’s father was particularly interested in botany, zoology, geology and natural sciences generally, as well as in the developing science of photography. Her brother, Leonard Johnston Wills carried this interest in geology and natural sciences into his own career with great success.

Lucy Wills was brought up in the country near Birmingham, initially in Sutton Coldfield, and then from 1892 in Barnt Green to the south of Birmingham. She went at first to a local school called Tanglewood kept by a Miss Ashe, ex-governess to the Chamberlain family of Birmingham.