Roger Hollis - Early Years

Early Years

Roger Henry Hollis was born at Wells in Somerset, on 2 December 1905, the third of the four sons of the Revd George Arthur Hollis (1868–1944), vice-principal of Wells Theological College and later bishop-suffragan of Taunton, and his wife, Mary Margaret, the daughter of Charles Marcus Church, canon of Wells, a great-niece of R. W. Church, dean of St Paul's Cathedral. He was a younger brother of Christopher Hollis, later a writer and Conservative politician.

Hollis was educated at Clifton College, and Worcester College, Oxford. At school he was a promising scholar who went to Oxford with a classical exhibition. But at Oxford he read English, and in the view of his contemporaries seemed to prefer a happy social life to an academic one. He was also an enthusiastic and frequent golfer. In the memoirs of Evelyn Waugh he appears as ‘a good bottle man’, and in Sir Harold Acton's as an agreeable friend. Because of this easy-going approach, and for no more dramatic reason, he went down four terms before he was due to take his finals, wishing to travel.