Professor Leonard Johnston Wills (27 February 1884 – 12 December 1979) – known as 'Jack' to friends and family – was one of the leading British geologists of his generation. He held the Chair of Geology at the University of Birmingham from 1932 to 1949, and received many honours including the Geological Society of London's highest award, the Wollaston Medal, in 1954.
Family background Jack Wills was born on 27 February 1884 in the Birmingham suburb of Erdington, into a prosperous and well-educated manufacturing family, with an interest in science. His paternal great-grandfather, William Wills, had been a prosperous Birmingham attorney from a nonconformist, Unitarian, family. William Wills was involved with the British Association for the Advancement of Science and wrote various papers on meteorology and other scientific observations. Jack Wills's grandfather bought an edge-tool business in Nechells, AW Wills & Son, which manufactured such things as scythes and sickles. Jack Wills's father, William Leonard Wills (1858–1911), was a science graduate of Owens College, Manchester, and took over the running of the family business. He was interested in botany, zoology, geology and natural sciences generally, as well as in the developing science of photography. 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. One of Jack Wills's 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 Oscar Wilde trial and sentenced the writer to two years in Reading Gaol.
Early years and school Jack Wills was brought up in the country near Birmingham, initially in Wylde Green, then Sutton Coldfield, and finally Barnt Green, all then villages. He went to the Lickey Hills preparatory school before going in 1898 to Uppingham School in Rutland. His house was Fircroft, where the housemaster was the Revd Raven. The academic emphasis was firmly on the classics, with natural sciences receiving little attention. In spite of this, his interest in geology, encouraged by his father, was already developing.
Cambridge and siblings 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, a pioneer in the field of haematology, went up to Newnham College in 1907; she later discovered the role of folate, one of the B vitamins, in preventing anemia in pregnancy. Their 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 Charles 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.
Norse sword In 1907, while out cycling from Cambridge, Jack Wills sheltered from a thunderstorm in a quarry at Hauxton Mill, just south of Trumpington, and noticed something unusual protruding from the rock face. It turned out to be a perfectly preserved tenth- or eleventh-century double-edged Norse sword, probably a relic of a Viking invasion. It is now in the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge.
1907 – 1913 After graduating in 1907, Jack Wills did two years research under the auspices of the Harkness Scholarship, focusing on the plant and animal fossils of the Bromsgrove district in the Midlands. In 1909, the year he became a Fellow of King's, he started a four-year appointment with the Geological Survey of Great Britain, mapping the rocks of the Llangollen area of north Wales.
Birmingham University In 1913, he started his long association with the geology department of Birmingham University, joining as lecturer in Geology and Geomorphology, under Professor William Boulton. Birmingham University awarded him his PhD in 1920. In 1932, when Boulton retired, Jack Wills succeeded him as Professor and Head of Department, remaining in this post for seventeen years until his retirement in turn in 1949. He then became Professor Emeritus, retaining his link with the department until his death in 1979, a few weeks short of his ninety-sixth birthday.
Marriage and family Jack Wills's marriage to Maud Janet Ewing in 1910 proved a particularly happy one. They had two children: Leonard born in 1911, and Penissa ('Penty') born in 1913. Penty never married, but Leonard did and had one son, David, who in turn had three children, Jack Wills's great-grandchildren. Jack Wills suffered various family bereavements, losing before the age of thirty both his father in 1911 and his sister Edith in 1913. Later he lost his wife Janet in 1952, and his son Leonard in 1976. He had several serious medical issues, suffering a severe coronary thrombosis shortly after his retirement, losing the sight of one eye, and losing all his body hair to alopecia.
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