Olive Willis

Olive Margaret Willis (26 October 1877 – 11 March 1964) was an English educationist and headmistress. She founded Downe House School and was its head for nearly forty years, from 1907 to 1946.

Early life Willis was born on 26 October 1877, at 65 Thistle Grove, Kensington, London, a daughter of John Armine Willis (1839–1916), a school inspector who later became Chief Inspector of Schools for the west of England, and of Janet Willis, who was a daughter of James Coutts Crawford. There were five children in the family, four daughters and a son, and Willis was the second girl. John Armine Willis had been educated at the University of Cambridge, where he was an officer of the Cambridge University Rifle Volunteers, and he liked to take his children on climbing holidays in Switzerland. Willis later remembered that they had "suffered from a surfeit of beautiful things on an empty stomach".

Olive Willis was a rebellious child. In 1891, she was sent as a boarder to the new Wimbledon House in Brighton, which while she was there became Roedean School, and was there for four years.

Religion Although baptised in the Church of England, the Willises attended a Theistic church founded by the Charles Voysey in Swallow Street, near Piccadilly. At Roedean, Willis objected to the lack of religious teaching, was attracted to Anglo-Catholicism, and at the age of seventeen was confirmed at the High Anglican St Cuthbert's, Earls Court, remaining a lifelong Anglican. and Willis ran the school alone until 1919, when she took on a new partner called Lilian Heather, who had been at the school since 1907 as a part-time teacher of Science and Mathematics.

In December 1921, with the help of an uncle and with a loan from two parents of girls at the school, Willis bought The Cloisters, Cold Ash, Berkshire, with , for £11,976. The Cloisters had been designed by the architect James MacLaren Ross and was built during the First World War for the Order of Silence, but the order had been unable to keep up the payments on its mortgage. Willis was able to move her school there just four months after the purchase, in April 1922. For the Summer term of 1922, the school had 83 girls, and by 1925 it had grown to 118.

As a headmistress, Willis had an imposing presence, but a balanced personality, and she inspired respect in her girls. She wanted her school to be a place where "life should be normal", with some freedom and a natural pace. In education, Willis believed that girls should not try to be like boys, and she aimed at a serious attitude towards education, preparing some of her pupils for university life.