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.
William Wills was involved with the British Association for the Advancement of Science and wrote various papers on meteorology and other scientific observations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jack Wills suffered various family bereavements, losing before the age of thirty both his father in 1911 and his sister Edith in 1913.
In 1926, the Willses bought Farley Cottage, with some 45 surrounding acres in a valley near the Lickey Hills between Bromsgrove and Romsley, together with the neighbouring mediaeval Shut Mill.
Farley Cottage, its gardens, orchard and surrounding valley, was the setting for the Willses' generous hospitality to many – family, friends, and geological colleagues – over the next forty years.
'The Professor' did much for local history, archaeology, and geology, and was largely instrumental in saving the valley from being flooded as a reservoir for Birmingham.
In 1956, Jack Wills decided to gift Farley Cottage and its land to the Field Studies Council ('FSC'), subject to him being able to continue to live there for his lifetime.
Jack Wills and his daughter Penty moved to a small bungalow half a mile away from Farley Cottage in the same valley, where he lived until his death in 1979.
He wrote accounts of new ostracoderm fishes from the late Silurian and Devonian, and became a particular specialist on terrestrial arthropods, notably with delicate dissections and interpretations of fossilized Triassic scorpions and Carboniferous eurypterids.
His research work then took him into Lower Paleozoic stratigraphy, the Trias to Quaternary succession of the Severn valley and the origin of the Ironbridge Gorge.
[2] However, the work which was to earn him lasting fame was the putting together of all then available information on surface and subsurface structures with the aim of producing a sequential picture of the geological evolution of the British Isles.
His final publication, at the age of 93, was another Memoir published in 1978 by the Geological Society of London, entitled A Palaeogeological Map of the Lower Palaeozoic Floor below the cover of Upper Devonian, Carboniferous and Later Formations.
One of the most remarkable features of Jack Wills's life was not only his longevity, but also the amount of geological work, both research and publications, which was done after his retirement.