Leslie R. H. Willis
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Leslie R. H. Willis (13 July 1908 – 12 March 1984) was an English mechanical and electrical engineer and archaeologist, who excavated the Iron Age settlement at the hamlet of Dainton, at Ipplepen, Teignbridge, Devon in the late 1940s.
The son of William Willis, J.P., a timber merchant and farmer, formerly a mounted police officer and inspector for the Fisheries Commission,[1] Willis was brought up at St John's Wood, Marylebone, and at Islington. His mother was a first cousin of General Frederick Charles Maisey, who excavated the Buddhist complex of Sanchi in 1851, and was aunt of T. M. Wilkes, head of New Zealand's civil aviation in the 1930s and 1940s. His uncle, Frederick Smythe Willis, was an accountant (a founder member and first hon. treasurer of the Corporation of Accountants of Australia) and Mayor of Willoughby, New South Wales, the Willises- a wealthy farming family from the minor gentry- having settled in New Zealand in the late 1800s; he was a descendant of the colonial judge John Walpole Willis (and so a relative of his elder brother, William Downes Willis, a clergyman and theologian). He was educated at the Mercers' School, then the University of London and Faraday House Electrical Engineering College (at which he would later lecture). He served in the Royal Artillery and, during the Second World War, with the R.A.F. in India.[2][3] After the war, he was awarded a Postgraduate Diploma of Prehistoric Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology (now part of UCL) at the University of London, where he was in the same cohort as Sinclair Hood and Leslie Grinsell; senior by a year were Nancy Sandars, Grace Simpson, and Edward Pyddoke.[4]