William Wills, 1st Baron Winterstoke

Wills was the son of William Day Wills and a cousin of Sir Edward Payson Wills Bt, Sir Frederick Wills Bt, Sir Frank William Wills Kt, and Henry Overton Wills III, first chancellor of the University of Bristol.

A member of the wealthy Bristol tobacco-importing Wills family, Wills joined the family firm at an early age. In 1858 he went into partnership with two of his cousins to take over W. D. & H. O. Wills, which later became part of the Imperial Tobacco Company, of which he was the first chairman. Recognised as the head of the tobacco industry in Britain, he was also Chairman of the Bristol Chamber of Commerce. In 1904 he presented the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery to the people of Bristol.

"Birdseye". Caricature by Spy published in Vanity Fair in 1893.

Wills was a member of the Bristol Corporation from 1862 to 1880 and sheriff of the city from 1877 to 1878. He also sat as Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) for two separate five-year periods: for Coventry from 1880 to 1885, and for Bristol East from 1895 to 1900.[1] He served as High Sheriff of Somerset in 1905.[2]

He was made a Baronet, of Coombe Lodge in the Parish of Blagdon in the County of Somerset, in 1893[3] and raised to the peerage as Baron Winterstoke, of Blagdon in the County of Somerset, in 1906.[4] He took his title from the ancient hundred of Winterstoke, in which his home at Blagdon lay.

Wills was educated at Mill Hill School, before joining the family tobacco business.

Lord Winterstoke was a keen supporter of the arts, serving as President of what is now the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) from 1898 until his death in 1911 and donating the money to create Bristol City Art Gallery, whose facade bears the inscription "The Gift of Sir William Henry Wills to his Fellow Citizens 1904".

He was also the president of the charitable Anchor Society in Bristol in 1866, and vice-president of Waverley Football Club from 1890.[5]

A zealous nonconformist by personal conviction as well as by family tradition, he actively engaged in the affairs of the free churches. He joined the board of the Dissenting Deputies, was a trustee of the Memorial Hall in London, and took a practical interest in the refoundation of Mansfield College, Oxford in 1886. To the new chapel of Mill Hill School, opened in June 1898, he gave an organ and other substantial help; his portrait, subscribed for by the governors, is at the school.

He married Elizabeth Perkins Stancomb on 11 January 1853, in Melksham, Wiltshire. Elizabeth was born 6 November 1831 in Trowbridge, Wiltshire and died at their seaside home of East Court, Ramsgate, Kent on 10 February 1896, and was buried in Ramsgate Cemetery, Plot D.C.189. They adopted Elizabeth's two nieces.

He died without heirs in January 1911, aged 80, when the baronetcy and barony became extinct. His estate was worth £2,548,209 (roughly equivalent to £276,080,938 in 2021[6]). A portrait of Lord Winterstoke hangs in the Middle Common Room of Mansfield College, Oxford.[7]

• Royal West of England Academy
• Smoking in the United Kingdom

• Alford, B.W.E. W.D. and H.O. Wills and the Development of the UK Tobacco Industry, 1786-1965 (London: Methuen and New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973) 500pp.

• Corina, Maurice. Trust In Tobacco: The Anglo-American Struggle for Power (St. Martin's Press, 1975), a standard scholarly history of tobacco in UK; online
• Cox, Howard. The global cigarette : origins and evolution of British American Tobacco, 1880-1945 (2000) online, a major scholarly history