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Born into a wealthy family Robert Bruce Melville Wills didn’t want for much. Second son of Walter Melville Wills of the famous Wills’ family who co-created the tobacco company Imperial Tobacco, he was educated at Charterhouse and latterly at Trinity College, Cambridge – leaving with a second class degree in the Mechanical Sciences Tripos.

Whilst at Trinity College, Wills joined the engineering section of the Officers Training Corps. But it was when he returned to Bristol and his father’s company that he joined the 2nd Wessex Field Company of the Royal Engineers, later attached to the 27th Division. The company was a territorial force and it was based at Churchill Road in Weston-Super-Mare, with a drill station in Clevedon.

In February 1915, Wills and his men were in the thick of the action in St Eloi, just south of Ypres. The Germans were sapping right up to the British lines and the Royal Engineers would have been involved in strengthening the British positions, re-wiring, sand-bagging and digging new trenches. The weather was terrible that month, with men and horses getting stuck and, it is reported, drowning in the mud.

As an officer, Wills would have been assessing the strength of the British positions and directing all this work. It was during this work and while rescuing a fellow officer that Wills was shot, and died instantly.

His brother, Cecil Maitland Wills, was promoted into Wills’ role as Captain in the company.

Robert Bruce Melville Wills’ selfless act didn’t go unnoticed. Â鶹ԼÅÄ presenter Peter Snow’s grandfather General Thomas D’Oyly Snow was Wills’ Divisional Commander and in the days that followed he wrote in a letter: ‘One of our territorial RE, a boy named Wills, a millionaire, was killed the night before last. I am going to try and get him a posthumous VC’.

On 15 February 1915, Robert Bruce Melville Wills left behind his wife of one year who was heavily pregnant with his only child. Ione Bruce Melville Wills was born three months after his death.

His legacy carries on further with his father dedicating the building of the Bristol Â鶹ԼÅÄopathic Hospital in his name.

Location: Bristol Â鶹ԼÅÄopathic Hospital, Bristol BS14 0DE
Image shows the entrance to the hospital
Narrated by Peter Snow

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