Dame Janet Stancomb Graham Stancomb-Wills, DBE (25 January 1854 – 22 August 1932) was the first woman mayor of

Ramsgate Ramsgate is a seaside resort, seaside town in the district of Thanet District, Thanet in east Kent, England. It was one of the great English seaside towns of the 19th century. In 2001 it had a population of about 40,000. In 2011, according to t ...

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

, an office which she held from 1923–24, and she was also the first person to receive, in 1922, the Freedom of the Town. She was elected President of the

Royal West of England Academy The Royal West of England Academy (RWA) is Bristol's oldest art gallery, located in Clifton, Bristol, near the junction of Queens Road and Whiteladies Road. Situated in a Grade 2* listed building, it hosts five galleries and an exhibition program ...

(RWA) in 1911, decades before any other British Academy even admitted women as full members, and also became President of the School of Architecture at Bristol in 1921. In 1927, she was appointed Justice of the Peace for Kent. She died on 22 August 1932 at East Cour
(Historic England listing)
Ramsgate, Kent, aged 78.

Biography

Born Janet Stancomb Graham Stancomb, she was the elder daughter of George Perkins and Catherine Janet (née Lobb) Stancomb, of Aldersgate, London, and niece of the first

Baron Winterstoke Baron is a rank of nobility or title of honour, often hereditary, in various European countries, either current or historical. The female equivalent is baroness. Typically, the title denotes an aristocrat who ranks higher than a lord or knig ...

(Sir W. H. Wills). With the early deaths of her father, and older brother, she and her sister, Yda Emily Margaretha Stancomb (31 January 1856 – 22 September 1936), were adopted by Sir William Henry Wills, and Janet and Yda officially changed their names in 1893 to respectively, Janet Stancomb Graham Stancomb-Wills and Yda Emily Margaretha Stancomb-Wills.

Philanthropy/accomplishments

*Elected President of the

in 1911, the first woman to hold such a role, and more than a century before the

Royal Academy The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly in London. Founded in 1768, it has a unique position as an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects. Its pur ...

in London elected its first woman President. *In 1923, she completed the Winterstoke sun shelter and rock gardens for public use on the sea front near her home (East Court) on the East Cliff in Ramsgate *She provided the money for a maternity ward and nurses home at the Ramsgate General Hospital. The Nurses Home in Ramsgate opened in 1927, containing 30 bedrooms and offices; she also provided the town with a motor ambulance and most up-to-date fire-fighting equipment. *She bought land for a new elementary school in Ramsgate, which was named in her honour, the Dame Janet Community Junior School - From December 2012 has been merged with the infants school to become "Dame Janet Primary Academy". *The Stancomb-Wills Glacier Tongue (75°0′S 22°0′W) is the extensive seaward projection of the Stancomb-Wills Glacier into the eastern Weddell Sea. The cliffed front of this feature was discovered in January 1915 by a British expedition led by

Ernest Shackleton Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton (15 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of ...

. He named it the Stancomb-Wills Promontory after Dame Janet, one of the principal donors of the expedition. One on the lifeboats in which Shackleton's crew escaped to Elephant island was named the 'Stancomb Wills'. The

Scott Polar Research Institute The Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) is a centre for research into the polar regions and glaciology worldwide. It is a sub-department of the Department of Geography in the University of Cambridge, located on Lensfield Road in the south o ...

holds the Janet Stancomb-Wills collection of papers, which comprises correspondence by Dame Janet to or regarding the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton.

Popular culture

Dame Janet Stancomb-Wills was portrayed by

Elizabeth Spriggs Elizabeth or Elisabeth may refer to: People * Elizabeth (given name), a female given name (including people with that name) * Elizabeth (biblical figure), mother of John the Baptist Ships * HMS ''Elizabeth'', several ships * ''Elisabeth'' (sch ...

in the TV series 'Shackleton'.Internet movie database
'Shackleton'
(2002), retrieved on 23 January 2016.

References

External links

Dame Janet Primary Academy websiteStancomb-Wills Glacier Tongue @ answers.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Stancomb-Wills, Janet Stancomb Graham 1854 births 1932 deaths British philanthropists Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire Members of the Royal West of England Academy People from Ramsgate Women mayors of places in England Place of birth missing Collections of the Scott Polar Research Institute