Dame Janet Stancomb Graham Stancomb-Wills
Dame Janet Stancomb Graham Stancomb-Wills DBE (25 January 1854 – 22 August 1932) was the eldest daughter of George Perkins and Catherine Janet (née Lobb) Stancomb, at Aldersgate, London, and niece of the first Baron Winterstoke (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 to Stancomb-Wills in 1893.
Dame Janet was the first woman mayor of Ramsgate 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 president of the Royal West of England Academy and 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 Court, on the East Cliff, Ramsgate, Kent, aged 78.
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. 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’.