William Hobson Mills was born in Hammersmith on 6 July 1873, the eldest of five children of William Henry Mills, an architect, and Emily Wiles Quincey. The family moved that autumn to Emily’s home town, Spalding. Mills was educated at Spalding Grammar School and then at Uppingham School. He entered Jesus College, Cambridge in October 1892 and read natural sciences. An injury to his Achilles tendon – sustained at Uppingham – meant that he remained at home for the academic year 1893-1894. He returned to Cambridge in October 1894, and obtained a First Class in the Natural Sciences Tripos, Part I, in 1896, and in Part II in 1897. Mills began research in the Cambridge University Chemical Laboratory under the New Zealand chemist T H Easterfield. He was encouraged to work on the conversion of 2,4-dibenzoylmesitylene to a pentacyclic system containing two anthraquinone groups. In October 1899 Mills went to Tübingen to work for two years under Professor Hans von Pechmann, where he worked on the same bench as Nevil Sidgwick. The two became lifelong friends. In 1902 he was appointed Head of the Chemical Department of the Polytechnic Institute, where he stayed until 1912. During this time he worked, with other staff members, to provide experimental proof of The Hantzsch-Werner theory of the isomerism of the oximes. He also published a paper jointly with is wife on derivatives of dinaphthanthracene. In 1912 the tragic death of Humphrey Owen Jones left a serious gap in the organic chemical staff at Cambridge. Mills was appointed to a Demonstratorship, and was shortly afterwards elected to a fellowship and a lectureship in natural science at Jesus College. In 1919 he was appointed a University Lecturer. In 1931 the University created a personal Readership in Stereochemistry for Mills, which he held until his retirement in 1938. During this period of his career, Mills continued his work on isomerism of the oximes, and also studied spirocyclic compounds, the stereochemistry of molecules with restricted rotation, and cyanine dyes.
Vice-Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, 1940-1948
President of the Chemical Society, 1942-1943 and 1943-1944
Family
Mills married fellow-chemist Mildred May Gostling in 1903. They had three daughters and a son: Marjorie, Sylvia Margaret, Isabel and William George Quincy. Mills died at his home, 23 Storeys Way, Cambridge on 22 February 1959; he was survived by his wife and children. Mildred Mills died at Addenbrooke's Hospital on 19 February 1962. Sylvia Margaret married zoologist Richard Julius Pumphrey at Chesterton, Cambridge in 1933. They had a daughter and two sons. William George Quincy, a surgeon, married Katharine N Hone in 1938. They had two daughters and a son. He died in Parkstone on 25 June 1988, leaving an estate of over £570,000.
