Born: 1922, United Kingdom
Died: 2013
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Phyllis Noble
This biography is shared with permission from the Academics’ Wives project, created by Rosalind Edward and Val Gillies and supported by the British Academy / Leverhulme.
PHYLLIS WILLMOTT (1922-2013)
Phyllis grew up in a working class area of South East London. On leaving school she worked at the Times Book Club, 1938-9, and then at the headquarters of the National Provincial Bank in Bishopsgate, in the City of London, 1939-43. She joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and served as a meteorological officer. After the war, she trained as an almoner (a medical social worker) and met Peter Willmott who was working at a Methodist homeless hostel at the time. They married in 1948, when Peter was working at St Pancras Electricity Company. He subsequently joined the Labour Party research unit headed by Michael Young, from where they both moved on to set up the Institute for Community Studies as partners in 1954. Phyllis, Peter and their two young sons moved into the flat at the top of the Institute for Community Studies in Bethnal Green while Peter and Michael Young conducted an intensive study of the area for their renowned study Family and Kinship in East London.
Phyllis Willmott kept two diaries during this period. One was her personal diary kept in a ledger, with the Bethnal Green material running from May 1954 to November 1954. She also kept a typed-up Bethnal Green Journal running from October 1954 to March 1955. The journal diary entries contain detailed descriptions of life in the local community and friendships with local mothers. While Peter Willmott organised a general survey of Bethnal Green adults and a sub-sample of semi-structured interviews with 45 married parents with dependent children, Phyllis went shopping in the local market and waited at the school gates with the other mothers – and wrote it all down. There are traces of the contribution of her observational insights in the published version of Family and Kinship in East London.
In addition, Phyllis conducted interviews, analyses and writing up for Peter Willmott’s follow up book The Evolution of a Community. A Study of Dagenham After Forty Years (1963). She is also credited for her editing work on Peter’s book Adolescent Boys of East London (1966) about boys growing up in Bethnal Green.
Phyllis was an accomplished writer in her own name. Her publications include The Consumer’s Guide to the British Social Services (1967); four volumes of memoirs comprising Growing Up in a London Village (1979), A Green Girl (1983), Coming of Age in Wartime (1988), and Joys and Sorrows (1995); a biography A Singular Woman: The Life of Geraldine Aves (1992); and a family history, From Rural East Anglia to Suburban London (1998).
Phyllis’ and Peter’s papers can be found at the Churchill Archives Centre, University of Cambridge.