Winifred Watson

Winifred Eileen Watson (20 October 1906 – 5 August 2002) was an English writer. She is best known for her 1938 novel, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, which was adapted into a 2008 film of the same name. Biography Winifred Watson was born at Whitley Bay near Newcastle and educated at St Ronan's, a boarding school at Berwick-upon-Tweed. She lived most of her life in Newcastle. Although she was expected to attend university, as her sisters had, she was unable to because of the impact of the Depression on her father's shoe business. She began working as a typist to help support the family. Watson once said: "The person I worked for never gave me any work until the afternoon—he told me to bring some knitting in. So I wrote the whole book in the office." Watson married Leslie Pickering, manager of a local timber firm, in January 1936. They had one son, Keith, born in 1941, who survived the Blitz by pure chance. Watson had put him upstairs but he was fussy so she brought him downstairs. A bomb destroyed the house next door and the fireplace was blown onto his cot. Being downstairs, he survived. After the bombing, she, her mother and the family next door moved in with Watson's in-laws. She stated it was these circumstances that made it impossible to write: "I just quit. It became impossible to write in a strange house with only one room for us all and my mother living with us, too. All my creative energy went into Keith." Other times, however, she said she had written all she wanted to write. She died in Newcastle upon Tyne on 5 August 2002.