Winifred Watson

Winifred Eileen Watson, writer: born Newcastle upon Tyne 20 October 1906; married 1936 Leslie Pickering (died 1969; one son); died Newcastle upon Tyne 5 August 2002.

Winifred Watson rose to minor literary prominence in 1938 with her novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and again over 60 years later, when the book was rediscovered and republished by Persephone Books in 2000. She was a forgotten name by then since she had abruptly stopped writing after her sixth novel, published in 1943.

Winifred Eileen Watson, writer: born Newcastle upon Tyne 20 October 1906; married 1936 Leslie Pickering (died 1969; one son); died Newcastle upon Tyne 5 August 2002.

Winifred Watson rose to minor literary prominence in 1938 with her novel Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and again over 60 years later, when the book was rediscovered and republished by Persephone Books in 2000. She was a forgotten name by then since she had abruptly stopped writing after her sixth novel, published in 1943.

Miss Guinevere Pettigrew, the central character of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, is a middle-aged governess who is mistakenly sent by her agency to work for a dissolute actress and nightclub singer. Over the next 24 hours, Miss Pettigrew helps the actress out of a series of sticky situations. There are three lovers, cocaine and cocktails for breakfast. "I didn't know anyone like Miss Pettigrew. I just made it all up," said Watson. "I haven't the faintest idea what governesses really do. I've never been to a nightclub and I certainly didn't know anyone who took cocaine."

Watson was born in 1906 in Newcastle upon Tyne and lived in the city all her life. Her father owned four shoe shops but with the Depression business fell away and in 1930 Winifred became a typist to help support the family.

She decided to write her first novel, Fell Top, set in the Northumbrian countryside around Weardale a century earlier, to see if she could write something better than the "tripe" she'd just read. She wrote it in six weeks, at work. "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."

She did nothing with it until, several years later, she sent it to Methuen in response to an advert her older sister saw asking for manuscripts. The publisher made her an offer and asked her if there were more. She immediately began work on her second novel. Reviewers were impressed by Fell Top, published in 1935, and the pretty young writer was featured in both local and national newspapers. The book was adapted into a BBC radio play. Her second novel, Odd Shoes (1936), was different in style but also showed the benefits of hours of research in Newcastle library.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, her third novel, was completed in 1935. Watson's publishers at first rejected it. "They were horrified," she recalled years later.

I had written two rather strong dramas before it, so when they received a book that was fun, they wouldn't accept it. I can remember to this day saying: "You're wrong – Miss Pettigrew is a winner."

Watson and her publisher came to a compromise: if she would write another of her Weardale novels first, Miss Pettigrew would be published. Watson was due to marry Leslie Pickering, manager of a local timber firm, in June 1936. She persuaded her husband to bring the marriage forward to January because "if I had to write a serious book I knew I had to be married and not have a job as well, but have someone to look after me."

Once married, she wrote every day. Upyonder was published in May 1938. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day came out that October. It was an immediate success in England, Australia and America; and was translated into French. In the summer of 1939 "there was this polite letter from Germany saying they'd love to print it". But the Second World War put paid to that edition, as it did to the proposed Hollywood film version. The film had been cast – Billie Burke, who played Glinda, the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz, was to have been Miss Pettigrew – but then came Pearl Harbor, and Hollywood focused on churning out morale-boosting films. "I wish the Japanese had waited six months," Watson said 60 years later.

She published her sixth and final novel, Leave and Bequeath, in 1943, when she was 37. Later, she said she had written all she wanted to write: "There are only six things in life you can write about and then you've said everything." At other times, however, she explained it was her circumstances that made it impossible to write. In 1941 she had a son, Keith. Her mother was living with her. When the house next door was blown up in the Blitz, the whole family moved in with her husband's parents. "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."

Over the years, both husband and son tried to persuade Watson to start writing again but she wasn't interested. When Miss Pettigrew was republished, she said that she had never read it again after the first time it had come back from the publishers. "I had completely forgotten the story," she said. "But most authors have a special fondness for one of their characters and I admit I always had a fondness for Miss Pettigrew."

Peter Guttridge

In the autumn of 1937, I was asked by Cecil McGivern, then in charge of the BBC's North Region, to find a radio play to mark the opening of the new transmitter at Stagshaw, near Newcastle.

I had just read a recently published first novel by an unknown writer, a Newcastle typist, and I was so fascinated by the book that I suggested I might make a radio adaptation that would be ideal for the occasion. The unknown writer was Winifred Watson and the book Fell Top. Cecil produced the play on 28 October 1937 with a cast of distinguished radio actors including Renee Bruce, Nancy Spain and Charles Wilkinson.

The play appealed as much to the Australian listener as to the Geordie. Less than a year after its first broadcast, it was heard on Australian radio and for the next six years it was repeated, annually, by one or other of the wireless stations of that continent. Each year, regular as clockwork, I received a cheque for £4 3s 0d as royalty, until 1946, when no cheque came. It seems that the Oz appetite for Northumbrian sensationalism was being satisfied in other ways.

Patrick Campbell

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