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Concept
Catherine Cookson
Summary
Dame Catherine Ann Cookson, DBE (née McMullen; 20 June 1906 – 11 June 1998) was a British writer. She is in the top 20 of the most widely read British novelists, with sales topping 100 million, while she retained a relatively low profile in the world of celebrity writers. Her books were inspired by her deprived youth in South Shields (historically part of County Durham), North East England, the setting for her novels. With 104 titles written in her own name or two other pen names, she is one of the most prolific British novelists.
Cookson, registered as Catherine Ann Davies, was born on 20 June 1906 at 5 Leam Lane in Tyne Dock, South Shields, County Durham, England. She was known as "Katie" as a child. She moved to East Jarrow, which would become the setting for one of her best-known novels, The Fifteen Streets. The illegitimate child of an alcoholic named Kate Fawcett, she grew up thinking her unmarried mother was her sister, as she was brought up by her grandparents, Rose and John McMullen. Biographer Kathleen Jones tracked down her father, whose name was Alexander Davies, a bigamist and gambler from Lanarkshire, Scotland.
She left school at 14 and, after a period of domestic service, took a laundry job at Harton Workhouse in South Shields. In 1929, she moved south to run the laundry at Hastings Workhouse, saving every penny to buy a large Victorian house, and then taking in lodgers to supplement her income.
In June 1940, at the age of 34, she married Tom Cookson, a teacher at Hastings Grammar School. After experiencing four miscarriages late in pregnancy, it was discovered she was suffering from a rare vascular disease, telangiectasia, which caused bleeding from the nose, fingers and stomach and resulted in anaemia. A mental breakdown followed the miscarriages, from which it took her a decade to recover.
She took up writing as a form of therapy, in order to tackle her depression, and became a founding member of the Hastings Writers' Group. Her first novel, Kate Hannigan, was published in 1950.
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