- published: 13 Sep 2009
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Dame Catherine Cookson DBE (née McMullen) (27 June 1906 – 11 June 1998) was a British author. She became the United Kingdom's most widely read novelist, with sales topping 100 million, while retaining a relatively low profile in the world of celebrity writers. Her books were inspired by her deprived youth in North East England, the setting for her novels.
Born as Catherine Ann McMullen at 5 Leam Lane in Tyne Dock, South Shields, County Durham, she was known as "Kate" as a child. She moved to East Jarrow, County Durham 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 Lancashire.[citation needed]
She left school at 13 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.