Catherine Cookson
December 24, 2008 8:43 pm AuthorsCatherine Cookson was born Kate McMullen at 5 Leam Lane in Tyne Dock, South Shields, which was then part of County Durham, later she moved to East Jarrow, County Durham (now in Tyne and Wear), which became the setting for one of her best selling books, The Fifteen Streets. Catherine was the illegitimate child of an alcoholic mother, Kate Fawcett. When she was a child, Catherine thought that her unmarried mother was her sister, and her grandmother Rose McMullen and her step-grandfather John McMullen raised her.
Catherine left school aged 13 and, after a period of domestic service, she took a laundry job at HartonWorkhouse in South Shields. In 1929 she moved south to run the laundry at Hastings Workhouse, saving every penny to buy her a large Victorian house and then taking in gentleman lodgers to supplement her income.
In June 1940, at the age of 34, she married Tom Cookson who was a teacher at Hastings Grammar School. After having four miscarriages late in pregnancy, it was discovered that she was suffering from a rare vascular disease, telangiectasia, which causes bleeding from the nose, fingers and stomach and results in anemia. A mental breakdown followed the miscarriages, from which she took a decade to recover.
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