Winifred Peck

WINIFRED PECK née Knox (1882–1962) had a sister and four brothers, about whom their niece, the late Penelope Fitzgerald, wrote The Knox Brothers. Their father was a clergyman who later became Bishop of Manchester, their mother died when Winifred was only nine; she then lived with an aunt in Eastbourne and went to school there; from 1896-9 she was one of the first forty pupils at Wycombe Abbey School. She read Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and in 1911 married James Peck, a Schools Inspector and later Education Minister and Minister of Food for Scotland; they had three sons (all of whom were King’s scholars at Eton). Winifred Peck wrote a life of Louis IX when she was 27 and started writing novels ten years later; twenty-five books appeared over the next forty years. Lady Peck, as she became in 1938, wrote House-Bound in 1942; she also wrote two books about her childhood, A Little Learning (1952) and Home for the Holidays (1955).