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Simon Watson was born in Essex in 1943 of Yorkshire parents and spent his childhood in Surrey, attending prep school locally before proceeding to Lancing and Christ Church, Oxford. After a year’s teaching in India he trained for the profession, doing stints in a school for handicapped children in Hackney and a split-site comprehensive in Peckham. Posts as an English master at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s School, Elstree and at Abbotsholme in Derbyshire were followed by positions at Haileybury and the headmastership (in 1986) of Hurstpierpoint in Sussex. Retiring after nine years there he went to work in the charity sector (The Order of St John) before rounding off his teaching career at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford – a school whose entry requirements (the 11+) he had failed to meet in 1954.
Over the years he has written several novels for older children and two collections of short stories for the very young. He is now engaged on his ‘Sons of the Morning’ novel sequence – books that draw on his own education and youth for fictional purposes.
He lives in Sussex with his wife Katie, also a retired teacher. They have two grown-up sons and an increasing number of grandchildren.
Of the SONS OF THE MORNING he says ‘This novel sequence was begun many years ago as a way of making use of the past. However, it is not an autobiography. It does use real experiences as the basis for the story in each separate volume but the purpose is not to record actual events; similarly, the characters, though some may resemble people I knew, are not portraits.
It is written to entertain, to bring to people’s minds the conditions we lived in during the fifties and sixties, of what it was like to be a young person undergoing a middle-class upbringing and education. But essentially – like all novels – it is a fantasy. |
