Winifred Foley

Winifred Mary Foley (born Winifred Mason, 25 July 1914, Brierley, Gloucestershire, died 21 March 2009, Cheltenham) was an English writer, known best for her autobiographical account of her children in the Forest of Dean.

Winifred Foley's A Child in the Forest (1974), mainly an account of her childhood in the Forest of Dean, also includes her experiences as an adolescent domestic servant in London and elsewhere, up to the point where she meets her future husband, Sydney (died 1998), at an anti-Fascist rally in 1936.

The book has been compared with Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie, but there are some differences, e.g. Foley makes clear the grinding poverty of her childhood. Its success was somewhat disconcerting for her: "I think I come out of it as a very ordinary little girl, with all the usual faults," she said. "I wouldn't have been surprised, after it had been published, if decent people hadn't wanted to know me." Her immediate family were delighted with the book, but "the honesty of her descriptions, which included stories of fleas in the bed and poor sanitation, shamed some parts of her family."

A Child in the Forest was serialised on BBC radio's Woman's Hour in 1973. One chapter about a job as a domestic servant was dramatised as a TV programme, Abide With Me in 1977. The success of the book allowed the Foleys to move from Huntley and buy a house at Cliffords Mesne, near Newent, Gloucestershire. According to her eldest son Chris, Winifred Foley "never lost her love of the Forest, even when she moved. My mother had a very political mind and talked about a lot of things, but she never talked about anything with more affection than her days in the Forest." A documentary on her life, Winifred Foley – A Child from the Forest, was broadcast on British ITV in 2001.

Subsequent works of reminiscences included No Pipe Dreams for Father, Back to the Forest and In and Out of the Forest. She also had some romantic fiction published. Writing fiction in her old age, she said, was "the only thing that keeps me going." She moved to Cheltenham after her husband died.

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