Sheila Stewart

Sheila Stewart (6 January 1928 - 3 September 2014) was a British writer who chronicled the lives of rural working people using their own words. Her technique was based on extensive interviews, which allowed her to capture the words, phrases and expressions of her subjects and the localities and the periods in which they lived. Her works can be classified as social histories.

Early life She was born Sheila McCairn in Appledore, Devon to an unmarried mother and was left in the care of the Coxes, elderly and impoverished relatives. When she was three, she was taken to her first of many homes run under the supervision of the Waifs and Strays Society (now called The Children's Society). She was to spend all her childhood and youth in care. At nine, while at the Maurice Home for Girls in Ealing, she became a voracious reader.

Career After she left the care of the Society, she trained as a teacher at Bishop Otter College, Chichester and began her teaching career at Sibford School, near Banbury. While living there, she met Eric Stewart and they were married in 1952. in its Thirty-Minute Theatre programme.

Stewart is one of the authors whose work is the subject of Dr. Jo Parnell's doctoral thesis on "docu-memoirs".