Donald Watson

Donald Watson was born on 2 September 1910 in Mexborough, a coal and steel town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the eldest of three children of a headmaster. He died in Keswick, Cumbria, on 16 November 2005, at the age of ninety-five. In the intervening decades he gave the English language one of its most consequential twentieth-century coinages and co-founded the organisation that has carried it, largely intact, into the twenty-first.

A childhood on the farm

The decisive experience of Watson’s life came when he was about fourteen, on the farm of his uncle George near the village of Mexborough. “I used to spend holidays on his farm,” Watson told George Rodger in their 2002 interview, “and I was surrounded by interesting animals. They all gave me something. The farm horse took me for rides. The farm dog was my friend. The cats were my friends. Even the pig, I used to spend hours with the pig, scratching his back. I thought he was a great friend.” One day he watched that pig slaughtered. “The screams of that pig and the fact that everyone was enjoying it was something I’ll never forget. So I decided that farms, and uncles, had to be reassessed: the idyllic scene was nothing more than Death Row, where every creature’s days were numbered by the point at which it was no longer of service to human beings.”

He went home, finished the Christmas turkey that was already on the table, and then, aged fourteen, became a vegetarian. His grandmother, a Yorkshirewoman who had never knowingly met a vegetarian, worried he would waste away, and was quietly relieved when he did not. He took up woodwork, trained as a teacher, and spent his working life in that trade, most of it in Leicester and later in the Lake District.

From vegetarian to “non-dairy”

Through the 1930s Watson drifted toward what would become a vegan position by routes that were dietary, ethical, and spiritual in roughly equal measure. He had absorbed Mahatma Gandhi’s writings; he read the Vegetarian Society’s The Vegetarian Messenger; and he had become convinced that dairy and egg production could not be separated, morally, from the slaughterhouse. Dairy cows, he pointed out in a letter to the Messenger, are sent to the abattoir once their yield falls, and their male calves are killed almost at birth.

He was not alone. Leslie Cross, a Croydon dentist who would become the Vegan Society’s most rigorous early definitional thinker, had reached the same conclusion independently, as had Elsie Shrigley, a quiet, organised figure who would do much of the practical work of holding the fledgling society together. In the August 1944 issue of The Vegetarian Messenger Watson proposed that the Vegetarian Society open a regular column for “non-dairy vegetarians.” The council declined. That refusal — polite, bureaucratic, and in retrospect a gift — forced the question of a separate organisation.

November 1944

Watson, Shrigley, and a handful of sympathisers met at the Attic Club, a vegetarian meeting room off Holborn in London, in early November 1944. Accounts of the exact attendance vary — five or six people, depending on the source — and the venue and date are reconstructed from Watson’s own later recollections and from Vegan Society records summarised in Leah Leneman’s The Awakened Instinct. They agreed to found a new society and to publish a quarterly newsletter. Watson, by temperament a maker of things, volunteered to edit and produce it.

The first issue of The Vegan News appeared that same month, dated November 1944, typed and mimeographed, twelve pages long, twenty-five subscribers. Its editorial, written by Watson, announced the new word and set out a programme. Vegans, it said, refused not only meat and fish but dairy, eggs, honey, and “animal milk and its derivatives” — and, more broadly, any product whose production exploited animals. Watson invited readers to send in recipes, contacts, and arguments, and to help work out what this way of life would turn out to require. He set the subscription at two shillings and sixpence a year.

The word

The word itself went through several candidates. “Dairyban,” “vitan,” “benevore,” “sanivore,” and “beaumangeur” were all considered and rejected before Watson and his wife Dorothy, in consultation with Shrigley and others, settled on vegan. “We took the first three and the last two letters of ‘vegetarian,’” Watson explained in 2002, “because it was the beginning and end of vegetarian.” The pun was precise: vegans stood both at the historical origin of vegetarianism — the principled refusal of flesh — and at the destination to which, in Watson’s view, vegetarian logic was bound to lead once one took dairy cows and laying hens seriously. The pronunciation, he insisted, was VEE-gn, with a long first vowel and a soft second.

The long life

Watson was not a theorist. The rigorous definitional work of the early Vegan Society — culminating in Leslie Cross’s 1949 reframing of veganism as opposition to animal exploitation as such, and in the 1951 and 1979 formal definitions — was largely Cross’s, not Watson’s. Watson’s contributions were the word, the first newsletter, and a founding temperament: mild, practical, cheerful, and unshakably committed. He served as the first secretary of the society, handed the editorship of the magazine to others within a few years, and spent most of his remaining life as a working teacher, gardener, and long-distance walker in Cumbria, where he and Dorothy moved after the war.

He ate a plant-based diet for roughly eighty years without dramatic incident. In his 2002 interview with Rodger, at ninety-two, he was still walking the fells, still growing his own vegetables, still sharp on dates and names, and still surprised by the idea that he had done anything remarkable. Asked what he made of the modern supermarket vegan aisle, he said he was pleased, but thought the central argument had not changed since the pig in his uncle’s yard.

Death and afterlife

Watson died in Keswick on 16 November 2005. The Guardian’s obituary of 1 December 2005 noted, correctly, that his contribution had been “less a doctrine than a word — but the word did the work.” By then the Vegan Society he had started with twenty-five subscribers was a registered charity administering the global vegan trademark, the word vegan had entered every major dictionary of English, and the movement he had helped launch was beginning to be measured in billions of dollars and in climate-policy documents. The through line from the Mexborough farm to the EAT-Lancet Commission runs, improbably but directly, through the quiet life of one Yorkshire woodworker who refused to let a childhood memory go.

For the broader context in which Watson worked, see History and Veganism; for the founding meeting itself, see the 1944 Vegan Society.