Donald Watson

Donald Watson (2 September 1910 - 16 November 2005) was an English woodworking teacher, gardener, and long-distance walker who, in November 1944, coined the word vegan and co-founded the UK Vegan Society with Elsie Shrigley, Leslie Cross, and a handful of others. He produced the first issue of The Vegan News that same month, working from Leicester with twenty-five subscribers and a mimeograph machine.

Born in Mexborough, Yorkshire, Watson became vegetarian at about fourteen after watching a pig slaughtered on his uncle George’s farm — an experience he recalled vividly more than seventy-five years later in his 2002 interview with George Rodger. Through the 1930s he came to regard dairy and egg production as ethically continuous with the meat industry and pushed the Vegetarian Society to accommodate “non-dairy vegetarians.” When the parent society declined, Watson and Shrigley founded a new one.

The word vegan was formed from “the beginning and end of vegetarian” — its first three and last two letters — chosen after rejecting candidates like dairyban, vitan, and benevore. Watson served as the Vegan Society’s first secretary and first editor, handing the magazine on within a few years and spending most of his remaining life teaching, gardening, and walking the Lake District fells near Keswick, where he died at ninety-five. He followed a plant-based diet for roughly eighty years.

For the full biography — Mexborough childhood, the founding meeting, Leslie Cross’s definitional work, and the long afterlife of the coinage — see the Donald Watson article. For the movement he named, see Veganism; for the founding event, see the 1944 Vegan Society.