Meg Henderson, bestselling author and adoption campaigner

Meg Henderson became a bestselling author thanks to Finding Peggy: A Glasgow Childhood, a book inspired by a harrowing investigation into her own family history. All her life she had been haunted by the sudden death, at the age of 36, of her beloved aunt Peggy, sister of her mother, Nan. The loss devastated her mother’s family: it “simply fell apart”. “My mother became a recluse within months and my childhood ended abruptly as I had to take care of her,” Henderson said.
It was only decades later that she discovered her aunt had died in childbirth, along with her baby, as a result of a student doctor’s botched efforts at delivery with forceps. Peggy’s tragic story formed the backbone of the memoir, which chronicled the grim realities of growing up in a Glasgow slum in the years following the Second World War. It resonated with readers, and its success launched Henderson, who had been freelancing for newspapers for only a few years, as an author.
Meg Henderson was born Margaret Ann O’Brien in Glasgow in 1948. Her mother, Joan (née Clark), who was known as Nan, was a sewing machinist at the time of her marriage to Laurence O’Brien, a shoemaker, 12 years earlier. One of her brothers, Patrick, was born before the war, and the other, Laurence, was a war baby. The family lived in Townhead until 1951 when their tenement building, which had been condemned and was shored up on one side, collapsed during a thunderstorm. They were decanted first to Blackhill, and subsequently to Drumchapel. Henderson attended Garnethill Convent Secondary.
Her family situation was grim. Not only was her epileptic mother devastated by the loss of her sister — whose children were taken into care — but her father was an alcoholic who made family life “miserable”. She recalled in 1991: “From whatever he earned, his drinking money had to be deducted first … my mother spent her married life cobbling an existence out of thin air.” The young Meg dreaded his return home each night; she also dreaded encounters with his drinking cronies after one of them assaulted her when she was ten years old.
Her original career was in cardiology: she worked as a student cardiological technician and, over time, became a chief cardiological technician at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow. In her early twenties, she spent a year in India working in a hospital near Madras, now called Chennai, as part of a Voluntary Service Overseas initiative.
In 1971, she married Robert (known as Rab) Henderson. They became foster parents and adopted three children, starting with Euan in 1976. Half-sisters Deborah and Lisa, who were then 18 months old and three and a half, joined them in 1980. However, it soon became clear that both girls, who had been placed in care after their elder brother had murdered their sister, had mental health issues. Lisa’s problems — she was brain-damaged, autistic and psychotic — were evident early on but the extent of Debbie’s took longer to identify. Initially, she just seemed to be extremely badly behaved but when she was in her twenties she was variously diagnosed as having a personality disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Despite the problems, which she would later describe in great detail in articles for the Daily Mail — with changed names for the girls — it was her “happy little band” to which Henderson referred in her 1990s Nuclear Reaction column for The Scotsman. With a light touch, it documented family life. However, she later said that they lived “amid constant conflict” caused by Debbie’s mental illness and disruptive behaviour, and she was angry because she and her husband had not been made aware of the extent of the mental illness in the girls’ family, and the abuse they had suffered, when they were considering their adoption.
She became a campaigner for a reduction in the number of adoptions of children. “We want the bandwagon halted in its tracks until social services get their act together and stop destroying well-meaning families,” she wrote in The Guardian. “The majority of children in care are so damaged that ordinary, warm-hearted individuals have no hope of coping with them.”
Having stopped fostering, she had time to write her memoir Finding Peggy, which was published in 1994. It was followed by a series of period novels, among them Chasing Angels, in which the Glasgow of the 1940s and 1950s loomed large.
However, it was through her campaigning that she almost had an authorised Hollywood biography among her works, that of Sir Sean Connery (obituary: October 31, 2020). “I was a foster/adoptive parent and knew there was insufficient support out there for people who took on very disturbed children. So I set up a charity to provide what local authorities didn’t,” she wrote later. The actor was one of the celebrities she approached for a donation, and they stayed in touch.
She was furious when, after securing Connery’s agreement to their collaboration on his official biography in 2004, he dropped her and hired another writer. Claiming he had reneged on the deal, she vented her spleen in the press. “I was wrong about Sean,” she wrote. “I paid him the compliment of thinking that he was an honourable man, who would have harmed himself rather than harm someone else. He isn’t the man I thought he was. Nor the man he likes to think he is.” He ordered her never to contact him again.
She continued to write about him over the years, notably when his book Being a Scot — the closest he got to an autobiography — was finally published in 2008.
A notorious article she wrote for Marie Claire in 1992, about youngsters serving life sentences, was mentioned in the Leveson inquiry of 2011. Her last newspaper articles in 2017 and 2018 concerned Debbie’s recent suicide. Robert died in 2021; she is survived by Euan, Lisa and two grandchildren.
In 2005, she said: “Some people might look at my life and think how hard it has been, but I never look at it like that. I just roll up my sleeves and get on with it. I certainly don’t want to be seen as some sort of tragic figure. There have been some very sad times in my life, but also lots of tremendously happy times.”
Meg Henderson was born on May 19, 1948. She died following a short illness on June 27, 2024, aged 76