Angusine Jeanne Macgregor came, as her name suggests, from Scottish parentage. Her father, Angus Macgregor, was a farmer’s son from Laggan in the Central Highlands of Scotland; her mother, Jeanne Chisholm, was born in the same hamlet. Forsaking farming for the drapery trade, Angus Macgregor moved south and became a commercial traveller. After stints in Worcester and at Herne Hill in South London, he settled his family in 1881 in Birmingham, where Angusine, the sixth of six daughters, was born in the suburb of Harborne in 1879, as was the seventh child and only son, Peter Chisholm Macgregor, who died in infancy. The household was by then sufficiently well-off to accommodate both a live-in lady’s maid and domestic servant. In due course Angusine went on to study at Birmingham School of Art and subsequently to become an illustrator and writer of children’s books. From July 1917 to July 1919 she served as housekeeper with the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Ajaccio, Corsica, then returned to the family home in Birmingham, from where she continued to work as an illustrator. She never married and died at the Parkfield Nursing Home in Birmingham on 26th February 1961.
