My Story
Pam Gems was born in 1925 in Mudeford, near Christchurch, in what was then Dorset, on the south coast of England. Her father, a Welsh ex-coalminer, died when she was six years old, leaving her mother to bring up Pam and her two brothers on her own.
For most of her childhood Pam’s family lived in extreme poverty, relying on charity from the parish church and the Salvation Army. At eleven, she won a scholarship to grammar school, where she excelled but left at fifteen to go to work.
World War Two had broken out and, in 1943, when she turned eighteen, she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service, and worked with British and Canadian bomber squadrons. After the war, she took up a government scheme providing further education, and went to Manchester University, where she studied psychology and met her future husband.
Pam was always stage-struck. She wrote her first play when she was eight, and was an enthusiastic participant in school plays. At university, she joined the dramatic society, wrote skits, and directed plays. After university, she got a job in audience research at the BBC, which she loathed, but enjoyed being part of a London bohemian scene that included Ted Hughes, the poet, and Robert Bolt the playwright.
After marrying and having her first two children, she moved to Wandsworth in south London, with her husband Keith, and started writing radio plays. This began an extraordinarily prolific writing career that produced over seventy-eight plays and adaptations, many of them performed internationally. Pam Gems is, without question, Britain’s greatest female playwright with only Agatha Christie having had more West End productions.
My Story
Pam Gems was born in 1925 in Mudeford, near Christchurch, in what was then Dorset, on the south coast of England. Her father, a Welsh ex-coalminer, died when she was six years old, leaving her mother to bring up Pam and her two brothers on her own.
For most of her childhood Pam’s family lived in extreme poverty, relying on charity from the parish church and the Salvation Army. At eleven, she won a scholarship to grammar school, where she excelled but left at fifteen to go to work.
World War Two had broken out and, in 1943, when she turned eighteen, she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service, and worked with British and Canadian bomber squadrons. After the war, she took up a government scheme providing further education, and went to Manchester University, where she studied psychology and met her future husband.
Pam was always stage-struck. She wrote her first play when she was eight, and was an enthusiastic participant in school plays. At university, she joined the dramatic society, wrote skits, and directed plays. After university, she got a job in audience research at the BBC, which she loathed, but enjoyed being part of a London bohemian scene that included Ted Hughes, the poet, and Robert Bolt the playwright.
After marrying and having her first two children, she moved to Wandsworth in south London, with her husband Keith, and started writing radio plays. This began an extraordinarily prolific writing career that produced over seventy-eight plays and adaptations, many of them performed internationally. Pam Gems is, without question, Britain’s greatest female playwright with only Agatha Christie having had more West End productions.
