Winifred Higgs was born into an upper middle-class family in Suffolk, England, on December 20, 1871, the youngest of three children of Amelia (Spalding) and Thomas Higgs, whose marriage did not last. Until her death at forty, in 1889, Amelia ensured that her children’s lives were filled with adventure, laughter, education and culture. She imbued all of them with the character to adapt to their changed circumstances after her death and to choose uncharted paths over well-trod ones. Leonard, Mabel, and Winifred Higgs were close throughout their lives.
To support themselves as adults, Winifred became a governess, Mabel took up nursing and Leonard emigrated to South Pender Island, BC with his family. During a summer 1896 visit to South Pender, Winifred and Mabel recognized the freedom and adventure of living there. They immigrated in 1897. Winifred embraced the social freedom of the still developing settler society of the Gulf Islands, adapting to both the relaxed social structures and the hard work.
In 1900, she married Ralph Grey and moved to tiny Samuel Island, which he owned. They had two daughters, Constance and Evelyn, and continued to farm for a decade. In 1910, the family moved to Esquimalt, where Mabel and her husband, Martin Allendale Grainger, were already living. For the rest of her life, Winifred lived there and in Vancouver.
As a young woman, Winifred had been financially unable to fulfill her dream of attending art school, but a number of her sketches and paintings have survived her. Her significant and lasting cultural contribution, however, is the detailed and engaging memoir she wrote, beginning in 1938, during one of her several periods of ill-health. It vividly depicts her life in the middle-class Victorian England of her childhood and youth and the pioneer life she led on the Gulf Islands from 1896-1910. It is humorous, philosophical, idiosyncratic and astute. Although Winifred did not intend it to be published, posterity is the richer for her family choosing to offer it to a broader audience.
Predeceased by her husband, Winifred died on June 15, 1951. She was 79.