Her father was a noted Scottish engineer and antiquarian, who wrote numerous works and left the sizable Boog Watson bequest to Edinburgh's libraries and her paternal aunt was children's author Helen Bannerman.
Her paternal grandfather was Robert Boog Watson, noted Scottish malacologist and minister of the Free Church of Scotland.
[2] Watson published her first book in 1935, the first of several educational titles intended for secondary school children, co-authored with fellow Edinburgh writer Janet Isabel Carruthers.
Her death notice in The Daily Mail records that she was head of the history department George Watson's Ladies College.
[3] Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Watson delivered multiple radio lectures on Scottish and British history, language, music and European geography intended for school-age listeners.