[1] The memoirs, covering Woodruff's impoverished upbringing in an English weaving community during the Great Depression, contain significant amounts of social commentary about the conditions in which he lived.

His parents were cotton weavers by trade (although at the time of his birth his father was serving on the Western Front).

[3] The Road to Nab End vividly describes his upbringing and his family's fight to survive the Lancashire cotton industry's initial downturn in 1920, through its decline in the 1920s, and the community's slide into the Great Depression that followed.

[3] His wartime experiences became the basis of his work Vessel of Sadness, which A. L. Rowse called one of the "most sensitive and moving books of the war, both authentic and poetic" in a review in the Times Literary Supplement.

In 1950 he became a Houblon-Norman research fellow supported by the Bank of England, and in 1952 he went as a Fulbright Scholar to Harvard University.