She was born in Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire, on 9 August 1887, daughter of Arthur John Batho, a postal telegraph clerk, and his wife Lilian, née Outram.

[1] Winifred began attending the Sheffield School of Art in 1907, where she met her future husband, the political activist, cartographer and cartoonist Frank Horrabin.

[1][3] She and her husband were involved in the Central Labour College, and in 1913 Winifred set up a Women's League to focus on the education of female workers.

[1] In 1932 her brother Harold died from wounds sustained in the First World War, and she made an anti-war speech to the National Conference of Labour Women, arguing that the working classes should reject employment in munitions factories, even if it meant starvation.

She also wrote for the political magazine Time and Tide and had a weekly column in the Manchester Evening News from 1944 under the pseudonym Freda Wynne.

Other unpublished works included a play, Victorian Love Story: Beloved Good, about Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane, and a biography of Olive Schreiner.