Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow, (29 May 1912 – 18 June 1981) was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic. Life Hansford Johnson was born in London. Her mother, Amy Clotilda Howson, was a singer and actress, from a theatrical family. Her mother's father, C E Howson, worked for the London Lyceum Company, as Sir Henry Irving's Treasurer. Her father, Reginald Kenneth Johnson, was a colonial civil servant who spent much of his life working in Nigeria. Her father died when she was 11 years old, leaving debts. Her mother earned a living as a typist. Until Pamela was 22, the family lived at 53 Battersea Rise, Clapham, South London. Johnson attended Clapham County Girls Grammar School, where she excelled at English, art history, and drama. After leaving school at the age of 16, she took a secretarial course and later worked for several years at the Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company. She began her literary career by writing poems, which were published by Victor B. Neuburg in the Sunday Referee. In 1933, Johnson wrote to Dylan Thomas, who had also been published in the same paper, and a friendship developed. Marriage was considered, but the idea was ultimately abandoned. In 1936 she married an Australian journalist, Gordon Neil Stewart. Their son Andrew was born in 1941, and a daughter Lindsay, Baroness Avebury (born 1944). Johnson and her first husband Neil were divorced in 1949. In 1950, she married her second husband, the novelist C. P. Snow (later Baron Snow). Their son Philip was born in 1952. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received a CBE in 1975. She was awarded the honorary degrees of Hon. DLitt (Temple University, Philadelphia 1963; York University, Toronto; Widener University, Chester, Pennsylvania) and Hon. DHL (Louisville, Kentucky). She was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University, of Timothy Dwight College, Yale University and of Founders College, York University, Toronto and held visiting academic positions at other North American universities including Harvard, Berkeley, Haverford and Cornell. She suffered from migraine for much of her career and wrote about the condition in her autobiographical memoirs Important to me and her novel The Humbler Creation. She was the first president of the Migraine Association and a founding trustee of the Migraine Trust. C. P. Snow died in July 1980. Less than a year later, Pamela