J.M. Barrie

Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote a number of successful novels and plays. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who inspired him to write about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a 1904 West End "fairy play" about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland.

James Matthew Barrie was born in Kirriemuir, Angus, to a conservative Calvinist family. His father David Barrie was a modestly successful weaver. His mother Margaret Ogilvy assumed her deceased mother's household responsibilities at the age of eight. Barrie was the ninth child of ten all of whom were schooled in at least the three Rs in preparation for possible professional careers. He was a small child and drew attention to himself with storytelling. He grew to only 5 ft 31⁄2 in. according to his 1934 passport.

When James Barrie was six years old, his elder brother David  died in an ice-skating accident on the day before his 14th birthday. This left his mother devastated, and Barrie tried to fill David's place in his mother's attentions, even wearing David's clothes and whistling in the manner that he did. One time, Barrie entered her room and heard her say, "Is that you?" "I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to", wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother Margaret Ogilvy "and I said in a little lonely voice, 'No, it's no' him, it's just me.'" Barrie's mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her.Eventually, Barrie and his mother entertained each other with stories of her brief childhood and books such as Robinson Crusoe, works by fellow Scotsman Walter Scott, and The Pilgrim's Progress.

Barrie died of pneumonia at a nursing home in Manchester Street, Marylebone on 19 June 1937. He was buried at Kirriemuir next to his parents and two of his siblings. His birthplace at 9 Brechin Road is maintained as a museum by the National Trust for Scotland.

He left the bulk of his estate to his secretary Lady Cynthia Asquith, but excluding the rights to all Peter Pan works whose copyright he had previously given to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. The surviving Llewelyn Davies boys received legacies, and he made provisions for his former wife Mary Ansell to receive an annuity during her lifetime.