LS Lowry Artist. He was born in Stretford, Manchester, and was educated at the Victoria Park School, but did poorly there. In 1904, he began to work for a firm of accountants. However, his only real interest, since he was a child, had been drawing; so, in the same year, he began to attend night classes at the Manchester Municipal College of Art. In 1910, he joined the Pall Mall Property Company as a rent collector, and remained with them until 1952, by which time he had risen to the post of chief cashier. The fact that he had a "nine to five" job was never revealed until after his death, as he had a horror of being thought of as an amateur painter. His paintings of industrial scenes achieved extraordinary popularity, to the extent that, in 1967, his painting "Children Coming Out Of School" (1927) was used by the Royal Mail on a postage stamp. Lowry died of pneumonia at Woods Hospital in Glossop. He never married and is thought never to have had any love affairs. He left his entire estate to a girl named Carol Ann Lowry, who had written him a fan letter because she was pleased to discover that she shared the same name as such a famous painter.
