Ruby Mildred Ayres was born on 28 January 1881, in Watford,
Hertfordshire, the third daughter of the marriage formed by Alice (née
Whitford) and Charles Pryor Ayres, a London-based architect. In 1909,
she married Reginald William Pocock, a insurance broker, and they
lived in Harrow until his death in a train accident. As widow without
children, she moved to her sister's home at Weybridge, Surrey.
She started to write as a girl, and her first story was published in a
magazine shortly after her marriage, and in 1912, she published her first
novel, Castles in Spain. In September 1915, with her first popular success,
Richard Chatterton, V.C. (which sold over 50,000 copies in the first
three years), she moved publishing houses to Hodder and Stoughton,
where she remained until her death in 1955. She wrote over 150 novels
and serialized works. Several of her works became films and she did
screenwriting for Society for Sale among others. She corresponded
with Douglas Sladen, and also was possibly an inspiration for the
P. G. Wodehouse character Rosie M. Banks. She died on 14 November
1955 in a nursing home in Weybridge, aged 74, of a combination of
pneumonia and a cerebral thrombosis. She was cremated four days later
at Golders Green in north London.
