McCullough Thew was born in Ashington. She left school at 14 to work in the village store in Ashington, Northumberland (recounted in The Pit Village and the Store). It was in the 1930s when she started and she was the first woman to work as an assistant at that co-operative store.
In 1942, she joined the ATS where she worked on anti-aircraft radar. She transferred to the Army Education Corps and subsequently took a teachers' training course in Newcastle. McCullough Thew "pioneered sex education in schools" and produced programs for television and radio about human relationships in the mid 1960s. After a career in teaching she became a full-time Writer. The Pit Village and the Store was dramatized by Channel 4 and broadcast in 1987.
McCullough Thew died at East Riding Residential Care Home in Morpeth on Christmas Day, 2013. Items that she had collected from her past, including World War II memorabilia, were donated to the Woodhorn Museum.
