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Keith Spencer Waterhouse, the son of Ernest and Elsie Waterhouse, was born in Leeds in 1929. He was educated at various local council schools until the age of fifteen, when, under a wartime scholarship program, he went to Leeds College of Commerce for one year to learn typewriting. Until called to serve in the Royal Air Force when he was eighteen, he worked for a local firm in Leeds which was clearly the inspiration for Shadrack and Duxby in his second novel, Billy Liar (1959); he describes this Leeds firm as "a peculiar combination of undertaker, estate agent and car-hire firm." In 1950 Waterhouse began to practice journalism on a free-lance basis. Much of Billy Liar, which he and collaborator Willis Hall adapted as a play in 1960, and indeed of later plays and novels, draws directly on Waterhouse's early years in Leeds, yet like Billy, neither he nor his family had any direct connections with the theater or with journalism.
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