 Peake spent much of her youth at Haslington Hall, an Elizabethan house near Crewe, bought by her father after the First World War.Her father, Colonel Humphrey Watts, was a prosperous Manchester-based industrialist whose family's wealth derived from S & J Watts, a textile business founded in 1798.Peake was educated at St. Winifred's, Eastbourne, but left before taking her school certificate to go on to a finishing school outside Paris.