W. H. Watson was born in Edinburgh and graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1921 with first class honours in mathematics and natural philosophy. From 1921 to 1928 he taught physics at the University of Edinburgh and earned his Ph.D. in 1925. In 1928 he went as Carnegie Research Fellow to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he worked under Sir Ernest Rutherford. He received a second doctorate from Cambridge in 1931, and in the same year joined the Physics Department at McGill. He remained here until 1944, when he went to the University of Saskatchewan. His major research interest lay in electromagnetism.