Critics claimed that he could not survive on his proposed diet. In November 1944, in Leicester, he and his wife, Dorothy, along with four friends—Elsie Shrigley, Mr G. A. Henderson and his wife Fay K. Henderson among them—founded The Vegan Society. They separated from the London Vegetarian Society and founded The Vegan Society because the former group refused to support veganism, which they saw as extreme and antisocial. (However, Watson remained a member of the London Vegetarian Society to keep in touch with the movement.) They had also decided they needed a word to describe their new way of life. The word 'vegan' was coined by Watson and his then-future wife Dorothy Morgan from the first three and last two letters of 'vegetarian' in 1944.