| Biography | Florence Tyzack Parbury was a British socialite, author, musician, painter and traveller. She was involved in aviation in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1910s and 1920s.
Parbury performed in public from an early age: in 1889, aged eight, she was on stage to raise funds for the Children's Hospital in Sheffield. Her musical training began in Sheffield was with the renowned teacher Marie Foxon. She learned to play several instruments including pianoforte, organ, violin, and harp, and also composed music. She also performed for troops in World War I. In a more formal setting she was admired by many for her soprano voice of unusual compass.
Florence Parbury was interested in aviation from its early days in England. In 1910 she attended the Blackpool Flying Carnival where she was a passenger in the Henry Farman biplane flown by Claude Grahame-White. Parbury described how she flew over Stonehenge in a biplane piloted by Howard Pixton, an early British aviator who won the 1914 Schneider Trophy air race held in Monaco.
Parbury travelled to Egypt when she was sixteen and then in 1901 she and her mother sailed to India from London on the P&O steamship Caledonia and then spent several months travelling in Kashmir. In 1909, Parbury published a description of their travels, including many of her paintings of local scenes and, ten years later, published sheet music evoking her experience in India.
When the war broke out Parbury nursed for eight months in France with the French Red Cross. It was probably this experience which prompted her to launch an appeal: "Miss Parbury is anxious to collect a million cigarettes for our soldiers. She will take them with her in batches and distribute them. Without publicity up to the present, she has obtained 75,000."
In 1922 Parbury flew as a passenger to the Hague, with a Blackburn test pilot, while using wireless telephony to listen to one of her own compositions being played in a hall below. At about this time Parbury was working on another big project. She had in mind a bond of harmony between the people of the Empire mediated through an annual music festival in London. The first British Empire Music Festival was held at the Royal Albert Hall on St. Cecilia's Day 1922, which included patriotic music of Canada, four of the "Six Australian Bush Songs" by W. G. James, "Rule Britannia" and tunes from the Pipers of the Scots Guards. |