A Life By Design

by Siobhan O'Brien

  According to David Bond, he and Albert Roberts had arrived at work, accompanied by an ex-employee, Richard Gill, at 6.20 am. Richard lingered in the studio-factory for a short time before he left. At midday David joined Richard at the nearby Four in Hand pub where the two friends had lunch. Shortly after 1 pm David returned to work. At 2 pm Florence asked him to prepare a sample for clients, who he described in his statement to police as ‘a middle-aged Jewish couple with a bluey-silver coloured poodle’. When David finished preparing the sample, he took it upstairs where Florence waited with her clients. Florence allegedly mumbled that she did not want to waste any more time with the Jewish couple as she was hoping to ‘get a good sale’ from other clients, who were waiting for her attention nearby.

  At 2.35 pm, David Bond and Albert Roberts changed out of their paint-splattered overalls into casual attire before they walked upstairs to collect their pay. According to David, it was customary for employees to be paid their weekly salary on Friday afternoon and ‘any employee who is required to work on a Saturday gets paid in cash by Miss Broadhurst’. As the two weary workers waited for Florence at the entrance of the showroom, three customers—a solid man of five-foot ten-inches (about 178 centimetres) who wore a green short-sleeved shirt, his female companion, a brunette who wore her hair closely cropped and a woman in her late forties who wore a fashionable one-piece pant-suit—rifled through samples of wallpaper. When Florence spotted David, she allegedly said, ‘This is my head printer. You’ll have to excuse me as I have to pay him.’ Florence then walked to her desk, produced a beige wallet from her large black handbag and handed the men their money. As David turned to leave he said to Florence, ‘I know what I’m printing on Monday, so I have no worries.’ Florence replied, ‘You know what you’re doing, David.’

  After a long day at work, the two men sauntered over to the Whitehall Hotel on New South Head Road for a couple of beers. David claims he left the studio-factory directly after he received his pay, but his fellow employee allegedly returned to lock the two rear double doors. Albert later joined David at the hotel.

  When the last of her clients left at approximately 3.30 pm, Florence went upstairs to the kitchenette, which was separated from the office and showroom by a curtain. It was a small space with a stainless-steel sink, electric stove, built-in cupboards, separate shower recess and a toilet with a hand basin. She opened the fridge and selected a carton of yoghurt, swallowing a few spoonfuls and nibbling on some segments of an orange, the uneaten segments of which she left on the sink. About ten minutes later, neighbour Wendy Soan, who lived at 27 Royalston Street, noticed Florence on the first floor, closing a window and pulling down the blinds. According to Wendy, ‘I knew that it was Miss Broadhurst because I could see her bright red hair, and she was wearing a black jumper with long sleeves. It also led me to believe it was Miss Broadhurst as it was her usual duty or practice to close all the windows and blinds before she leaves.’

  Even though Florence wore hearing aids, she was still hard of hearing. So, as she cleaned up her afternoon tea she had no idea that an intruder had snuck in under the awning and through the front door downstairs. As he walked past the printing tables that were a tangle of screens and paint pots, he picked up a piece of timber that was allegedly used to stir the pot of vinyl coating that Florence applied to her wallpaper. The timber was freshly sawn at one end. He climbed the stairs that led to Florence’s office and confronted her in the kitchenette.

  The fight was vicious. As Leonard, her ex-husband, explained in an interview that he gave to the Australian Women’s Weekly shortly after her death, ‘She was not one to be intimidated, and confronted by an intruder it would not be Florence’s nature to be meek, but rather the opposite. Her determination may have contributed to her death.’ Leslie Walford agreed, ‘Her killer would have had a hard time, because Florence would’ve attacked them, verbally at least.’

  Even though her spirit was strong, the elderly Florence was overpowered and in the struggle she dropped a tea towel and lost her dentures, both of her hearing aids and a gold earring. The intruder chased her to the washroom, then to the kitchenette, and finally back to the toilet adjacent the washroom. Florence sustained massive head injures. The intruder, who the police alleged bludgeoned Florence nine times in her face and once on the back of her head, fractured her sternum, broke her nose, the thyroid bone in her throat and the bone at the back of her right eye socket, then shoved her head into the toilet and pulled the chain. When found, Florence was in a seated position on the concrete floor. Her left leg was bent with the knee tucked up near the left shoulder and her right leg was outstretched on the floor. Her bloodied left cheek lay on the rim of the toilet bowl, near the broken seat. Plastic fragments of the toilet seat floated in the water. Her top dentures lay on the cistern, her bloodied mouth was slightly ajar. Her limp right arm flopped into the bowl that had been plugged with her cardigan and blouse and the rings that usually adorned her left hand were nowhere to be seen. Some of her red hair was pasted in wet streaks across her face and was caked with congealed blood, while the rest of it hung down into the toilet bowl. Mascara ran down her face. Her fingers had been crushed to a pulp. Fragments of bloodstained timber, a gold earring, a false eyelash and a segment of orange lay on the floor nearby. Another hearing aid lay between her legs. Two metres above Florence’s body was an impression of the fabric of her pantsuit on the fibro wall of the toilet. The bloodied imprint suggested that her killer had either rammed or thrown her body with brutal force into the wall. On the opposite wall there was a blood-stained impression of her head.

  Her killer knew his way around well enough to escape by the rear doors, which he had had to unlock to exit. He then placed bricks against the doors so they could not be pushed open from the inside, presumably in case Florence was still alive, thus preventing her from leaving the premises. With a key kept on a nail by the door jam, he unlocked a padlock holding a chain on the rear gate of the factory, locked the padlock from the outside and took the key with him.

  At 4.15 pm Sue Christine McCarthy and her mother and sister pulled up in a red Fiat out the front of Florence Broadhurst Wallpapers on Royalston Street—they had hoped to buy some wallpaper that afternoon. The three women walked in through the front door that had been left ajar and climbed the stairs to the first floor. They waited for a few minutes and went downstairs to the lower level. They called out several times. There was no answer, so they returned to the first floor where they called out again. Sue walked into the kitchenette but the door to the washroom was closed. She knocked on the door, but everything was still and silent. She did not see a hearing aid lying on the floor nearby. At 4.30 pm, Sue and her family left. It is quite probable that the killer was hiding somewhere on the premises or had just left.

  It was a murder that shocked Sydney’s society set. As Maggie Tabberer recalled, ‘Sydney felt like it had been run over by a steam train the morning we opened the papers and saw that Florence had died…’

  •

  Who murdered Florence Maud Broadhurst and exactly why is still a mystery, and so is her life. She lived a tangle of contradictions, inventions and half-truths. She kept her Queensland childhood a secret, claiming she was an Englishwoman, and acted out roles, as she did on stage. She yearned for an aristocratic background and wove an intricate web of lies to cover her working-class roots. But those roots would not be buried; some details kept resurfacing during her numerous entrepreneurial endeavours. In one lifetime she seemed to live many lives, appearing in her own real-life drama in a number of guises: Bobby Broadhurst, the Shanghai minx; Florence Kann, British royalty’s best friend; Madame Pellier, couturier to the stars; and Florence Lloyd Lewis, the trucking baron’s wife.

  With her flamboyant clothes and perfectly coiffed and hennaed hair, Florence cut a dashing figure on the social scene throughout her life. A devoted fundraiser for charity, she was also a sought-after public speaker and hostess, but she was more than just a social butterfly.

&nbs
p; Variously described as eccentric, vain, self-absorbed, sharp tongued and ostentatious, Florence was also regarded as generous, loving, spirited, fearless and loyal. She was socially gregarious, but avoided intimacy with friends; she had an astute business mind, but the whimsy of an artist; she gushed over her customers (they were called ‘darling’) and treated her workers with contempt (they were called ‘fools’); she was an unapologetic snob but said her greatest ambition was to ‘play marbles with wharfies’. While living in London during World War II, she wrote: ‘I am interested in people not pedigrees—if I like the Joneses I don’t care if they came over with the conqueror or have just arrived from the colonies.’ But her actions rarely followed this philosopy.

  John Lang, a one-time employee, described Florence as ‘nervous yet lonely. What the public saw was a great, blazing, fierce, endearing redhead who rattled her bracelets at them.’ Peter Leis, another employee, described his former boss as almost impossible to work for. He painted a picture of an eccentric woman who responded to flattery, but would talk to a kerosene heater ‘as if it were a lover—referring to it as “beautiful” or “terrific”. I was a bit frightened of her—most people were, but you could always sweet-talk her. If you paid her compliments about her hair or her hat you’d have her wrapped around your little finger.’ Leis, who attended a number of work-related functions with his boss, also claimed that if she attended an event that she felt was ‘beneath her’, she would make remarks such as ‘these aren’t my people’.

  Designer Leslie Walford used to drop in for a chat and to mix his own colours in Florence’s studio: ‘She was a red-hot character, a red-hot mama, bright-eyed and flame-haired. She was fierce and determined with sassy sex appeal…still having affairs into her seventies. But there were people around who were scared stiff of Florence Broadhurst.’ Maggie Tabberer agreed she was sassy, but added: ‘She looked mad with her incredible hair in cochineal pink. Today it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, but in those days it was simply alarming.’ Leanne Whitehouse, the director of Whitehouse School of Design and Fashion, claimed: ‘In her day, Florence Broadhurst was God!’

  Janet Mosely was the subject of a portrait painted by Florence in 1961. She provided an insight into Florence the artist. ‘She was unapproachable, commanding and spoke with clipped, quick English tones through a stiff chin, lips and teeth. Her attitude was, “you have come to sit for me, now sit”. She made me nervous, the way she looked me up and down, it made me feel creepy.’

  Sally Fitzpatrick, who worked with Florence, said that the Florence she knew spoke at a million miles an hour in a mad gibberish, which was probably a result of her inability to hear as well as she once could. ‘You’d say something to Flo, either in person, on the phone or in the studio, and she’d reply, “What? What? Who? Who? Oh, fabulous, fabulous darling.”With Flo everything was always, “What? What? Who? Who?”’

  A striking woman, despite her diminutive five-foot four inches (about 163 centimetres), Florence left an impression of being ‘tall’ and ‘statuesque’. She had a fine-boned frame and her face was petite and heart-shaped, with a high, wide forehead and high cheekbones. Her chin was weak, small and pointed and she had unusual large, grey cat-like eyes that were alert, piercing and enquiring. According to Janet Mosely, Florence’s eyes, accentuated with lashings of black kohl and mascara, darted with nervous energy. But, as Janet also said, less flatteringly, ‘she was poppie eyed—like she had a thyroid problem’.

  It was Florence’s unusually luminous red hair that was her signature. She went through a temporary phase of dying it pink, while later she wore an elegant blonde French roll, but it didn’t take long before she returned to her favoured fiery shade of red. Much to the dismay of her long-suffering hairdresser in the Sydney suburb of Edgecliff, Florence would often produce a lock of her own hair that she had kept from her childhood, and say ‘colour me carrot!’

  GROWING UP

  1899–1922

  ‘With the help of God, and with no other mortal ever to know…I shall do great things.’

  FLORENCE MAUD BROADHURST, FIFTEEN YEARS OLD

  It all started for Florence not, as she may have wished and as most probably thought, in some aristocratic Georgian mansion in England, but amongst the flies and dust of Mungy Station, a large cattle property on the outskirts of Mount Perry in north-west Queensland. There was no Shakespearian theatre or European boutiques for hundred of thousands of acres—just bush, rocks and scrub, cattle, dust and huts with corrugated-iron roofs. It was inside one of these huts, with blowflies buzzing about the meat safe, that Florence was born on 28 July 1899, or 26 August 1899, depending on whether you go by her birth certificate or her death certificate.

  Only a year had passed since Florence’s mother, Margaret Ann Broadhurst nee Crawford, had lost a daughter named Maude who had lived for just twelve days, one of five of her children lost in childbirth. Florence’s first moments were watched by her three-year-old sister, May Millicent, and four-year-old brother, Fassifern, who peered up at their mother, who was propped up by pillows in her four-poster bed holding tiny Florence in her arms.

  None of her family could have conceived of the life that lay before the little redhead who lay wailing and thrashing her legs.

  •

  By those days’ standards Florence’s family was close-knit and close by. Her grandparents on her father’s side lived at Sharston Mount, a remote property 30 kilometres from Childers (located between Maryborough and Bundaberg), where they’d been for almost twenty years. Florence’s grandfather, William Broadhurst, had taken a long time to put down roots. Sailing into Hervey Bay from Liverpool in 1865 with his wife, Elizabeth Broadhurst nee Johnson, aboard the optimistically named Golden Land had conjured up a mixture of feelings. The shoreline of ‘the promised land’ was a tangle of mangroves, palm trees, rocky outcrops and mud flats. The khaki shadows of the horizon and sea blended together and the eerie outline of Fraser Island rose up from the ocean like a shadowy giant. They had to wait nineteen days before they could set foot on the mainland because a fever had broken out on board the Golden Land. When a government steamer finally arrived to take them to the mainland it was too late for three of their fellow passengers. They were buried in the sand dunes of Woody Island.

  Only a year after Florence’s grandparents arrived in Queensland, Elizabeth was pregnant with John, the first of twelve children. Bill, Florence’s father, was next. William worked for a while in a variety of jobs—at sawmills, dairy farms and such. Then, with a growing family to feed, he joined the hundreds of hopefuls in the Gympie Gold Rush in 1867 before settling in Kolbore, where he began dairying. On roads that were little more than bush tracks, he carted, once a week, butter, eggs and bacon the 33 undulating miles (about 53 kilometres) to Maryborough. It wasn’t long before William’s butter, according to the Bundaberg Daily News and Mail of the time, was ‘in popular demand…on account of its unrivalled excellence’.

  When Florence’s father, William ‘Bill’ Broadhurst, and his new bride, Margaret, moved to Mount Perry in the late 1890s, a railway line had been installed from Bundaberg to Mount Perry. The newlyweds had been attracted to the picturesque township for more reasons than fertile soil, plentiful water and land grants. Copper and gold were discovered in Mount Perry in 1869 and the sleepy town, dominated by the verdant 750-metre peak by the same name, became a boom town overnight. By the time the couple arrived, after Bill had been granted land in the area—410 acres (approximately 166 hectares) at Kullogum and 873 acres (approximately 353 hectares) at Wolca—in July 1885, the town’s success could be measured by its twenty-three hotels, five churches and a plethora of businesses: butcher shops, blacksmiths, cobblers, saddlers, storekeepers, dairies and cordial makers. Surrounding scrub farms produced pineapples, bananas, mangoes, peanuts and cotton. The area was also extremely good cattle country.

  Rather than tending his own land, Bill decided to take a job as station manager for William Sly, the owner of Mungy Station. It was regarded as one
of six biggest and best cattle stations in the area and at one time covered 300 000 acres (approximately 122 000 hectares). Located eighteen kilometres west of the township, beyond the rocky Normandy Range and steep Possum Creek Range, the property, which still exists, has two creeks running through it—Possum Creek and Reid’s Creek. It is the latter that snakes through the rocky outcrops and willow trees near the cluster of huts that was Florence’s birthplace.

  Bill Broadhurst was a straight-talking larrikin renowned for his dry wit, great strength and relentless endurance. Ted Bettiens, who still lives in a yellow fibro house on the outskirts of Mount Perry, worked by his side on Mungy Station for almost a decade. Bill and Ted set out droving once a week and stayed out for up to five nights before returning home to their families on weekends. While most men would have found the constant separation from their loved ones lonely, it suited Bill’s natural independence, fierce spirit and determination. Their days were filled with mustering and feeding cattle, tending lucerne crops, fixing fences and taking care of Bill’s invaluable horses. At night they smoked rollies around a campfire until the early hours and, depending where they were, slept in hessian sacks slung between trees that they ‘climbed into like a pair of possums’. According to Ted, the pair survived on tea, jam and bread that was so mouldy ‘it needed shaving’. When Bill later became the wealthy owner of numerous properties in the local area, including a 9000-acre (3640-hectare) property called Elliott’s Creek, he would joke that his side of the fence was ‘the shiny side’ and the neighbours owned ‘the rusty side’.

  In character, Bill’s wife, Margaret, was his polar opposite. Naturally tentative, she was quietly spoken and reserved; a woman who ‘clung to the house’ according to locals. Reid’s Creek was her saving grace. Just a stroll down the hill from the huts, it made life in the harsh conditions more bearable. Like Bill, Margaret was from a big family of twelve siblings, so she knew well the work involved in raising a brood. Born in Tenterfield, her mother, Jane Fletcher, moved to the Maryborough district in 1867, where she married Thomas Girvan Crawford on 31 January 1868. Thomas was a robust, energetic timber getter who was an itinerant worker in a variety of locations including Tin Can Bay, Nanango and Dunmora. It was when they were based at Dunmora that their daughter Margaret had married Bill Broadhurst on 9 October 1894 in a Methodist ceremony, followed by a modest country reception.