Lady Mary Ravensdale, who was not only the president of the World Congress of Faiths, but one of the first four women to become a member of the House of Lords in 1958, also inspired Florence. Lady Ravensdale (like Florence) was a bundle of contradictions. She was an outspoken and controversial member of Britain’s aristocracy who displayed contempt for democracy, associating it with all things bourgeois, dull and inert (Sutherland, 1999). She did much to rally against a Labour government who claimed it would be wrong for women to engage themselves in politics ‘by virtue of birth’. When Lady Ravensdale famously remarked that the male members of the House of Lords were ‘a drowsy lot of flies buzzing comfortably in a warm room, afraid of the entry of a few hornets’ it was an attack on those of her peers, such as Fred Pethick-Lawrence, who claimed that the raison d’être behind opposition to equal rights was that men dealt with women on an emotional plane, and it was impossible to think of them as colleagues. Likewise, Lord Glasgow stated lazily, ‘We simply don’t want [women] here. We don’t want to meet them in the library or sit next to them on these benches. This is a house of men…we don’t want a House of Lords and Ladies! This is the last place in the country where men can meet without women. For heaven’s sake let us keep it that way!’ (Sutherland, 1999).
Just as Sir Winston Churchill would later inspire Florence in the realm of politics and public speaking, Lady Ravensdale fuelled Florence’s feminist leanings and inspired her increasingly unorthodox views on life.
Alongside Florence’s carefully collected articles stuck into her scrapbooks, she jotted down personal musings on themes that included eternal youth, the power of the mind, positive self-talk and spiritual ideology. They ranged from single moments of clarity (‘entertain only the nobler and more constructive emotions’; ‘use the power of the mind, courage and self control’ and ‘form habits known to contribute to the welfare of the mind and the body’) to long rambling entries on topics such as ‘The universal intelligence we call God, or more intimately and lovingly “our father who art in heaven” is the supreme source of perfect health and youth’ and ‘As Ralph Waldo Emerson says, while we commune with that which is above us, we grow young.’ Her preoccupation with looking and feeling younger was a theme that continued throughout Florence’s life. And it seemed as if she had doctors on a pedestal. As she wrote in her diary, ‘A surgeon—His characteristics in his profession were accuracy, dexterity and gentleness of touch. He was a man of acute sympathies who was greatly distressed by human suffering. His understanding was appreciated by his students that they went to him for a solution to their private and personal difficulties.’ She even recorded jokes about them: ‘The man who consulted his doctor to see who could advise him what to do in order that he should live to 100. So the doctor replies give up drinking, smoking and women and he said then shall I live to 100 and the doctor replied no but it will feel like it.’ In more personal moments in her scrapbooks, Florence reflects on her childhood in Mount Perry and notes: ‘I would recommend more enlightenment of spiritual life should be given at an early age—in plain understandable language—not hinted at or presented as being expounded from a Bible quotation but clearly defined—the advantages of living a god-like existence…’
But Florence was no angel. On the contrary, many of the quotes that she either collected or invented were tainted with sexual overtones, including ‘what a girl needs is a bad influence’; ‘I see a throbbing vitality’; ‘power and lust of the mind’ and the unusual, almost disturbing, entry ‘what is the difference between rape and seduction?’
Of all the hand-written entries, the most startling and the one that provides us with a piercing insight into her lifelong habit of reinventing herself and acting out roles, is titled ‘Personality Building’. It is unclear whether Florence undertook a transcendental course of sorts or whether she invented the theory that follows. These (pages upon pages) of hastily scribbled notes instruct the reader that human beings are an ‘ever renewing and ever unfolding expression of the infinite life’. She provides five steps or ‘spiritual rules’ on ‘building a personality’. These include ‘Rule 1—Learn to Build a New Personality’. This rule incorporates four stages, namely: Suggestions, Impersonation, Personification and Embodiment and Assumption. In ‘learning to build a new personality’ students are introduced to ‘suggest characteristics of personality—concentrate and visualise with faith and confidence that you may become the happy, winning magnetic personality you would love to be’ while the ‘impersonation’ step instructs students to ‘begin to act out the part [they] have strongly suggested to the subconscious mind’.
The other rules follow:
Rule 2: Educate yourself thoroughy [sic] for success.
Rule 3: Seek to express in your outer life the nobility, power and beauty of your inner life.
Rule 4: Study and observe so that you will know how to read and understand people.
This process of ‘personality building’ came naturally to Florence. Her discovery (or invention) of the ‘rules’ merely served to reinforce what she was already thinking and doing. She had instinctively morphed into Bobby, the singing dancing coquette, by pretending she was British. Then later, during her time in London, she transformed herself into Madame Pellier, the Mayfair couturier. When she returned to Australia from London, she reinvented herself again as the Australian doyenne of design. Florence’s manifesto on ‘Personality Building’ paints a picture of a single-minded woman with an inquiring mind who was determined to be successful, even if it meant turning into someone else.
Florence’s musings, press clippings and notes were certainly not isolated to the realm of subconscious persuasion. Many were rehashed and presented in her numerous talks on the place of women in world affairs that Florence delivered as a voluntary speaker for the Women-for-Westminster Movement and a member of the Conservative Party’s panel of speakers. An author who was a source of inspiration for Florence’s public speaking from this period was Ethel Mannin, a self-confessed ‘emancipated, rebellious, and angry young woman’ (Princess Grace Irish Library, 2001).
Ethel’s books examined the lives of working-class women and anarchism and pacifism in the forties. She reputedly had an affair with the poet W.B.Yeats. An article by Mannin, published in the Daily Express on 18 September 1928, was part of a series that invited writers, playwrights, psychologists and scientists to discuss ‘their faith’ in the ‘things they believe in most implicitly’. On the rambling (and now somewhat faded) yellow press clipping, Florence highlighted phrases that appealed to her, including: ‘Power and glory pass with the years, but the spirit of beauty remains. Beauty is the thread of intelligence running through the chaos and confusion of the vast tapestry of life’; ‘The emotional reaction to beauty as expressed in music, painting, sculpture and poetry, derives from precisely the same source as profound emotional reactions to personalities’, and ‘I do not believe that art is a luxury of civilisation; I believe it is a vital necessity for the making of civilisation endurable.’
A speech that Florence delivered while living in Sydney in the fifties draws on Mannin’s theme. Her version reads: ‘Art and creation is synonymous with beauty. It is the emotional reaction to beauty that compels those who have the ability to create to pour out that emotion in song, in words or poetry, literature or architecture.’ And drawing on Ethel’s ‘vast tapestry of life’ theme, Florence writes: ‘I weave my defence from this loom.’
The late twenties also marked a period when Florence fancied herself as a fiction writer. One of the poetic entries in her notebook included:
After they had eaten, the two men light their pipes and then commenced to talk. He explained that he studied the language and the habits of the Indians and that he was going to write on the subject a large book of 20 volumes. That was the object of his voyage to Alaska. He did not add that the first chapter was not yet started.
Another read:
A serene sky, and sea that, as it swirls round the rocks deepens to the colou
r of crushed butterflies wings and above the strength and splendour of the guardian cliffs…there was a kind of healing benediction.
She also philosophised about life and pondered the fabric of society. At times she painted a bitter, cynical picture of the world around her, while at other times she was overwhelmed by its beauty and joy. Trying to make sense out of the bipolar views she presented is a daunting task. One entry read:
Progress of civilisation is made possible only by vigorous sometimes even violent lying; that the social contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings…Lies are the mortar that bind the individual man into the social masonry. What is man? Lust and greed tempered by fear and irrational vanity.
And another:
It has always been my conviction that the world belongs not to princes, not to the politicians, not even to the merchants, whose caravans wind their way to so many Baghdad’s but to the gentle band of [this word is indecipherable], who can gaze into the heart of a flower and behold the secret of the universe.
For those who might feel they were close to unlocking the key to Florence’s mind, she offered up this food for thought:
Beyond the ken of the printed word are vast sources of thought and spiritual refreshment which in these days of universal education fewer and fewer of us feel the impulse to explore.
•
Shortly after Florence arrived in London she met Percy Walter Gladstone Kann. To Florence, Percy was everything that Wallingford was not. He was worldly, sophisticated and wealthy. He had a career ahead of him and led the high life. Various reports claim that Percy was either a prince (there were rumours that he was connected to the Spencer family), a stockbroker, Pakistani, or connected to the English gentry. When she went out with Percy, Florence did not perform to monarchs and the upper echelons, she mixed with them at dinner and cocktail parties and sat in the royal box at such venues as the Wembley Stadium and Greyhound Racecourse. Among her personal papers there is a photograph of Florence having afternoon tea with the Queen Mother. This friendship would endure, at least on a social level, until the fifties. Whenever Florence and the monarch found themselves at the same social event (which did not occur infrequently), they always took time out to have a quick chat.
In 1929, after only a year and a half in London, Florence and Percy married on 22 June. The wedding was a lavish affair, with no expenses spared. In a photo taken in the Kensington Gardens, Florence is wearing an elaborate wedding frock, an elegant headpiece and carrying an impractically large bouquet of roses and cascading greenery that threatens to overshadow her gown. A filmy white veil falls about her shoulders and the length of her back. In its transparent beauty, Florence looks almost angelic.
The wedding was held at one of the most impressive churches in London, the Church of the Immaculate Heart of St Mary (commonly known as the Brompton Oratory), located on Brompton Road in South Kensington. It is an extraordinary church for a number of reasons: it is the second-largest Roman Catholic church in London, it has a regal Italianate style that is rarely seen in Britain, and though it was constructed in the 1880s, the interior contains elements that hark back to the 1660s. It was against this lustrous backdrop of marble, precious stones, mosaic tiles and stone carvings that Florence, Percy and their witness, known only as A. Lewis Leighton, signed the wedding certificate. It stated Florence was twenty-seven years old. In fact she was twenty-nine. (Stretching the truth about her age was something that Florence continued to do until she was well into her seventies. As a friend recalled at the time of her death, ‘When Florence was seventy-eight, she said she was forty-eight.’)
The newlyweds travelled to Paris where they frittered money away at gambling houses such as the Casino de la Foret and played sport at Le Touquet de Tennis. Whether Florence and Percy actually lived in Paris for a time or not is unclear. Florence herself lost track of the web of inconsistencies that she concocted about her life with Percy. In one article, ‘She came to Rest and Stayed to Paint’, written about her when she returned to Australia in the fifties, Florence claims she spent ‘ten years studying in Paris’ and the ‘next ten years in England’. In another article Florence contradicts this and says, ‘I didn’t go to Paris to paint at all, I was training as a singer’. And later she remembered that she did go to Paris after all, to paint. ‘I spent time in Paris painting landscapes on the left bank,’ she said. However, it is unlikely Florence spent ‘ten years studying in Paris’ for a number of reasons: she arrived in London in 1927; married Percy at the Brompton Oratory in 1929; launched a Mayfair couturier business with Percy in the early thirties; and met her second husband, Leonard Lloyd Lewis, in 1935.
Florence sometimes fancied herself as a scholar. According to Florence she was a one-time associate of the London Trinity College of Music, as well as a student at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, but there are no records to confirm this story which was published in the Daily Telegraph in 1977. Florence certainly studied painting (her many exhibitions in Sydney throughout the fifties and sixties, and her considerable drafting skills, provide testimony to this), but the exact location of her studies might never be known. Florence kept sketch books from this era that she filled with dimensional doodles and handwritten notes pressed firmly into the page that read, for example: ‘On Painting a Picture—first determine where the light is coming from to fix the shadow, to work out full character of shadow’; and ‘Notes of Importance—Strokes—Press and Relax with several colours. Use different colour to underline corners for more forms.’
Florence (who left her ‘rank of profession’ void on her wedding certificate) also claimed that she was a London-based interior designer. In an article published in the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1965, she described what she sold in her ‘interior decorating’ store in London. ‘When we couldn’t get anything, I bleached Hessian bags and decorated them with raffia and shells—they made wonderful lampshades. We used sailcloth and dyed artificial sheets too,’ she said. Florence did make one remark, however, that goes some way to helping us sort out this tangle of deception. She said, ‘It was partly my interest in clothes which showed me how easily I could express myself in line and colour. I studied and painted, and earned some money designing clothes.’
•
In the early thirties, Florence and Percy launched a couturier on the corner of New Bond and Brook streets in Mayfair, London. Advertisements for the shop—originally known as Kann and Pellier—claim it was a ‘dress house’ that supplied ‘better clothes at lower prices’, with Florence acting as a ‘designer and dress consultant to film and stage’. According to an article that appeared in Town and Country News on 8 December 1933 ‘its numerous regulars’ included ‘many notable figures of the stage and society’. Some of these regulars might have included stage and screen divas such as Valerie Hobson, Googie Withers, Dame Gracie Fields, Dame Wendy Hiller or Phyllis Calvert. Others might have included the wives and lovers of Stewart Granger, Val Guest, Harold French, Sir Michael Balcon, Marius Goring and the like. And given the social connections that Florence and Percy had forged for themselves, it appears at least one member of the royal family came to have her frocks fitted at Florence’s shop.
The shop itself—‘one of the outstanding successes of London’s dress world’—was elegant but spartan, with art-deco appeal. A number of carpeted salons and private change rooms were hidden behind heavy velvet drapes and the rest of the elegant space was scattered with dresses on metal stands, pendant lamps, vases of flowers, hand mirrors and comfortable upholstered sofas. As the article points out, the shop was ‘presided over by a lady who herself is a genuine dress artist, and who is one of the most original of dress designers’.
Accompanying the article is a photo of Florence—at this point in time a raven-haired beauty—wearing a simple dress with a keyhole neckline with her signature kohl-lined eyes, dark lips and swept back shingle hairstyle. Underneath the photo is her name. Not Florence or Bobby Broadhurst. Not Florence Kann. But her newest
nom de guerre: Madame Pellier. Florence was again attempting to conceal her Queensland past. Was her transformation as Madame Pellier an exercise in ‘personality building’ or a media stunt designed to draw clientele into a shop presided over by a sophisticated European dress designer, not an Australian sheila from a cattle station? Either way, the successful enterprise soon became synonymous with the force of Florence’s new ‘personality’ and, although Percy remained one of the salon’s co-directors, it wasn’t long before ‘Kann and Pellier’ lost the name Kann and ‘Pellier Ltd’ was born.
Florence, whose second husband called her ‘the first of the women’s libbers’, claims she did a roaring trade among the upper crust. One of her designs—a long wool coat with accentuated epaulettes—featured in Vogue magazine on 27 November 1935. The elegant illustration features a woman wearing a pillbox hat, a coat with a high collar around the face and carrying a clutch purse, bearing the caption, ‘Colourful plaid outlines. This navy wool coat, 8 guineas, Pellier, Bond Street’. A brochure circulating at this time also features Florence (or rather Madame Pellier) looking decidedly French, wearing a beret tilted to one side and a dark jacket with a high neckline. A brochure for the shop from Florence’s personal papers reads:
Paris via Pellier. Paris being Paris, is sometimes a little over-confident…flinging into the picture new modes that neither the English mind can cherish nor the English figure wear. A Frenchwoman can sometimes go to extremes in style and pattern that would make her English cousin look ‘fancy dress’. This season, France, as you know, is going everything from Abyssinian to Bersaglieri…with military millinery…Renaissance gownery…classical negligee. And ‘shirring’ and ‘draping’ are becoming the most overworked words in the couturier’s vocabulary. All very whimsical and smart…MODERATION. Which is precisely where Madame Pellier sweeps in. The new Pellier models are founded on Paris but interpreted into smartest possible English. All that the Pellier models have lost is a danger of looking ridiculous. And ah, how much they have gained! Whatever the hour of the occasion, you could never be safer than in a Pellier creation.
A Life By Design Page 6