Born in 1882, Florence Antoinette Kilpatrick was known as a novelist and playwright. Her most famous plays were The Hellcat and Virginia’s Husband, which were turned into black and white films in the 1920s. Another play ‘Getting George Married’ was shown at The Everyman Theatre in 1930 and featured the actor Rex Harrison as The Hon. Frederick Thrippleton.
Florence also wrote 31 novels between 1920 and 1941, being described as a best seller, and making her the most prolific novelist born in Peterborough. Some of her novels are still available and her first novel ‘Our Elizabeth’ is available to read for free thanks to Project Gutenberg. Her character Elizabeth, a free-speaking Cockney maid, was very popular and appeared in a total of eight novels.
Florence Antoinette (Annie) Calvert was born in Peterborough in 1882 and was baptised in St Mary’s Church on 1st October. The baptism record tells us that the family were living in Princes Garden and her father George was a commercial traveller. He travelled around to sell veterinary drugs, which provided Florence with a rather nomadic start to her life. All of her brothers were born in Yorkshire, where her father was from, but her eldest sister was born in nearby March, Cambridgeshire. Sadly, it appears that her birth place was one of chance, rather than choice and Florence would not have considered herself a Peterborian, but a Yorkshire woman, after spending her childhood there.
She married James Alexander Kilpatrick in London on 25th
August 1909 a journalist who was 13 years her senior. He was no doubt influential in Florence’s writing career, publishing his own book ‘Tommy Atkins at War as Told in His Own Letters’ in 1914, which is also available free with project Gutenberg. He died in 1956.
Florence’s travelling childhood influenced her adult life and she travelled broadly, visiting South America, the Far East and Africa, her adventures forming the basis of later novels, including her Elizabeth novels.
She married Herbert Crowder in 1963 at the age of 81, dying on 1st January 1968 at the age of 84.
