Salford's
Famous Women
F ...............
* Florence Broadhurst
neé Elliot
born in 1902
..... she lived in Regent Square, Ordsall and left school at the age of 14 to work in a cotton mill. During the Second World War she worked as a welder in an aircraft factory and later worked at the Ritz in Manchester. She went to live in America with her husband in the 1970s and in 2004 celebrated her 102nd birthday. She now lives in a retirement village in Oakland, outside San Francisco ( I think her age allows her a mention in Salford's Famous Women)
* Frances Hodgson Burnett
born November 24th 1849 died 29th October 1924
..... eldest daughter of Edwin Hodgson, a small shopkeeper who lived at 386 Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester. Her father died when she was only five and from the age of seven until her early teens the family lived at 16 Islington Square, Salford. She later went to live at Seedley, and in her autobiography described her garden there as the "back garden of Paradise". The family business was ruined by the depression in the cotton industry in Lancashire during the American Civil War and in 1865 the family emigrated to America where she married. In 1877 she published four successful stories and by 1883 had produced sixteen novels. In 1886 she published her most famous novel Little Lord Fauntleroy, the story of a little American boy who inherits an English title. The hero was based on her son Vivian. In another novel "That Lass o'Lowrie's " (1877) the heroine was modelled on a mill girl whom she remembered from her childhood in Salford. In her later years she became an eccentric, was snobbish and an escapist and took to wearing elaborate clothes and wigs which earned her the nickname of ‘Frilly’. She also indulged in semi-mystical religions and was a minor tyrant to her family