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Florence Broadhurst
She was bludgeoned to death with a large piece of timber in her Paddington studio in 1977. The murder was never solved, but there has been some speculation that Broadhurst was a victim of serial killer John Wayne Glover – (see ‘Florence Broadhurst – Her Secret and Extraordinary Lives’ by Helen O’Neill), who was convicted of murdering six elderly women between 1989 and 1990, and is thought by police to have been responsible for other deaths.
In Gillian Armstrong’s Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst, friends and employees of Broadhurst stated that they believed the killer may have been known to her and that the motive may have been financial. This was due to the presence of two cups of tea near her body, suggesting a meeting or appointment, and the killer’s apparent knowledge of her factory’s layout.
Florence Broadhurst’s work and design is used today by the Signature Prints company and Borderline Fabrics, where all the fabrics are screen printed on a variety of natural base cloths in the U.K. with the exception of Florence Broadhurst.