Florrie Forde
Australian singer
Florrie Forde (born Flora May Augusta Flannagan; 16 August 1875 – 18 April 1940) was an Australian-born British vaudevillian performer and popular singer, notable in music hall and pantomime. From 1897 she lived and worked in the United Kingdom, where she found her greatest success, as one of the most popular stars of the early 20th century as a music hall entertainer and recording artist.
Early life and career
Forde was born in Fitzroy, Victoria, on 16 August 1875. She was the sixth of the eight children of Irish-born Lott Flannagan, a stonemason, and Phoebe (née Simmons), who also had two children from a prior marriage. By 1878, her parents had separated. Phoebe married Thomas Ford, a theatrical costumier in 1888. Forde and some of her siblings were placed in a convent. At the age of sixteen, she ran away to live with an aunt in Sydney. When she appeared on the local music hall stage, she adopted her stepfather's surname but added an 'e'.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald's reviewer, at one of her earliest vaudeville performances in January 1892, "[i]n the first part the vocalists were all well received, and several had to respond to encores.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Florrie Forde” as australian singer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as australian singer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5461945. VIAF identifies the subject as 19870688. The Library of Congress control number is n93005472. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1875, 1940, 1897 and 1878.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Florrie Forde” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.