March 1909. When her mother died in 1899, Florence returned with her father to Middlesbrough, where he joined a partnership in a wholesale fruit merchants business with William Henry Easton, his father and Fletcher Easton, his brother. A collection in Middlesbrough raised enough money for her to study for a year at the Royal Academy of Music in London—she lost the money on her first day in the capital, and her father had to find replacement funds. She started in May 1900 and studied singing for a year. The 1901 Census shows her as an 18-year-old student at the Royal Academy of Music, living at Hendon, Middlesex. In 1901 she went to Paris to study singing with Elliott Haslam, a friend of her father's. "But not long after this my father died, and my grandparents (who had good old-fashioned ideas that a woman's place to sing was in the home) discouraged my efforts. They even carried paternalism far enough to select a husband for me. When this point had been reached, I quietly disappeared, and once more went back to my vocal work". Professional career Florence was determined, and her debut operatic appearance was as the Shepherd boy in Tannhäuser at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1903 with the touring Moody-Manners Opera Company. On the first evening of the company's season at Covent Garden she sang Stephano in Roméo et Juliette. Her first leading role at the Covent Garden Opera House was Arline in The Bohemian Girl, and she was a success there in 1903, as the lead in Madama Butterfly. Florence married twice; in May, 1904 she married Francis Maclennan (born 1873, died 1935), an American tenor with the Moody-Manners Opera Company. She made her American debut as Gilda in Rigoletto in Baltimore with Henry W. Savage's English Grand Opera Company in November 1905, and she sang a number of roles with this company in the US and Canada over the next 2 years. In 1905 Maclennan had the title role in Henry W. Savage's Parsifal tour of America, and Florence gave up her singing career to set up home in America. They had a son in 1906 and a daughter (Wilhelmina) in 1912; they divorced in 1928. Wilhelmina died in the flu epidemic of 1919. Her first notable success in America came in Henry Savage's 1906–07 season as Cio-Cio-San in the premiere of Madama Butterfly (in English). Her performance