Sculptor born in West Derby, Liverpool, the eldest son of the architectural sculptor, Alfred Norbury (1843–1934). He learnt his trade presumably from his father, the 1891 census recording him as a ‘Sculptor’s Apprentice’. In the meantime, however, he was taking formal instruction, firstly at Liverpool’s Municipal School of Art and subsequently at the South London Technical School of Art. Norbury contributed to Liverpool’s Autumn Exhibitions from 1888 to 1902, portrait busts and medallions only until 1897, turning to reliefs of imaginative subjects for his last three appearances. In 1894 the sculptor Charles John Allen arrived in Liverpool to take up his post as Lecturer in Sculpture and Modelling at the School of Architecture and Applied Art (‘The Art Sheds’). He also set up his own studio and at some point, took on Norbury as an assistant. Allen gave him what was probably his first important job, carving the two stone reliefs he had designed for the exterior of Liverpool’s St George’s Hall: Liverpool, a Municipality, employs Labour and encourages Art and Liverpool collects Produce and exports the Manufactures of the Country (c.1896–1898). Norbury himself was teacher of woodcarving at the Art Sheds, 1897–1903. One of the exhibits at the 1902 Liverpool Autumn Exhibition was a model of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board’s new office building, which had been designed by the architects Briggs and Wolstenholme and made by Norbury; as Allen was responsible for supplying the building’s sculptural decoration it may have been he who recommended Norbury for the job. In 1902 Norbury joined a territorial unit, the 1st Cheshire Royal Engineers, transferring to the Cheshire Infantry Brigade as a captain in 1908 and serving with this unit as a major during the First World War. In 1918 he was awarded the Italian Croce di Guerra and the Order of the British Empire for services during the war. On his return to Liverpool in 1919 he found commissions hard to come by. In that year his son emigrated to Canada and in the following year Norbury and his wife did the same. They settled in Edmonton, Alberta, and Norbury re-established himself as a sculptor, his principal commissions being the Red Deer Cenotaph (1922) and the Holden Cenotaph (1923), both in Alberta. He died on 26 December 1965.
According to the biographical details Norbury supplied to the Provincial Archives of Alberta, from 1900 when he went into private practice as a sculptor, until 1914 when he went off to war, he ‘did the carving for most of the public buildings in Liverpool’. Unfortunately, no records have yet been found to support this statement.
Ancestry website sources: England and Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index … 1872, Q1; England censuses: 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911; Liverpool … Church of England, Marriages and Banns … Wavertree, St Bridget, 1896; Liverpool … Electoral Registers … The Abercromby Division, 1904–05.
Bibliography: M. Bennett, The Art Sheds, 1894–1905 (Walker Art Gallery catalogue), Liverpool, 1981, n.p. (Norbury is listed as a member of staff under no. 194: ‘The University Calendar’); T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 261, 263; M.H. Clough (ed.), C.J. Allen 1862–1956: Sculptor and Teacher, Liverpool, 2003, p. 27; Edmonton Journal, 28 December 1965, p. 24 (obituary); HeRMIS (Provincial Archives of Canada): ‘Frank H. Norbury fonds’.
Terry Cavanagh, October 2025