Sculptor born on 23 August 1901, in Elstree, Hertfordshire, one of the five daughters of Walter Key Parbury, a physician, surgeon and later, radiologist, and Annie Lillian (née Crouch). She entered the Slade School of Fine Art in 1920, studied under Henry Tonks and George Havard Thomas, and graduated in 1924 with a diploma in Fine Art. Her oil painting of a male life-class model, from 1922, is in the University College London Art Museum. She received her first sculpture commission, a portrait head of the chairman of the governors of an approved school, while still a student. But despite this auspicious start she seems not to have been able to support herself on sculpture commissions alone. According to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald (2 June 1937), Parbury initially followed her father into the medical world; towards the end of a brief notice of the visit of her sister, Patricia, a violinist, to Melbourne, the journalist concluded: ‘One of her sisters, Miss Kathleen Parbury, was for a time a radiographer, and now devotes most of her time to sculpturing bones, skulls and skeletons for the Royal College of Surgeons.’ Although little is known of her independent work as a sculptor in these years, it is possible that she continued to take portrait commissions in her spare time. There is, for example, her 1938 bronze bust of Sir Arthur Keith, the retiring conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, which, having been presented to the subject by his friends and pupils, was in turn passed by him to the Museum for safe-keeping. The earliest known reference to Parbury exhibiting her work dates to 1941, when she showed two sculptures at the Royal Scottish Academy. In 1953, she was one of the founder members of the Society of Portrait Sculptors and was elected a Fellow in 1966. Her busts from these years include Field Marshall Sir Gerald Templar; the Antarctic explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs; the actress Dame Sybil Thorndike; and the educationist Sir Richard Livingstone. In 1955, with Josefina de Vasconcellos, Parbury organised the exhibition, ‘The Gospel in Sculpture’ at St John’s Wood. The post-Second-World-War programme of church building and reconstruction provided her with a number of commissions, including four for churches built or enlarged by the architect N.F. Cachemaille-Day: a relief of the Risen Christ in concrete for St Michael and All Angels, Bemerton Heath, Wiltshire (1956–57); a Virgin and Child in concrete over the entrance of St Mary’s, West Twyford, north-west London (church enlarged 1958); a fibreglass relief of St Francis preaching to the birds for St Francis of Assisi Church, Radford, Coventry (1957–59); and four figures of trumpet-blowing angels inside St Columba’s church, Sutton Coldfield (1957–60). In addition, her 3.4m-high red concrete figure of St Aidan in St Mary’s Churchyard, Lindisfarne, Northumberland, 1958, she repeated in white concrete for the façade of architect John Newton’s St Aidan of Lindisfarne (R.C.) Church, East Acton, London in 1960; within St Aidan’s is her carved wood figure of St Theresa. Parbury was elected an Associate member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1960 and a Fellow in 1967. She lived in London from about 1946, but in 1966 finally moved to Lindisfarne following regular visits over the years. She gave up sculpture in her later years to concentrate on writing, publishing The Saints of Lindisfarne (1970); Star of the North. The Life of the Venerable Bede (1973); and Women of Grace: A Biographical Dictionary of British Women Saints, Martyrs and Reformers (1985). She died on 27 September 1986 and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Lindisfarne; the church contains a memorial stained-glass window to her designed by L.C. Evetts.
Ancestry website sources: England censuses for 1911, 1921; London … University College Student Record Card for Kathleen Parbury; Electoral registers, 1929–66; England and Wales, National Probate Calendar … 1986.
Bibliography: Birmingham Daily Post, 23 January 1959 (‘The Friendly Saint’); D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; Historic England – Official List Entry: ‘Church of St Mary, Brentmead Gardens NW10’; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, p. 59; Mapping Sculpture; Royal Society of Sculptors: ‘Kathleen Parbury FRBS’; Sydney Morning Herald, 2 June 1937, p. 9; P. Usherwood et al, Public Sculpture of North-East England, Liverpool, 2000, pp. 32–33; Wikipedia: ‘Kathleen Parbury’.
Terry Cavanagh, March 2026
