Florence Du Val was the fifth child and second daughter of Charles Allen Du Val and his wife Elizabeth. She was baptised on 2 September 1842 in Manchester Cathedral, where on 4 June 1861 she married William Thomas Holland (1834-1899).

When first married, Florence and William lived in a small house in Wembdon near Bridgwater in Somerset, where William’s brother [father?] , the Reverend Thomas C. Holland was the minister at the local Unitarian chapel. Prominent among his congregation was Charles P. Browne, who was the owner of Browne & Co, manufacturer of bricks and tiles, and for whom William worked.

Soon they moved to a large house on West Quay in Bridgwater called The Lions because it had large stone lions guarding the front entrance.

Florence and William Holland had three daughters. They were Mina, Lilian Florence (Lily), and Kathleen. All three were to marry famous scientists.

If the High Victorian age could be said to be colourful, then that colour was purple. Dyes had been available for centuries, but they were derived from plants or animals. Until that time, purple was very costly and could only be obtained from a rare murex shell. But in 1856 the chemist William Perkin, who had actually been trying to make quinine from coal tar, produced a chemical called mauveine, the very first synthetic dye, which became known as mauve. He patented it, and soon it was being made in vast quantities at his factory by the Grand Union Canal in Greenford. William Perkin had founded the synthetic dyestuffs industry, and thereby also the pharmaceutical industry, as the earliest synthetic drugs were in fact colourless dyes.

His son was also named William and he too became a renowned chemist, and author with his brother-in-law of the standard textbook on organic chemistry known to generations of students as late as the 1950s simply as Perkin & Kipping.

Frederic Kipping was cousin to the Holland sisters, their mothers being daughters of Charles Allen Du Val. On a visit to their Manchester relatives in 1882, Mina Holland met young William Perkin who was a friend of Frederic Kipping and had worked with him at the University of Munich. Both had a great love of music, and William Perkin was an excellent pianist. After he returned to Munich they wrote letters to each other. In 1886 he came back to England and spent a year studying at Owens College (now the University of Manchester), during which time he made visits to Bridgwater.

In 1887 William Perkin was appointed Professor of Chemistry at Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh. And on New Year’s Eve in the same year he married Mina Holland.

Kathleen Holland, the youngest of the three sisters, met yet another organic chemist. When her brother-in-law was at the Institute of Chemistry in London, her sister Lily Kipping told her that he had taken on a young Birmingham student, Arthur Lapworth. He was the son of Charles Lapworth Professor of Geology at Birmingham University. Arthur Lapworth played the viola at musical evenings organised by Mina Perkin, and he also played the violin. Kathleen Holland was herself a keen musician and played the cello. She eventually met the new student when Arthur Lapworth was invited by the Hollands to spend his summer vacation with them at The Lions in Bridgwater.

In 1898 Arthur Lapworth was appointed Professor of Chemistry in London, and the prospect of marriage dawned. However William Holland, father of the three sisters, became seriously ill, and died on 11 December 1899. Not until after the usual period of mourning could the wedding proceed, and Kathleen Holland and Arthur Lapworth were married in St Mary’s church in Bridgwater on 14 September 1900.