Lily Laverock

Laverock, Lily

Lily (Johnston) Laverock. Impresario, writer, b Edinburgh, Scotland, 14 Jun 1880, d Vancouver 2 Dec 1969. She emigrated to Canada in the 1890s with her family and attended McGill University College (Vancouver) and later McGill University. A founding member of the University Women's Club (1907) and the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Women's Press Club (1909), she became a reporter for the Vancouver World (1910) and later women's editor for the News-Advertiser (ca 1918). She was the first woman in Vancouver to become a general reporter. By 1921 she had begun to work as an impresario, and in the succeeding years brought to the city, through her International Celebrity Concerts, such figures as Geraldine Farrar, Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Nellie Melba, John McCormack, Benno Moiseivitsch, and Sergei Rachmaninoff, and such ensembles as the Don Cossack Singers and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo - an effort which made a profound contribution to the musical life of Vancouver. Laverock temporarily suspended her concert sponsorship at the beginning of World War II and retired in the early 1950s.