Harold Kirby and his sister
Mary Ada were descended from key Coventry families. Their mother Mary was the daughter of John Cash, the ribbon manufacturer who, with his brother Joseph Cash, set up the world-famous company J. and J. Cash. John Cash had married the daughter of John Sibree, one of the most important Dissenting Ministers in Coventry, (after whom the Sibree Hall is named) and therefore the Kirby siblings had, on their mother's side, a strong ancestry within the dissenting tradition locally (the Cash brothers were Quakers). Both Cash and Sibree families had links with the novelist George Eliot and her friends the Brays.
Their father Alfred Kirby was himself from a prominent Coventry family. His father, a solicitor, had bought a property in Little Park Street, Coventry which is now known as Kirby House, and which is thought to have been designed by Francis Smith, the architect responsible for Stoneleigh Abbey's Georgian West Wing. Alfred himself became a well-known solicitor and clerk to the magistrates in the city.
Harold, born on 16 March 1890, had travelled in Australia before becoming a 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps during World War One, receiving his certificate in 1916 at the Military School, Catterick Bridge for flying a bi-plane. In 1917 he was shot down by anti-aircraft guns and became a prisoner of war in Karlsruhe in Germany. At the age of 52 he married Nancie May Tonge, nee Cook, who had a son by her previous marriage. She later became President of Stoneleigh's W.I.
After the war Harold went into textile manufacturing at Cash's as his mother's family had done, and died on 2 November 1958, his address being The Stone House, 14, Stoneleigh Road, Gibbet Hill.
Mary, born on 9 July 1880 appears to have remained with her parents until their deaths, and when she died on 4 April 1966 was living at 45, Binswood Avenue Leamington.