The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  The

  Surprising

  Life of

  Constance Spry

  SUE SHEPHARD

  MACMILLAN

  For Ben

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  1

  Dark Frustration 1886–1900

  2

  Ireland 1900–1910

  3

  The Mine Manager’s Wife 1910–1916

  4

  The Freemasonry of Flowers 1917–1928

  5

  Ensnared with Flowers 1928–1930

  6

  All-White 1932

  7

  Made for Happiness 1932–1936

  8

  Absolute Discretion 1934–1937

  9

  Silver-Tong Manners 1937–1939

  10

  The Sprys’ Wartime Household 1940–1945

  11

  A Beginning School 1945–1950

  12

  Never Be Funny with Flowers 1950–1953

  13

  Lights Up – Lights Out 1952–1960

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography and Sources

  Index

  Introduction

  There was an extraordinary uproar in September 2004 when the Design Museum of London held an exhibition on the work of Constance Spry. The museum’s co-founders, Sir Terence Conran of Habitat and George Dyson, of bagless vacuum cleaner fame, threatened to resign. Flower arranging, they said, was utterly wrong for a design exhibition and a ‘betrayal’ of the museum’s original purpose. ‘Design is about serious technical things, not shallow styling,’ Dyson claimed, and Conran wrote to the Guardian to say that they were ‘confused by the “high-society mimsiness” of Constance Spry and of the suitability of flower arranging for the Design Museum’. Mimsiness, a nonsense word coined by Lewis Carroll from ‘miserable’ and ‘flimsy’, is the kind of word that Constance Spry herself would have used to describe the prim, outdated flower arranging that she most deplored and did most to change. With his Habitat stores, Conran has done as much as anyone to make the British style-conscious, so it was ironic to find him so agitated about a floral designer who similarly encouraged people to feel they could beautify their homes in their own way on a modest budget. Indeed Constance Spry would have been bemused by their narrow vision, not because it smacked of sexism but because in her day design and art were pretty much regarded as the same thing.

  Who was this Constance Spry who had caused such a ‘storm in a flower vase’? Journalists swooped on the story and began reworking the name into a modern brand and associating it with the bland, sterile haut-bourgeois domestic perfection of the 1950s whereas in fact her greatest achievements were in the 1930s when she revolutionized the art of flower arranging – indeed, she made it an art. Nearly half a century after her death, Constance Spry was resuscitated as a household icon and taste-maker famous for doing the flowers for high society, for establishing a posh finishing school and for writing a bestselling cookery book which in 2004 Waitrose Food Illustrated selected as ‘one of the greatest cookbooks of all time’. None of this is incorrect but it is nevertheless wide of the mark of the real Constance Spry – for she was neither the ‘cookery woman’ nor the grand society ‘flower lady’ of popular imagination.

  There are few people now who can recall the glamorous days in the Thirties when Constance Spry was the most sought-after flower decorator to the wealthiest and most fashionable homes, but many more of us will remember growing up in the Fifties and Sixties when the family kitchen had a well-thumbed copy of The Constance Spry Cookery Book, written in collaboration with her friend Rosemary Hume. I had particular reason to be familiar with this book and these names. My mother had trained at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in London in the early 1930s and subsequently taught there and knew Rosemary Hume, the school’s founder, who later became my godmother. Rosemary, alas, was so shy and retiring that I hardly knew her, and Constance Spry was just a name on a bookcover. I was quite unaware of her extraordinary achievements, let alone her unconventional life. But as I got older and became more interested, both personally and professionally, in cooking and gardening, I began to wonder about Constance Spry and who she really was.

  It has been claimed that she made the biggest impact on women’s domestic lives since Mrs Beeton – though, unlike Isabella Beeton, she was a genuine original with ideas, creativity and a way of teaching entirely her own. Yet there is no evidence that Constance Spry ever tried to instruct people on how to furnish their homes, to dress, run a household or generally live perfect lives. Most of her own life was spent throwing out convention and debunking the rules of etiquette, of style – and of flower arranging too. Indeed in any one of her books on gardening, flower arranging or cookery you will find a cry from the heart for freedom of expression:

  I want to shout out: ‘Do what you please, follow your own star; be original if you want to be and don’t if you don’t want to be. Just be natural and gay and light-hearted and pretty and simple and overflowing and general and baroque and bare and austere and stylized and wild and daring and conservative, and learn and learn and learn. Open your minds to every form of beauty.’

  Constance possessed a rare combination of talents: as writer, innovator, gardener and, above all, as a floral artist. She was a gifted lecturer and at different periods in her life headed schools for the richest and for the poorest. At a time when most women’s expectations were still limited she believed in instilling in girls from all backgrounds the confidence and freedom to create beauty. Similarly she showed that a woman could, if she chose, run her own business and overcome the gender and class barriers that in those days prevented most women from achieving professional ambitions. Her belief that anyone from any background, rich or poor, had the right and the ability to create beauty and derive pleasure from it reflected her own rags-to-riches story: an unhappy, impoverished childhood, then tough years in health education and teaching in the East End of London before being catapulted, in middle age, into lavish and sophisticated circles as an ‘artist flower designer’. There she was transformed into a successful society ‘floral artist’ lionized by the chicest members of the theatre, interior design and fashion worlds.

  It was a baptism of creative fire and she plunged into it with all her enthusiasm, energy and humour but also with the naivety that characterized everything she did. She rarely looked before she leaped and sometimes she landed on her feet, sometimes not. Her lack of business sense meant she never acquired much wealth and any profits from her shop were always ploughed back into her schools. Along the way was a failed marriage, divorce, cohabitation, adultery, homosexuality, an address book of hugely wealthy clients; plus high-society glamour, royal scandal and royal patronage – none of which seemed to affect her unswerving integrity and down-to-earth approach to every challenge she took on. Despite serving the top echelons of society, Constance, or Connie as she was familiarly known, was genuinely democratic, almost to the point of being blind to class differences.

  She told several stories from her difficult childhood in her books, but otherwise concealed most things about herself and somehow ran her life and her business with personal secrets so well kept that she was able to do flowers for aristocracy and royalty without a whiff of scandal. Perhaps that is why she was sympathetic to other people’s social disfavour. One of her most extraordinary commissions was her and her team’s ‘absolutely silent and loyal’ furnishing of flowers for the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

  Like many artists, Connie relied on rich patrons and so is still associated in people’s minds with luxury �
� the grand ballrooms and elegant drawing-rooms, the fashionable weddings – but she never allowed her clients to dictate to her. Indeed, she was known to abandon a commission if she was asked to compromise her own standards and principles. The fact that Connie served high society never meant that she wished to be part of it nor that she was impressed by the breeding and wealth of her clients. She was never a name-dropper – those most often mentioned in her books are of gardeners and nurserymen whose guidance and opinions she sought. She was popular at all levels of life, from royalty and aristocracy to the ‘lower orders’. The glorious flower arrangements, the friendly and inspiring books, the vivacity and gaiety she presented to the world were all genuine; she had an immense capacity for relishing life, and it was her gift to pass it on to others. But a darker current flowed beneath: she was also a woman who never knew complete peace of mind; she was wayward, nervous and highly strung. She was romantic and deeply sentimental but also tough and sometimes quite cruel when it served her to be so.

  Connie was a restless spirit, always keen to move on to a new challenge – she feared criticism and was never satisfied with her work. Perhaps it was her sense of insecurity that kept her going, kept her alive to new challenges: running a huge London flower shop, creating new gardens, travelling and lecturing, setting up a cookery and flower-arranging school, writing numerous books, or doing the flowers for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding and later for the coronation procession in 1953 – the grand finale of her life’s work.

  Everyone who worked with Connie described her as tough and funny, full of energy and originality. Her friend the writer and gardener Beverley Nichols once described the art of flower arranging as ‘pre-Spry’ and ‘post-Spry’. In between were three extraordinary Spry decades: the extravagant 1930s’ world of designers and artists breaking free from Edwardian fustiness and exhibiting their art and their sexuality with a new-found freedom; the 1940s, a period of wartime austerity and making-do, of gardening and cooking with the Blitz spirit and of refusal to compromise; then the 1950s, the last fling of English high society, of debutante balls and girls’ finishing schools, and later new clients in industry, advertising and politics. Connie’s success, when it finally came, was rapid and brilliant and intimately bound up with the social history of the pre- and post-war years. She designed the flowers for many of the most influential and important people and functions of the time and she made her influence felt in particular on interior decoration, especially the great rage for ‘Vogue Regency’, the all-white interiors of the early 1930s.

  Three things made the name of Constance Spry justly famous: her creative artistry; her refusal to consider the second-rate; and her passion for perfection in detail. Nichols wrote: ‘Constance has the supreme gift – which is really the core of all art and all invention – of seeing things for the first time in a new way, and seeing them whole and seeing them isolated from convention.’ She turned outdated flower arranging on its ear, threw out the rules thereby liberating gardeners and florists, and inspiring designers. Her boldly modernistic approach and her theatrical effects supplanted strict Victorian and Edwardian traditions. She was most famous for freeing the flower vase from the constraints of the stiff formal arrangements of the past, did away with old ideas such as using a single type of flower or just one colour, and pioneered new ways with dynamic creations of mixed and even clashing colours.

  She was very well read, possessed a vast library of books on art, cookery and horticulture, and she took inspiration from an eclectic range of sources: from Dutch and Flemish flower paintings, medieval embroidery and tapestries, old-fashioned plants and classical decoration, interpreting them in her own unique way. She was brilliant at improvisation and an enthusiastic user of new materials such as plastics and sticky tape – and she invented the use of scrunched-up chicken wire, well hidden, to anchor soaring stems and branches that would seem to fly out of her arrangements without benefit of gravity. Instead of the priceless crystal, silver, porcelain or other heirlooms that she might be invited to use at her clients’ homes, she preferred baking-tins, meat plates or junk finds to put her flowers in. Her genius for creating beauty out of the cheapest and simplest materials was legendary. The most controversial aspect of her reputation was her use of all kinds of plant material. With her natural flair and remarkable feeling for the character of flowers and their potential she claimed that nothing should be overlooked, whether gathered from the flower garden, the vegetable patch, or the hedgerows and fields – branches, grasses, leaves, seeds, berries, fruits and vegetables, including her famous kale. Any plant, from the most exotic to the commonest weed, had potential for the container – anything in fact that ‘excited her creative juices’ to work as an artist with the freedom of her particular paintbox.

  Connie’s defining principle was that a flower arrangement should blend with the character of the room and the occasion for which it was intended. She demonstrated that flowers had the power to create mood and also to reflect it. It all lay in the subtlety of the material, the colours and textures, and in the complementary nature of each unique design she created:

  One arranges flowers as the spirit moves you; to obey some inner prompting to put this colour with that, to have brilliance here, line there, a sense of opulence in this place or sparseness in that; to suit your surroundings, your mood, the weather, the occasion. In a word, to do as you please, just as, if you could, you might paint a picture.

  If she made any rules, she quickly broke them; she wrote that flowers should look natural, but then stripped the leaves from branches of lime to reveal the flowers, skeletonized magnolia leaves and painted branches in blue and silver. She rebelled against the fussiness of small vases of flowers dotted around a room and instead would set one or two large, dramatic displays at eye level. She shocked church authorities by decorating weddings with foaming cow-parsley and other wild flowers.

  Connie always wrote with a cheerful, uninhibited directness, never afraid to debunk a convention she did not agree with or side with the reader over a problem. She never patronized her readers and offered them the freedom to follow their own creative inclinations. She opened up new possibilities for self-expression for women. Her books and ideas still seem fresh and inspirational, her flower arrangements as exciting and surprising as ever.

  Her influence and artistry are still around us. Anyone who looks on the Spry era as long forgotten has only to think of Connie’s original use of purple seakale, for instance, to find similar displays winning medals today at Chelsea and other flower shows.

  Among the many people who rallied to defend the Constance Spry Exhibition in 2004 at the Design Museum, the poet James Fenton best summed it up in the Guardian:

  When you visit one of Conran’s shops and find some amusing table decoration – a nice little aquarium full of broad beans or whatever some zany and fetching assistant has thought up that day – all that derives from Constance Spry. You like twig bundles (I don’t) – she knew all about twig bundles, their virtues and drawbacks. The exhibition credits her with singlehandedly overthrowing a flower-arranging rule that insisted on one species to a vase. She pioneered the mixed arrangement, but also the eloquent use of limited materials. The starting point of her philosophy was that wild flowers and weeds could be pressed into service, just as much as tuberoses. One could indeed spend a fortune. One could also spend next to nothing. This was the source of her popular appeal.

  He concluded the piece by recommending a photograph of one of Connie’s arrangements:

  It bears the title ‘Whitewashed Leaves’: a kneeling blackamoor figure in the Venetian style bears a huge display of whitened palm fronds and heaven knows what. It’s fun. It’s dashing, perhaps unacceptable. It’s part of the uncensored history of design.

  Just the kind of response that Constance Spry herself might have come up with.

  Prologue

  No one going up or down Bond Street during the early 1930s could have missed Atkinsons’ new perfumery shop, built in the
latest Art Deco style on the corner of Burlington Gardens and Old Bond Street. With its gilded ‘Flemish’ tower of carillon bells, it was quite unlike anything ever seen before. Inside was a fairytale setting of specially made mirror glass, crystal chandeliers and a delicate fountain. But what first attracted passers-by on crisp, dark winter afternoons were the four huge, warmly lit bay windows in which stood the most astonishing displays of flowers.

  People stopped to stare at the thrilling, theatrical floral tableaux, spotlit and magnificent in soapstone urns and black marble tazzas. They were utterly different from any of the conventional flower displays normally seen in shop windows – formal and static ‘shop’ arrangements of stiffly wired hothouse blooms. People began to make special trips to view the Atkinsons’ windows and admire the majestic yet ethereal displays. They noted the marvellous downward swoop of great trails of garlands and branches that sprang from a shallow vase on a long stem seeming to defy gravity.

  How was it done? What were the strange flowers and leaves? Nothing like those they were used to seeing. It was so new, so original: the combinations of surprising colours and the blending of the materials – flowers, leaves, branches and berries – with a liveliness and freshness of line that broke all the strict rules of flower arranging. Every week new and breathtaking compositions appeared, and shoppers would press their noses against the cold window panes, discussing and arguing. They would go inside, enquire who was responsible for the flowers, then in the charming, heady atmosphere of tinkling glass and water and seductive perfume they would purchase elegant bottles of ‘Love in Idleness’, ‘Oleander’ and ‘Insouciance’, impossibly small pots of creams, and lotions. Atkinsons’ Perfumery was soon doing a roaring trade.