The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Bernstein was a perfectionist who daily fired off telegrams and nagging memos to his staff: to one cinema manager – ‘A man who sells the Ice-Cream is still in a white overall. This looks horrible and must be stopped’; to Connie – ‘All theatres should now be hanging baskets of greenery and flowers outside their canopies’, to all managers – ‘Regarding rubber heels for the staff . . .’ And so on. No detail was too small to escape his attention.

  Connie and Shav were invited to attend the grand opening of the Granada, Tooting, in South London in September 1931. At 7 p.m. sharp, sixteen trumpeters from the Life Guards blew a fanfare from the steps of the brilliantly lit Italianate façade, and while the public looked on from the chilly streets four thousand invited guests surged inside. Komisarjevsky had designed the immense foyer after a medieval baronial hall, with minstrels’ gallery, carved panelling and heavily beamed ceiling from which heraldic Venetian lions stared down on the milling crowd. Lining the wall were oak and gilded Gothic side-tables on which Connie had placed giant urns of exotic plants and vases containing large displays of sweet-smelling flowers. A 150-foot-long hall of mirrors, with Italian Renaissance marble columns, led the guests on through an arched cloister to the vast splendour of the auditorium. Here everything was the colour of antique gold: the ceiling was embossed in rose and gold mouldings; the walls lined with row upon row of cloistered arches and delicate tracery. A series of cusped Gothic pendants, shrouded in rich draperies, were clustered on the proscenium. The floors were either of marble or covered in deep carpets of rose and mauve, and in the recesses were murals of courtly fifteenth-century figures such as troubadours and damsels in wimples, while above were stained-glass windows and wall paintings simulating illuminated manuscripts.

  As part of the opening show, Bernstein ordered all those who had worked on the cinema to parade onto the darkened stage as their names were announced over the loudspeakers. He did not join them, and neither did Connie, who had fulfilled her commission for these wildly theatrical picture palaces with enormous skill and enthusiasm but was too nervous to make a public appearance. Her name, though, was passed around the elegant and wealthy guests as the woman who had ‘done the flowers’. The experience was overwhelming, and the following day a stunned press described the Tooting Granada as the ‘Cathedral of the Talkies, and one of the seven wonders of London’.

  Connie’s little order book was rapidly filling; suddenly she was finding that she had neither the time nor the flowers to fulfil all her commitments. She desperately needed a base in London to work from, and proper staff to help. Perhaps the answer was a small office or shop where she could also sell flowers. With somewhat reluctant support from Shav, Connie found herself hurriedly setting up a flower business to cope with the demand. It was hardly a good time to open a flower shop. Factories were closing down and banks refusing to lend money to finance new ventures. But, Connie argued, she had secure commissions, the rent would be low and the staff would be paid very little.

  Shav, in the meantime, was becoming increasingly alarmed by these developments. Connie’s flower ‘hobby’ had blown up into a considerable undertaking and he was concerned about the financial risks. Even though they were not married, he was afraid that both he and Connie could find themselves legally responsible for bad debts and overstretched budgets. He was right to be concerned; as would become increasingly clear, Connie was no businesswoman, had no head for figures and seemed barely aware that she was engaging in a commercial venture. But as usual, she was already forging ahead, stubbornly refusing to listen to sense, blind to possible risks and blinkered to suggestions that did not suit the direction in which she wanted to go. This was the Connie that Shav, her friends and employees would have to learn to accept. She was not going to change now.

  Connie flung herself into the challenge with characteristic verve. Although this was not how she had planned it, the idea of owning a small shop appealed to her. She could hear her mother’s disapproval: here was Connie, now reduced to the level of shopkeeper from which she, Etty, had struggled to raise herself all those years earlier. Connie found a shop that suited her in modest rented premises, consisting of ground floor and basement, in Belgrave Road – nowhere near the fashionable Belgrave Square but near Victoria Station on the way down to unfashionable Pimlico. It was, as she later wrote, a terrible mistake to start in such an out-of-the-way place. The shop was called Flower Decorations, which she hoped would distinguish it from the common florist. (She always preferred to use the term flower decorating instead of arranging; perhaps in some snobbish way she believed this distinguished her ‘art’ from ‘business’.) At first she tried to run the shop almost single-handed, doing all the marketing and the flowers herself. She was used to hard work, but now she had taken on something entirely new for which she had neither training nor experience. It was the most critical year of her career, the year in which she made her name; it was also the year in which she dreamed of bringing a new art form to fruition. But it came with the risk that her ‘art’ would be superseded by the demands that accompanied commercial success.

  A steady stream of old friends came through the shop door offering help and advice, from painting walls to bookkeeping. This was always her way of creating her team: picking people up en passant, firing them with her infectious enthusiasm, then simply telling them to ‘get on with it’. Connie’s young brother Gilbert, who worked abroad in colonial administration and was home on leave, came to help get the shop ready. He was dismayed to be told to stipple the walls, a novel painting effect of the time. ‘Nonsense,’ said his sister, ‘anyone can stipple’, and Gilbert got on with it.

  Throughout her life Connie would gather up people she liked and find them jobs, whether or not they were suitably trained. She seemed to have a nose for talent, always confident that her protégés had only to ‘give it a try’ and, with a little guidance from her, would blossom and ‘do brilliantly’. It had worked with the assortment of friends who became her team at Homerton, and would do so again in creating her staff for the shop. One day she came across Florence Standfast, her old student roommate, working nearby in Belgrave Road restoring and painting furniture for an antique dealer, who paid almost nothing. Poor Flo was half-starved. ‘We can’t have this,’ Connie declared, ‘you must come and make artificial flowers for me.’ A department known as ‘Arts’ was born out of Connie’s wish to help her old friend and, like so many of her ‘workers’, Flo remained there, loyal and successful, for twenty years.

  Marjorie Russell sent over some out-of-work Civil Service colleagues, and teachers from Homerton School offered themselves, including her devoted friend Jos Cook, and Mr Phippen, the school instructor in bookkeeping, who came in the evening and did the shop accounts. Gilbert had to return to Africa but his wife Marjorie stayed behind with her baby Norma, to help get the little business on its feet, and became its first saleswoman. Marjorie and Norma lived for a while at Abinger with the Sprys, where Norma later remembered she was looked after mostly by Gladys the cook and only saw her mother, Connie and Shav briefly in the evening. Connie was a tough taskmaster and always led by example. She had a genius for getting everyone enthused and involved so that they would do anything for her without complaint, and often without pay. Above all, what Connie really loved was having a team, and she took an almost schoolgirlish delight in heading her various teams.

  As demand grew, the need for yet more cut flowers increased. The indomitable Walter Trower laboured in Connie’s Surrey garden, sending up vanloads. But even more flowers, and in greater variety, were soon required. Connie started making daily sorties to the London flower markets, getting up at 5.30 each morning to visit Covent Garden to get the best and the freshest. She always loved the market and had a good relationship with the dealers. Her favourite haunt was the French Department in Covent Garden where, even on the drabbest day, Mediterranean flowers and plants formed an oasis of sunshine. Flat French bamboo baskets would be filled with exotic and wonderful surprises: lavish quant
ities of deep-cream, double-flowered tuberoses and tightly furled buds of the rare Iris susiana. There were golden French ranunculus, anemones, eucalyptus, masses of small, white, wild Roman hyacinths, and lily-of-the-valley, ‘smelling gloriously and carrying one straight to the steps of La Madeleine’. Parma violets, which were especially favoured by ladies for their corsages, were sent to England in slatted wicker baskets like picnic hampers. Stacked at the station or quayside waiting to be shipped, they would have been hosed down to keep fresh for the several days it would take for them to arrive at the flower markets.

  Connie also adored exotics with their dramatic and unusual forms and colours: ‘Huge clumps of palm-tree fruits, looking like fantastic bunches of grapes, their small, hard, black fruits on thick, canary-yellow stems; hard to arrange but dramatic in the right place.’ There were branches of pepper-tree that might have come straight from a Tunisian market-place, the delicate pink berries hanging in graceful racemes that lasted for weeks. Many flowers arrived at the shop beautifully packed in wooden boxes, which were chargeable, and money recouped on yesterday’s returns was spent on more flowers. To unpack and search through deliveries sent up from the English gardens produced an almost unbearable feeling of excitement. From the hothouses camellias and gardenias arrived in special cases beautifully lined with cotton wool, as well as ‘all manner of exotic flowers, blue water-lilies, scarlet passion flowers, and strange lily-like and waxy blooms’. It was wonderful in summer to find scented sweet-peas and moss roses, stately spires of delphiniums, foxgloves and eremurus.

  The market traders soon learned Connie’s likes and dislikes; they knew her bête noire was chrysanthemums, but if they had anything new or strange such as a rare orchid, a richly coloured anthurium or a fine passion flower, they kept it back for her. At first she was a curiosity at the market and nobody took her seriously. ‘I’ll give her a fortnight,’ laughed one market official. But Connie passed effortlessly through the fortnight, meeting buyers from old-established florists in the breakfast room at Covent Garden which Munro, the great wholesale flower business, ran for its customers.

  Here Connie loved to sit and listen and learn. Basil Unite, who had just completed his training at Munro’s and was in charge of the lily department, remembered his surprise when the first walked into his office. Covent Garden was hardly a ladies’ world. But there she stood, chatting away to him and humming with vitality ‘like a little transistor set that you tuned into immediately’. Although she was not a big customer, Connie’s influence on the London flower scene was soon reaching back to the markets. She had an insatiable appetite for lilies and white arums, and Basil Unite persuaded James de Rothschild’s head gardener to grow extra quantities for his demanding new customer. Connie knew exactly what she wanted, and she got it. When she wanted big branches of magnolia and camellia, rare species rhododendrons or exotic shrubs, orders went down to plantsmen’s gardens in Devon and Cornwall such as Caerhays, Glendurgan and Trebah and to the Rothschild garden in Exbury, Hampshire. They would always do their best to supply her.

  When the breakfast ritual was over, Connie would sit on the pavement surrounded by her purchases and wait to be collected (she never learned to drive). The little green Austin van would eventually arrive and be loaded to bursting – including its canvas carrier on the roof where thickets of branches would protrude fore and aft – before Connie and her assistant sped back along the Embankment. The policeman on duty at Westminster Bridge got to know the van with its thatch of green, and would hold up the traffic to let them through. It was the sort of thing that Connie loved and they would arrive back at the shop in good humour and gales of laughter, which would carry the overworked and underpaid staff through the long, arduous day and ‘make it all seem so worthwhile’. To get the best plant material meant going very early to market, but Connie’s clients were not such early risers and so with the flowers plunged into buckets of water she and her assistant would rest in a couple of deck-chairs until the time came to set off on their rounds.

  In the early days there were the regular bread-and-butter jobs: Atkinsons’ windows done on Mondays and visited daily to check nothing needed renewing; four big windows at Drage’s in Oxford Street, the Elizabeth Arden salons and the dining-rooms at Hatchet’s Restaurant. Because these places were so hot it was difficult to keep the flowers fresh, and they tended to wilt; Connie gradually developed her own special methods for ensuring her flowers survived all kinds of maltreatment.

  In order to get the best out of her material, Connie found certain methods worth using to ensure long vase life and reduce the trauma which often resulted in drooping and wilting blooms: ‘Some of the most exquisite flowers are the most fleeting, but I find that no reason for disregarding them . . . I would like to say that there are ways and means of prolonging the life and freshness of many flowers that are regarded as being too short-lived to be worth picking.’ She always picked her own garden flowers at least a day before they were needed, and put them in deep pails of water in a cool place. This enabled them to absorb plenty of water before being exposed to the rigours of travel, warm rooms and over-handling during arrangement. There are several kinds of cut flowers that will not last in a vase at all unless they have been first almost submerged in water – for example, arum leaves and maidenhair fern, bougainvillea, violets and annual sunflowers. A few plants such as hellebores, Connie suggested, last better if allowed to ‘swim’ in water before being arranged. Some types of flower are unable to absorb enough water to support both blooms and heavy foliage – for instance, lilac and some philadelphus: ‘You may prolong their life and also gain a greater decorative effect, by removing a good number of their leaves’, she wrote. Some of the most difficult flowers were also her favourites: cow-parsley, lime flowers, euphorbia, wild willowherb and garden lilac, which all require special attention including the stripping off of nearly all the leaves.

  Some of Connie’s methods might sound rather extreme but she was convinced of their efficacy. For example, in order to enable hard-wooded material such as fruit-tree branches and woody-stemmed chrysanthemums to absorb enough water to keep them alive, the cut ends of their stems should be bruised, or crushed with a wooden mallet, several at a time. Very tough stems can be hammered or split for three or four inches. Soft-stemmed flowers can be helped if split with a knife at the cut end to about one inch. Dahlias, hollyhocks and poinsettias should have the ends of their stems either charred or dipped into boiling water for a few seconds before being soaked, while poppies and bluebells should have just the ends of their stems dipped. To restore flowers wilting in a vase she suggested using warm water and, to keep it clear, putting a lump of charcoal in the bottom of the vase. If flowers such as tulips or rosebuds show signs of wilting they can be lifted out of the vase, have their stems re-cut, be rolled up in newspaper to keep them straight, and plunged to the neck in water in a dark, cool place until they revive. Care must be taken that no leaves ever touch the water, and one should never disturb an arrangement after it is done – just top up daily with tepid water.

  Servicing the pot-plants for all the Granada Cinemas required much driving around and heavy lifting and carrying. Then there was the increasing list of clients wanting flowers for parties, dances and weddings. Contracts for flowers for shop windows and cinemas were gradually superseded by private orders for regular floral decorations in the smart society houses, for parties and weddings, or for any special public occasion where an eye-catching display was required. Commissions piled up and more staff were urgently needed. Connie requested help from an agency and, one Monday morning, a rather plain young woman arrived.

  Valmar, or Val, Pirie was from an old Franco-Scottish family. Her grandfather had married a Frenchwoman who insisted on living in France, so he bought a chateau near Angers and transported his entire family, livestock, furniture and possessions by boat from Aberdeen, across France, then up the Loire to his new home. Her father was the MP for North Aberdeen and a passionate gardener, her mother a
daughter of the 17th Baron Sempill. The Pirie children were mostly brought up in France and French was their first language, but with the outbreak of the First World War they had been sent back to Scotland to be educated. Val was musical and had hoped to become a concert pianist, but soon decided she lacked the necessary talent. She also had a flair for fashion and loved dressmaking and was accordingly apprenticed to a tough London couturier, where she was treated more as a general slave than a trainee. After a few years of snubs and scolding, she walked out and signed on at an employment agency. There she was told about a job with a small florist paying just £2 10s a week; she must be good with flowers and gardening and be able to drive a van. Val had been a keen gardener as a child and though she could only name flowers in French, she could drive. Connie felt she had the right instincts and enthusiasm for the job and immediately took her on. For the business it was a decision that would prove unerringly correct. For Connie personally, it was disastrous.

  On her first day Val arrived at the shop at eight o’clock. Flo Standfast shouted to her to hurry and drive the van to the market, where ‘Mrs Spry had expected you at six!’ Val leaped into the van and drove hell for leather to Covent Garden, where she found an anxious little figure on the pavement surrounded by boxes and baskets. ‘Just get me to Atkinsons’ in Bond Street,’ Connie cried, and off they roared. The boxes were unpacked and Connie started to work on one of the big soapstone urns. ‘You do the other to match,’ she told Val. With trembling fingers Val did her beginner’s best, and presently Connie came over. She thanked Val, praised her work and then slightly retouched it; Val was completely hooked. Working with Connie, she recalled, was always delightfully warm and friendly. From the beginning, one was treated as a colleague of equal status, not as a lowly trainee: ‘Everyone’s ideas were encouraged, and it was always praise first and gentle criticism after.’ Connie had the instincts of a good teacher, always patient, never negatively critical but absolutely demanding of complete dedication and effort.