The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Stiebel has taken the lives and hearts and aspirations of Englishwomen and transmuted them into clothes, adding that touch of the artist, something that is rich and strange and exciting – like the sweeping scarlet cloth cape over a black dress that makes so dramatic an entrance – and the town suits made exciting by scarlet braid, or stripes of Persian lamb, plus absurd bonnet hats. He builds unusual and lovely colour combinations, such as a dark, slatish purple chiffon scarf and a bunch of violets with ash-pink crêpe, or adds a spangled scarf and a charlady bonnet.

  Stiebel often joined Connie and Syrie in their junk-shop raids and the trio made many discoveries, ‘either delightful or valuable!’ They found two marble-topped tables ‘for a song’ in the Caledonian market and spent ‘hilarious hours’ rummaging around the furniture storage warehouse off Tottenham Court Road. Although Connie was never as ruthless with antiques as Syrie, if an object had potential to hold flowers she would strip, paint and re-cover with as much brio as her friend. If something was not waterproof she would get her ‘chap’ to fit a special lead lining inside. Connie’s ingenious improvisations were a great wonder to Stiebel, who was extremely fond of both of his ‘lady companions in style’, despite thinking that Syrie had ‘a vulgar streak’. Connie, however, was ‘without a flaw’ and he loved her talent for making life civilized – whether with food, furnishings or, of course, flowers. He once said she had ‘started something which was spreading over the country like a wonderful euphoric disease’.

  Connie had already demonstrated her ability in the commercial world with her work for Atkinsons’ and Drage’s. Now Heals, a leading London furniture store and one of the ‘cathedrals of consumption and barometers of fashion and style’, approached her. The most fashionable shops had begun to use top designers to attract customers with eye-catching window displays, state-of-the-art interior decorations and modernist advertising posters. Prudence Maufe, wife of the architect Edward Maufe, was a trained decorator. She had had an affair with Ambrose Heal, whom she persuaded to let her create entire rooms of furniture and furnishings in the store’s Mansard Gallery, quite a novel idea in those days. In order to show the full lived-in effect, Maufe asked Connie to do displays of flowers to fit the scheme. ‘It was a weekly masterpiece,’ wrote Maufe, ‘and I used to look forward to meeting a genius every Monday.’ However, her first sight of Connie was a disappointment: ‘I had pictured someone as tall and elegant as her own lilies; instead a short, and by now plump middle-aged woman arrived wearing an overall, an outsized hat and an armload of incongruously jangling bracelets . . . One’s impression was of a fussy little dowager duchess.’

  As with Atkinsons’, word spread among Heals’ customers and many came especially on a Monday just to see Connie’s floral ‘weekly masterpiece’. Connie was now firmly linked with all the big leading names in decoration and design. For one King’s Road drawing-room Syrie Maugham provided a carved wood console table painted white; the textile designer Marion Dorn designed the rugs in white and beige; Oliver Messel created a draped white plaster female figure which hung on the wall; and Connie arranged white lilies in a huge white ceramic vase that stood on the console table.

  In addition to her Chelsea house Syrie owned a villa in the fashionable French resort of Le Touquet, much favoured by the rich, who went for long weekends to play polo or take the sea air. It had been a sanctuary from her unhappy marriage, and since her divorce it had become another place in which to show off her latest designs. Weekends at the Villa Eliza, named after her daughter, were filled with interesting and influential guests who admired her styles and spread the word. Magazine editors had discovered that their readers gained vicarious pleasure from a peep into the homes of the famous and, although this meant original creations were widely plagiarized, it did afford decorators considerable free advertising. For example, House and Garden described Syrie’s villa in great detail: the drawing-room was decorated solely in tones of white and beige, it said, with peach-coloured silk curtains and beige sheepskin rugs, white leather on natural oak chairs, white lampshades, white gesso mirror frames and white porcelain. ‘All this white and beige’, the reporter wrote, ‘can only mean a great deal of cleaning and maintenance’, which for those who could afford an army of servants was half the point. Connie was among the guests who crossed the Channel for these rather wild and eccentric weekends. During one long summer house party Beverley Nichols recalled her bowls of white roses on the Provençal sideboard, adding that they were ‘so overblown that one had to be somewhat adroit in lifting the silver lids on the hotplate, lest the petals should fall into the kedgeree’.

  Syrie never failed to go home without booty bought in the French flea-markets. The artist Paul Nash sourly complained about formidable designer ladies such as Syrie ‘hopping backwards and forwards between England and the Continent on the benefit of the Exchange. In their homeward flight they seldom failed to carry back something for the nest, a piece of stuff from Paris, a German lamp, a steel chair or just a headful of other people’s ideas.’ In Syrie’s case this included the work of the French minimalist Jean-Michel Frank. Connie’s booty, with the exception of a vase or container that caught her eye, was usually botanical; she would comb the beaches and dunes for grasses and wild flowers growing along the seashore.

  Three years after creating her first Atkinsons’ window displays, Connie was successful and famous. She had found a new clientele and new openings for her business, and she could now add the cutting edge of fashionable interior design to her portfolio of shop windows, theatres, cinemas and private patrons. What makes her achievement particularly extraordinary is that she managed to do it with a handful of staff in a backstreet flower shop in Pimlico. Its small door became increasingly battered as customers, staff, buckets of flowers and delivery boys passed in and out throughout the day. The telephone rang shrilly non-stop, and one girl had to be deputed just to answer calls and take orders. It wasn’t quite how Connie had imagined it, but as long as the thrill and the rush were on, she thrived on it.

  Gradually the little staff at Belgrave Road increased. When the young actor John Gielgud, whom Connie had been providing with flowers for his dressing rooms for some time, suggested that she might give his sister her first job, Connie typically agreed. Eleanor Gielgud was quite a colourful character. Though she showed little interest in flower arranging, she was deft with her hands and learned to wire, and sometimes helped the florist out in a crisis. Nell had a racy tongue and a whiff of stage glamour about her that everyone loved. Her nicknames for the staff were always apt. Some of her ‘resting’ actor friends would help out in the shop for pocket money, just for the fun of it. Charles Laughton used to come in; he would grovel about among the discarded twigs and leaves on the floor because, he said, it was where he found the best things – he rather fancied himself as a flower arranger who could make an effective vase out of almost nothing. Connie, of course, adored him.

  Nell Gielgud was told that part of her responsibility was to keep the books, which terrified her as she had only an elementary knowledge of bookkeeping; it was enough, however, for her to see that things were not looking good.

  One evening Shav found her weeping over the accounts, unable to make them add up to a profit. She knew that Covent Garden wholesalers’ bills allowed no credit and would have to be paid by the end of the week. When Shav went over the accounts, as he should have done regularly, he got quite a shock. Only the floristry and cut-flower sections were making a real profit. In spite of the long hours worked by Connie, Val, George Foss and the junior decorators, the decorating side barely broke even. Connie, who worked solely out of passion and the creative urge, was ignorant of proper costing and kept her prices far too low, often failing to build in costs such as transport.

  For the displays at Atkinsons’, retouched two or three times a week, she charged a mere £5, and for Heals’ ‘weekly masterpieces’ only £1. Sidney Bernstein’s cinema contract required long journeys and that too was priced far too low, as wer
e the lavish parties and house decorations. Commissions brought valuable publicity and business but were of little use if the extra work failed to profit the shop. No one, it seems, had realized that the bills had to be dealt with on a proper basis. Having no sense of the cost of things, if Connie suddenly decided that an arrangement needed a rare orchid or some other exotic and expensive addition, someone would be sent round to a rival florist’s to buy it at retail price and any profit would be gone. Flo Standfast, too, was incurring serious losses. Shav discovered that one creation priced at thirty shillings had actually cost the business forty-two shillings’ worth of Flo’s time to make. At this stage Shav Spry did not have an active full-time hand in the business that bore his name, but it seems extraordinary that Connie’s ‘helpmeet and support’, a trained chartered accountant, had not kept his eye on the ball. Just as Connie and her team were doing so well, it seemed as if they might have to restrict themselves to more modest activities until they got the shop back on an even keel.

  Connie, the eternal optimist, rarely saw the sensible way forward. When she heard that a shop next door to Atkinsons’ Perfumery was vacant she decided that this would be the obvious move. They would leave the backstreets of Pimlico and set themselves up in the fashionable centre of the West End – surely then business could only get better. A Bond Street address would enable her to charge the same prices as established commercial florists like Edward Goodyear, Moyses Stevens and Felton. The leading flower shops in the West End were highly efficient, well-established businesses. They constituted formidable opposition for a small, barely known firm run by a person with amazing artistic ability and an impressive clientele but little business sense. Connie nevertheless believed that they could improve turnover by selling cut flowers to passing customers, instead of clients having to send their chauffeurs out to Pimlico. The premises were larger, so they could employ more staff there. The windows of Flower Decorations would complement those of Atkinsons’ next door and would draw even greater numbers to see Connie’s dramatic arrangements; together they would dominate Burlington Gardens and bring new customers streaming through the doors. Even Shav acknowledged that it was an opportunity not to be missed. Somehow they found the money to prime the failing accounts and took the lease. It proved to be a risk well worth taking.

  No. 4 Burlington Gardens consisted of an elegant showroom with offices behind. Syrie Maugham and Norman Wilkinson helped design it, adding mirrors, white walls and bamboo screens. Connie, with her eye for new or unusual materials, used dull white surgical rubber sheeting pleated on screens to divide the front window from the interior. She made grand-looking gesso-style tables at no cost by draping half-moons of wood with swags of hessian, then plastering the whole lot and painting them white. Down a murderously steep flight of outside steps was a roomy basement where they installed a huge refrigerator to keep the cut flowers. Since they still had the Pimlico lease, Connie initially decided to allow Flo and her assistant to remain there; Flo had always enjoyed special protection from Connie, who treated her as a great artist, which sometimes caused jealousy among other members of staff. But Shav, who had now become more involved in decisions, vetoed the idea. It was no use, he pointed out, for Flo to work as though each piece was intended for the British Museum; praiseworthy it might be, but it wasn’t commercial. The ‘Arts’ department had to be with everyone else, under Connie’s artistic eye and Shav’s financial monitoring.

  Soon everyone was rushed off their feet, and a new decorator was urgently needed. Sheila Young was walking down Burlington Gardens with her mother when she saw in Atkinsons’ window an urn of dried leek heads and old-man’s-beard in a brown ceramic cylindrical vase. ‘That’s the sort of thing I want to do!’ she exclaimed, and entered the shop to enquire who had done it. Directed next door to Flower Decorations, her mother told Connie that Sheila came from a family of keen gardeners and longed for a career in flowers. Sheila had that very day just been for an interview for an apprenticeship in floristry, which had depressed her. Could she not work and train in this shop instead, where the flowers looked so natural and were done so creatively? Connie was immediately taken by the eager girl’s delight and agreed to take her on as an apprentice for a monthly premium which her mother was very happy to pay.

  On her first day in the shop she was mystified when Val set her to strip sloe branches of their leaves, but laboured on until she heard an amused voice behind her: ‘You need only bother with those that have fruit.’ Connie explained how the glowing colours of the fruit on the branches would create character in an arrangement she was doing. For several days Sheila painted earthenware jugs until, at last, Connie allowed her to try her hand at a display in the Atkinsons’ window. Sheila recalled that Connie had a particular technique for instructing her pupils, putting in two or three stems or branches herself to start it off, then handing over with a ‘Now finish that.’ After the first month Connie informed Sheila’s mother that she expected no further payments – the girl had such an outstanding natural flair that she was already a valuable member of staff. For the rest of Connie’s life Sheila Young, along with Joyce Robinson, whom Nell had nicknamed ‘Robbo’, were her chief decorators.

  Connie could no longer do every arrangement herself, but her creative eye saw everything that was done by her team. She kept them alert, demanding new things, never happy to see the same effect twice, instantly pouncing on and dismissing anything that looked formulaic. Connie would sometimes quickly glance at a completed group and then drop some tiny comment like ‘Lime green in the middle’; it always lifted an ordinary arrangement into something special. ‘Suitability’ was her key word for a really good arrangement. ‘Most suitable’ was her highest praise. Connie’s trainees learned by looking, feeling and learning to relax, and they gained confidence by following their instincts and natural spontaneity. They learned from her, slowly absorbing the look of the things she did and the way she did them. The effect created at a church wedding or in a ballroom, for instance – how it blended with the place and the spirit of the event. Afterwards they would sit and analyse, criticize and discuss, thinking up a fresh approach or reworking something already successful; nothing could be repeated or be allowed to go stale.

  As a welcome break from the hothouse atmosphere of shop work, demanding hostesses and society functions, Connie had begun making monthly visits to the Swanley Horticultural College in Kent to give a flower-arrangement class. It helped her retain her interest in education. She would wander round the large college gardens with her class of fifteen girls, collecting materials, often from the vegetable garden, looking for shape and colour, texture and character. Then they would set about creating outsize and lavishly flowing arrangements à la Spry. Even the least talented student was caught up in the enthusiasm and gaiety and blossomed under the individual attention that Connie gave to each of them. The principal of the college, Dr Kate Barrett, had been a lecturer in botany at Imperial College and her most successful students there included the garden designers Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe. Connie lunched with Dr Barrett and picked her brains about all kinds of horticultural matters; she liked to tell people she was entirely self-taught and not at all infallible. She described how one day at Swanley College a student brought in a tall stem of a white umbrella-shaped flower of great delicacy, which Connie did not recognize. After some discussion about its identity, the student took the class back to the experimental garden where she had found it, ‘and there discovered it was the flower of the ordinary cultivated carrot gone to seed!’

  Through teaching at Swanley Connie grew increasingly interested in educating and training new staff. Whenever a new girl was taken on in the shop, she was paired with an experienced one and told to copy her work for a while until she could begin to evolve her own personal style. Connie encouraged her decorators to develop their own styles, but their work would nonetheless retain the intrinsic character of Connie’s pioneering artistry. When any of them walked down Bond Street they could immediately tell
which of them had done Atkinsons’ windows that week; at the same time, everyone knew a Spry arrangement, whoever had made it. Connie’s displays at the perfumery grew ever more daring and unusual, and she had a totally free hand to use any plant materials she wanted. On one occasion she created a jaw-dropping display of red kale and scarlet roses, which drew such large crowds that the police were called to move the traffic on.

  Younger decorators remained for a while under Connie’s immediate supervision. She went with them to every new client and personally planned every large-scale commission. She studied each new interior: ‘My first instinct’, she wrote, ‘is to seek some note round which to plan a scheme.’ For example, ‘Lady Howard de Walden’s green marble staircase in Belgrave Square could best be emphasized by mixed foliage arrangements, while Mrs Ashley’s onyx table lit from beneath gave a water-lily quality to any white flowers.’ A blank canvas was her ideal, which is why she loved the all-white schemes so much. But more often she was confronted with an ugly or cluttered room which, as she said, made her ‘think with longing of what could be done with a whitewashed barn’. Her tact on these occasions was an object lesson to her staff. Without offending the house owner she would contrive to suggest that a curtain or swathe of fabric should be hung over the garish wallpaper or deplorable picture, and the flowers set against it.

  Mrs Spry’s ‘young ladies’, as they were known, worked to an accepted routine. They always went to the front door – not the tradesmen’s entrance; always assembled the arrangements where they were to stand, not in the pantry or scullery; and spread dustsheets around them as they worked, then cleared up immaculately, leaving not a single leaf. This routine applied to church decorating as well (except at St Mark’s, North Audley Street, where there was a strict rule forbidding it). If Connie and her team were decorating for a country party or wedding, they would travel down and stay the night; sometimes they were treated as guests, but were often relegated to the servants’ quarters, which the girls claimed was far more amusing. On one of these occasions, gleefully remembered, the hostess, who had treated them with considerable hauteur, was mortified to find her guests falling upon Connie with cries of admiration and warmth.