The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Connie would continue to develop her passion for gardening until she could write as knowledgeably about cultivating plants as about arranging them. Everywhere she went she jotted things down in her small notebook. The Oppenheimers, she recorded, had solved a particularly tricky problem in their garden in Wales, situated on the side of a very steep hill. They had had it terraced and the banks covered with hurdles held by wooden pegs. Sturdy-growing varieties of rambler rose had then been planted, their long canes tied to the hurdles. The banks were thus held fast and beautifully curtained with a wall of roses. She visited Gravetye Manor in Sussex, the home of the late William Robinson, whose gardener Ernest Markham still ruled. Markham was an expert on clematis. His collection clambered up among the trees, creating great bowers heavy with flowers in summer and wreathed in autumn with filmy seeds. Connie greatly admired Robinson’s legacy of growing plants in the natural manner: ‘When you walk through these gardens in the autumn you find some of the heavily laden apple trees also bearing bronzed leaves of vines which have climbed up through the branches, shining red apples and brilliant red leaves intermingling.’

  One of her oldest gardening friends was Scrase Dickins, whose gardens at Coolhurst, also in Sussex, she especially admired: ‘Mr Dickins has a way of growing flowers so that they look as though they had not been planted by the hand of man. In his woodland garden one might think that the rare lilies grew wild; strange and lovely plants seem to be naturalized by the streamside.’ A new neighbour in Kent was Lord Darley of Cobham Hall, who showed Connie how in the Hall’s great park he had naturalized colonies of sweet-scented bergamot, growing in clouds of crimson, pink and white in the open spaces among the trees. Connie was entranced. It never mattered to her whether she was discussing gardening with an earl, with his gardener or with a nurseryman; what was important was their passion and what she could learn from them. The plantsman Norman Haddon, a fellow iris enthusiast, had a woodland garden in Porlock, Somerset. He shared with her his secret for the successful slaughter of slugs in his delphinium beds: ‘He told me that he mixed crushed meta [a chemical compound of carbide used instead of methylated spirit] with bran and strewed this about near his plants. The effect was remarkable.’

  In the summer of 1934 Syrie Maugham wrote to Connie telling her that she had sold Villa Eliza in Le Touquet and made an arrangement to rent the Pavilion, a Victorian folly in the grounds of Waddesdon, the Rothschild estate near Aylesbury. Syrie, who was no gardener, begged Connie to come and see what could be done in the garden. Connie knew several members of the Rothschild family, who were great garden lovers, especially Lionel Rothschild at Exbury, and she was curious to see the place. Visiting for the weekend, Connie found Syrie’s new garden a disappointment. Although there were some fine elms and chestnuts and open lawns spreading gracefully down to a lily-choked artificial lake, there were neither flower beds nor shrubs to give structure and excite the eye with colour. Connie made a few suggestions, planted up a few pots and left her friend to it.

  She now decided the Burlington Gardens shop was too small and that that too should be moved, preferably to an even more fashionable part of town. She still put great faith in the West End, and new premises were found at 64 South Audley Street, just off Grosvenor Square, in fashionable Mayfair. ‘It must be alright because it’s farther west,’ she said. It was probably no coincidence that Syrie Maugham was also moving her showrooms to Mayfair. Syrie, like Connie, needed constant stimulation. She was now bored with her all-white schemes and had moved on to strong colours, mirrored glass, shells, bamboo and polished steel. By 1934 Vogue was reporting a ‘new direction’, writing of one of Syrie’s cocktail parties:

  [It was] a sort of farewell to the big white room, which has now become a white and scarlet room since she has acquired two big mural decorations by Christian Bérard which are a riot of colour. Instead of the sofas being covered in white they are now covered in Holland linen with red fringes, and cushions of different shades of scarlet. There were big bouquets by Mrs Spry of different shades of scarlet flowers mixed with white and a few white chairs touched with scarlet paint. So this must definitely be the end of white.

  While waiting for the new Mayfair shop to be refurbished, Connie began to consider other ideas. As the business continued to grow she would obviously need to expand her staff, and new decorators would have to be trained in her unique style. Still hankering for some form of teaching role, Connie decided there was a need for a flower school. The only training then available was an apprenticeship in the workroom of one of the leading floristry shops. Fourteen-year-old school leavers worked on mossing wreaths, de-thorning roses, cutting flowers and putting them in water: dull, routine work with no creative challenge to make it worthwhile. Apprenticeship, which they had to pay for, was a long, hard grind and they had to love the work to survive. There were no courses in the kind of flower decorating Connie had made famous, and which she claimed was a quite different art. If she wanted girls skilled in her new art form, she would have to teach them herself. She had been observing the progress of her friend Rosemary Hume’s Cordon Bleu cookery school, which had opened in London in 1931 and was proving very successful. Although the first students had mostly been debutantes, the intake had broadened to include serious-minded girls who viewed cookery either as a potential profession or as a source of satisfaction and pride in the home. In 1935 the school moved to an old tea shop in Sloane Square and with the extra space had opened a proper restaurant. Rosemary’s mentor Monsieur Pellaprat gave them permission to use the name Au Petit Cordon Bleu – a title that she and Dione Lucas also used for their popular book of recipes, published in 1936.

  Early in 1935 Connie opened the Constance Spry Flower School in the basement of Sunderland House in Curzon Street. It was a rather amateurish affair, with two hours of lectures and demonstrations a day. As at Rosemary Hume’s cookery school, many of the students were merely debutantes amusing themselves, or girls filling in time before going on to secretarial college or marriage. But there were a few with real talent and ambition who were allowed to help out in the shop and to lend a hand on rush orders. Those who showed sufficient promise were taken on when their course ended.

  Connie was often asked by clients if she would train their daughters. ‘It would just suit her, she’s so dreamy and artistic’ was frequently given as a qualification, and Connie would gently point out that flower decoration required someone with a tough disposition, great patience and skilful hands. ‘Dreamy’ was not required – ‘Quickness and a sure hand are far more useful, for an eye can be trained more readily than a character changed.’ Speed was certainly of the essence, and a good sense of humour also helped. In her book Flowers for House and Garden Connie laid out her requirements for a successful flower decorator:

  An open and unprejudiced mind, a gift for constructive criticism and the ability to see the essential quality in what is beautiful are all valuable assets . . . Prejudice and preconceived ideas which refuse to be altered are a drag on one’s progress. If one dislikes certain flowers, colours and combinations of colour, this is a personal matter; to refuse to understand them or to use them well is, however, a mistake. To see the possibilities of all colours and all subjects is a help.

  She went on to stress the importance of really looking at the room that is to be decorated: seeing its positive values, sensing its atmosphere and understanding how different flowers could contribute to or complement those qualities. For example, one might plan a flower scheme round a single picture or piece of furniture, or to stress the colour of the walls or hangings. Even the most beautiful flower arrangement, if not in sympathy with its surroundings, can destroy the beauty and symmetry of a room, drown its subtleties and override its individuality. ‘We have gone a long way’, she wrote, recalling Irish memories, ‘since the days when ivy was trailed round picture frames and fireplaces hidden by banks of flowers.’ Just as important was the need to look for potential material in the garden, flower market or hedgerow; to see all ki
nds of possibilities and not be prejudiced by convention or fashion. ‘Rules are there to be broken,’ Connie would say to her students, and when they looked surprised she would laugh, ‘in the most “suitable” way.’

  Shav now decided that the business should become a limited company: Flower Decorations Ltd. The directors were to be Constance Spry, Val Pirie, a chartered accountant colleague of Shav’s and Victor Stiebel, who said: ‘I was there to be on Connie’s side.’ Stiebel had to a great degree filled the empty space in Connie’s life left after the death of Norman Wilkinson. But he agreed to be a director of Flower Decorations only if Connie became a director of his company too, which she did. Eleanor Gielgud became company secretary. Shav, perhaps surprisingly, took no formal interest in the business. That said, he was undoubtedly a backseat driver with considerable influence over both Connie and Val. If one did not support his views, the other would be sure to agree with him.

  In March 1935, after months of decorating and refurbishing, they finally moved into 64 South Audley Street. With contributions from Syrie and Oliver Messel, Connie had again used all her ingenuity to create a lavish-looking interior from bits and pieces: these included offcuts from Victor Stiebel’s couture workrooms, wrought-iron tables stripped and gilded by Syrie, plus marbled pedestals and gold-painted cherubs produced by Messel, leftovers from the set of one of his theatre productions. The flower school, too, moved to premises across the road, and was rather grandly renamed the Modern School of Flower Work. The new shop was spacious and the staff of fifty could work comfortably, spread over three floors: a big well-lit basement workshop, at street level an elegant shop overflowing with flowers and eager young staff and, upstairs, a special wedding room.

  Weddings were now a major part of the business, and almost every Friday and Saturday a team of girls worked against the clock making bouquets and decorating a church – in high summer, often several churches. Connie had devoted a whole chapter to flowers for weddings in Flower Decoration: ‘Flowers are part of the pageant and must complement both the bride and bridesmaids’ dresses and the church where the service is to take place . . . with pageantry one needs uniformity, but not so everyone looks alike.’ Connie had always had strong views regarding flower decorations in church, but she had not found it easy to gain the acceptance of the society churches favoured for London’s grander weddings. For all her railing against the common practice of filling the nave with low pots of ferns and palms that no one could see after the congregation had gathered, or the commercial wedding florists’ terrible (according to Connie) habit of turning a church into ‘a bower of flowers or an herbaceous border’, London’s clergy were initially reluctant to give a ‘backstreet florist’ like Connie an entrée.

  When Emily Lutyens, wife of the architect and a regular customer of Connie’s, was planning her daughter Mary’s wedding at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in February 1930, she wanted Connie to decorate the church. The clergy at the church were particularly unwilling to allow Mrs Spry and her innovative arrangements across their portals. Lady Lutyens, however, was a forceful personality and that, allied to her husband’s prestigious name, won the day. February could not be a more difficult month for flowers; Connie raided the markets and found huge branches of the beautiful Eucalyptus globulus with its creamy-white seed-heads. She and her team sat up half the night painting the backs of the leathery leaves blue. The branches were then arranged in urns on alabaster pedestals so that they looked like two waterfalls, cascading down on either side of the chancel steps. The effect was exquisite and quite unlike anything that had been seen at St Margaret’s, or indeed any wedding, before. It was typical Connie – she was always adamant that displays in a church must never obscure the building’s architectural features, nor be dotted haphazardly around. Two dramatic displays at the chancel became her classic wedding style. In the newspapers the Lutyens wedding attracted much publicity, of which the flowers received their full share. After this triumph, it was harder for the smart churches to refuse Connie entry.

  When the Duchess of Norfolk was married in Brompton Oratory, a difficult interior to decorate with its cavernous space and low lighting, Connie matched the flowers in the church with those carried by the bridesmaids: the brilliant carmines and scarlets toned with their pale-blue dresses and ‘the place simply glowed’. The marriage of Lady Howard de Walden’s daughter in the Russian church in South Kensington presented other problems, not least that the congregation was expected to remain standing throughout the ceremony. So posts were attached to the pillars, and vases like Venetian lanterns attached to the posts, then the vases filled with large bouquets of white flowers so that the whole aisle seemed to be a floral guard of honour. For a marriage in a synagogue, Connie used the wedding canopy of white brocade embroidered with silver thread to make an arbour, then garlands of flowers crowned with a slender plume of white lilies.

  The vastness of St Paul’s Cathedral demanded something more dramatic, so for a wedding there she placed at the chancel steps two large formal settings of enormously tall swords of New Zealand flax with generous stabs of scarlet amaryllis. The effect was one of grandeur, austerity and beauty: ‘the groups had some of the character of their surroundings and were not dwarfed or dimmed, but fell into place.’ For her wedding in Southwark Cathedral Betsan Horlick carried a shower of brilliant blue gentians which Vogue reported as ‘completely novel’. The Cathedral was decorated with twelve-foot-high stands of lilies, pampas grass, green hydrangeas and a few yellow globe-headed chrysanthemums: ‘All done by Mrs Spry,’ Vogue reported. ‘We do seem to be very far from the days of Romney bridesmaids and orange-blossom!’

  Young ladies and their mothers would gather in the Wedding Room to pore over examples of bouquets and headdresses, with Connie and her team in patient attendance. It called for considerable tact: ‘weddings being very individual and personal affairs sometimes means the bride will carry, for sentimental reasons, flowers which neither assist the general effect nor improve the appearance of her gown,’ Connie wrote somewhat wearily. Her trademark hand spray was a creamy waterfall of huge wax-like lilies flowing in a crescent from waist to hem. Lilium regale, white marguerites and romantic old-fashioned roses were all popular. Sheila Young remembered driving the van from Park Gate to London with buckets of warm water filled with hundreds of stems of orange blossom cut from Connie’s famous walk. The church was then decorated with philadelphus and huge flowering branches of lime, their outer leaves removed. ‘The soft blend of green and white colours and the warm sweet scent was sublime.’

  When Cecil Beaton’s sister Nancy married a Grenadier Guards officer, Connie was naturally asked to do the flowers. She almost overreached herself. It was to be a classic winter wedding and the bride ‘looked like the Snow Queen’. Connie had the bridesmaids linked together ‘like snowflakes’ with whitewashed ropes entwined with garlands of chalk-white flowers, but in the hot, packed church, the whitewash began to flake off, leaving a chalky trail up to the chancel steps and back again, like a small snow storm. ‘It was quite a time’, George Foss recalled, ‘before we were allowed into St Margaret’s again after that.’ But the Beaton family loved it, as did all the guests, and it was talked about long after.

  But the wedding most often remembered for Connie’s sheer daring and originality was that of Lady Violet Bonham Carter’s daughter Laura to Jo Grimond in 1938. Connie filled St Margaret’s, which had been forced, albeit reluctantly, to accept her, with nothing but white urns filled with great billowing sprays of cow-parsley, creating an exquisitely lacy effect – though it is possible that some guests were sneezing by the end of the service. The idea was so successful that it was repeated at a debutante ball at Claridge’s Hotel, where she created a wonderful, creamy summer idyll effect with girls in their white evening dresses ‘floating around the ballroom afoam with ox-eye daisies and cow-parsley’. The hotel management were apparently not amused; they did not expect controversy in the floral decorations. Fearing ridicule and consequent disaster
, Connie was delighted when the society pages responded ecstatically and everyone wanted ‘country weeds’. Because of her use of wild material, a popular joke at the time was to say of an inadequate vase of bedraggled-looking flowers, ‘Ah, Constance Spry – no expense spared!’

  Connie had by now received some royal commissions, her first client being Prince George, Duke of Kent. The Duke, a neighbour of Lady Portarlington, having admired Connie’s flowers at her parties invited her to do the flowers at his private home in Belgrave Square. The Duke’s wedding to Princess Marina of Greece was the highlight of the 1934 Season and Connie was to do the bride’s bouquet. Prince George was a keen gardener and liked to chat to her about gardening while he watched her team at work. He was amused by their free use of pieces from the royal family’s Meissen and Sèvres dinner services, though when his mother Queen Mary came for luncheon they were expected to use conventional pink carnations in more traditional receptacles. The Duchess once asked Sheila Young to remove a vase of lichen-covered branches and decorative kale before her brother arrived from Greece as she felt he would not understand it.