The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  The following year, on the Duke’s recommendation, Connie was invited to do the flowers for another royal wedding, that of his brother the Duke of Gloucester and Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott. Connie and her girls might have been allowed into St Margaret’s, Westminster, but they were still not permitted to work in the Chapel Royal where the ceremony took place. They did, though, provide the bouquets for the bride and bridesmaids who included the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Norman Hartnell designed the gowns and the bride carried a bouquet

  made of cream-coloured flowers in a graceful crescent shape and in order that no note of green should disturb the delicate aspect of this bouquet some of the flowers were mounted on fine wires which were bound with silver. This enabled an effect of richness to be achieved without heaviness. The bridesmaids carried the palest of flesh-pink roses and here again no green was used, but a few fragile skeletonised magnolia leaves veined with gold leaf, mounted on gold-bound stems, were introduced among the roses.

  ‘Skeletonised’ leaves veined with gold or silver-leaf were quite a novelty and became a Spry hallmark. Once again the press declared that Mrs Spry ‘had set a new standard in elegance and grace’.

  A further sign of royal favour came when the Prince of Wales became a regular client. On the evening of the Duke of Gloucester’s wedding his father, King George V, wrote in his diary, ‘Now all the children are married except David.’ The Prince of Wales, known to his friends and family as David, was now forty years old but still a confirmed bachelor. To his father’s huge disapproval he had become involved with a succession of married women, notably Freda Dudley Ward, the wife of a Liberal MP.

  Fort Belvedere, the Prince’s bachelor home, was an oddity on the edge of Windsor Great Park, a mock-Gothic folly built in 1750 by George II as a military lookout post; it still boasted a line of four-pounder guns. The Prince flew the flag of the Duchy of Cornwall to make it clear that it was his private retreat, and came to love it more than anywhere else. Connie, accompanied by either Sheila or Robbo, visited regularly to do the flowers. They were always made to feel welcome at the Fort and were well looked after by Mrs Mason, the housekeeper. There was always a jigsaw puzzle laid out in the drawing-room, music from the gramophone to listen to while they worked, and they were allowed free run of the gardens to pick whatever they wanted for their arrangements. The girls took sandwiches for lunch, but if the Prince was in residence Connie was invited to join him. A keen and knowledgeable gardener, he greatly enjoyed their horticultural discussions. He was one of the few people to show interest in her previous work as an educator and questioned her closely about her experiences in Ireland and the East End. He was at that time particularly concerned with the plight of the miners, but it is unlikely that Connie ever confided that her first husband was a mine manager and that, for several years, she had lived within sight and sound of an Irish coalmine.

  The Prince had recently taken up with a new companion, an American divorcee. ‘Lunched with Emerald [Cunard] to meet Mrs Simpson,’ the Conservative MP and diarist Henry ‘Chips’ Channon wrote on 23 January 1935. ‘She is a nice, quiet, well-bred mouse of a woman with large startled eyes and a huge mole. I think she is surprised and rather conscience-stricken by her present position and the limelight which consequently falls upon her.’

  Wallis Simpson, who was living in London with her second husband Ernest Simpson, was also a client of Flower Decorations Ltd. She was very fastidious, hated wire-netting to show and knew nothing about flowers, but she always gave warm praise when the job was done and everyone at the shop wanted to do her flowers. Sheila Young, who usually attended her house to make up the vases and tend the exotic plants in two glass accumulator tanks, remembered Mrs Simpson saying, in her American drawl, how she would like some spring branches ‘with those cute little yellow worms on them’.

  Mr and Mrs Simpson were introduced to the Prince of Wales at a party in London given by Thelma, Lady Furness, then the Prince’s mistress. Wallis found herself curtseying to a small fair man in very loud tweeds and recalled that their first conversation was about central heating. Some time later Lady Furness arrived late at a dinner party given by Syrie Maugham and discovered the Prince and Wallis Simpson quite alone in Syrie’s intimate library. It did not take long for the news to spread, and by the following year Wallis Simpson had become a popular hostess, playing bridge and giving little dinner parties at which she served American food and entertained her guests with her fresh, unguarded transatlantic talk. One guest described her Regent’s Park house as ‘quite lovely, with old mirrors and new colours supplied mostly by Syrie Maugham and fresh flowers supplied by Constance Spry’. Cecil Beaton, who was a regular visitor, once rather bitchily described Connie’s work for Wallis Simpson as ‘arrangements of expensive flowers, mixed with bark and local weeds’.

  Mr and Mrs Simpson stayed at Fort Belvedere for a weekend party, where they found the kilted Prince doing embroidery on a sofa, an art his mother had taught him. He spent the days billhooking the shrubbery and evenings dancing to the gramophone. Soon he, too, became a regular guest at the Simpsons’ little dinners. ‘He was lonely,’ Wallis Simpson later recalled, ‘and perhaps I had been one of the first to penetrate the heart of his inner loneliness, his sense of separateness.’ The Prince was also ‘the open sesame to a new and glittering world that excited me as nothing in my life had ever done before . . . It seemed unbelievable that I, Wallis Warfield of Baltimore, Maryland, could be part of this enchanted world . . . it was like being Wallis in Wonderland.’ Not a word of their relationship appeared in the British press, and the upper classes were horrified when they realized that the Prince was intent upon marrying her. Connie, who saw only romance and cared little for scandal or politics, was fond of both the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson and was determined to do all she could to protect their privacy. She summoned her staff, telling them firmly, ‘These are two of our best customers, none of you have had anything but kindness from them, and I want you to be absolutely silent and loyal.’ Every member of Connie’s team kept silent.

  On the night of 20 January 1936, King George V died. To ease the King’s end and ensure the announcement could meet the morning papers, the royal physician Lord Dawson administered a lethal injection of cocaine and morphine. Two days later the Prince of Wales was proclaimed King Edward VIII. Despite his father’s gloomy prognostication that ‘after I am gone the boy will ruin himself within twelve months’, the new King seemed determined to prove himself a successful modern monarch. Yet he also seemed intent on enjoying himself, and spent the summer on board a yacht cruising the Dalmatian coast with Wallis Simpson, Lord Mountbatten and Duff and Diana Cooper. The British press refrained from fuelling scandal by reporting on the lovers’ progress, but American and other foreign newspapers covered the King’s holiday keenly, publishing photographs of him sunbathing shirtless on deck. Six months later Wallis’s divorce became absolute and she was free to remarry. Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, urged the King not to marry her. On 30 November Harold Nicolson noted in his diary:

  The Cabinet are determined that he shall abdicate. So are the Privy Council. But he imagines that the country, the great warm heart of the people, are with him. I do not think so. The upper classes mind her being an American more than they mind her being divorced. The lower classes do not mind her being an American but loathe the idea that she has had two husbands already.

  Three days later, on 3 December, Nicolson wrote:

  The storm breaks . . . the streets flame with posters, ‘The King and Mrs Simpson’ . . . I do not find people angry with Mrs Simpson. But I do find a deep enraged fury against the King himself. In eight months he has destroyed the great structure of popularity which he had raised.

  Baldwin once again met with the King and told him that the country would not tolerate a marriage between the sovereign and a married woman. The crisis, which left the country divided for some time, reached its long-drawn-out conclusion when Baldwin held firm and the King
abdicated on 10 December. In his now famous abdication broadcast he said: ‘You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.’ The King was given the title of Duke of Windsor and sailed to France, where Wallis Simpson was waiting for him.

  The King’s departure was reported in women’s magazines as a story of ‘the king who had given up everything for his true love’. Connie was particularly saddened by the abdication and felt she had lost not only two valuable clients but two people who had been important to her. Just before Christmas 1936 she received a strange letter from Mabel Mason, the Duke’s housekeeper at Fort Belvedere, with whom she had been in close correspondence over the whole ‘terrible business’. Mrs Mason, who seemed to regard herself as a clairvoyant, wrote that she had seen Connie in a sort of vision, ‘a week before the crisis’, dressed in black, weeping, and saying: ‘I am so sorry about it all. Oh dear, oh dear, what shall we do?’ The wretched housekeeper, who was clearly very upset that no one had told her anything about the abdication and now felt abandoned, appeared to believe that Connie was ‘communicating’ with her about it. Although she had had several offers of work, Mrs Mason wrote, ‘I am not inclined to go anywhere where I shall undoubtedly be besieged with questions about our little man.’ She was sure he would return to the Fort: ‘HM told me he hoped when he came back that I would come back in service to him!’ Connie, who was far too down to earth to believe in telepathy, wrote a polite and tactful reply:

  I am greatly interested in what you tell me and certainly if thoughts could carry themselves, I should have been with you all that dreadful time as I was thinking about you and how wretched and upset you must be . . . I am sure that when HM returns, all of us will want to rally round and show our loyalty and love for him . . . I feel just as you do about questions. People have no reticence and not much decency, I think.

  The coronation of George VI on 12 May 1937 brought several extra commissions for parties and festivities and everyone tried to forget the unpleasantness of the abdication. Connie, though busy, received no work from the royal family, hardly surprising since she was so closely associated with the former King. One day, soon after the coronation, she received an invitation to do the flowers for the wedding of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor which was taking place on 3 June at the Château de Candé, the home of the Duke’s Franco-American friends Charles and Fern Bedaux. The chateau happened to be near Val Pirie’s family home, the Château de Varennes, near Tours. Without hesitation, and without pausing to consider whether or not this was a wise step, Connie said yes. The great love between Wallis and the Duke had touched her sentimental and romantic soul. Through her own experiences of failed marriage and secret love, she could sympathize with their plight.

  Connie and Val took the train to Paris where they visited the flower markets and ordered three dozen Madonna lilies and quantities of peonies. Then they hired a car and Val drove them to the Château de Varennes, where they stayed with her family and spent two days ‘picking like mad’ in the gardens: syringa, more peonies, and great sprays of rambler roses. With the car crammed with flowers they arrived at the Château de Candé to find the place under siege, reporters from all over the world camping at the gates. The house was in a state of turmoil as everyone prepared for the wedding. Connie was unable to do her flowers in situ, as she preferred, and instead set herself up in the Orangery.

  Cecil Beaton, who was to do the photographs for Vogue, recorded the wedding preparations in his diary: ‘Mrs Spry and her assistant Miss Pirie, two laden Ganymedes, calmly went about their business of decorating the whole Château with magnificent mountains of mixed flowers.’ For days there was a general air of harassed comedy, with people rushing around and delivery vans breaking through the press phalanx, roaring up the drive. Dogs raced about too, among them a greyhound, a saluki and ‘endless cairns’. It was the kind of make-do or make-it-up-as-you-go-along sort of event that Connie adored.

  Despite Wallis’s two divorces, the Duke of Windsor had wanted a short religious ceremony, and the Reverend Robert Jardine, an obscure vicar from Darlington, running the risk of his bishop’s disapproval had volunteered to officiate. Beaton described him as a ‘comic-looking little man with a red bun face, protruding teeth and a broad grin’. When Jardine complained there was no altar, the entire household ran from room to room looking for something that would serve. Eventually a heavily carved chest was dragged from the hall into the music room with the Duke directing things: ‘Marvellous. That’s marvellous, but put it farther back; put it here . . . there . . . no, a little more this way.’ Everyone puffed and heaved and swore under their breath, while he continued flapping his arms in all directions. Then someone noticed that the front of the chest was decorated with fat caryatids. Wallis shrieked, ‘We must have something to cover up that row of extra women’, and suggested a tea cloth that they had bought in Budapest as a souvenir. Not any old tea cloth, but a rather fine one in a pale coffee colour with silver-thread leaves in it. Wallis’s cockney maid was sent to unpack the linen trunk and, after much grumbling, found it. ‘If it’s as much trouble as this getting married,’ she moaned, ‘I’m sure I’ll never go through with it myself.’

  Meanwhile, Connie had set up two huge pedestals of flowers on either side of the improvised altar. Beaton noted in his diary: ‘Mrs Spry, robin-like in a picture hat and overalls, sentimentally broke off a branch of laurel: “I’m going to make the flowers as beautiful as I can. I’m so glad they’ve got what they want with this religious ceremony. I’d do anything for her. I adore her.”’

  It took two days to complete the job and the Duke soon tired of watching preparations in the music room and instead took to hovering around the Orangery chatting to Connie while she worked. Old copies of The Times were spread on the floor and the flowers plunged into buckets of water. Huge pink peonies bulged over in their troughs, cascades of lilies, great trails of blossom, syringa and flowering laurel lay on sheets, and spikes of acanthus and white yucca reared up out of their buckets. The Duke noticed a buckle on Val’s belt – a souvenir of his abandoned coronation. She was very embarrassed, but he seemed unmoved. Like the homesick exile that he was, he spent hours kneeling on the floor hungrily reading from the carpet of damp old English newspapers.

  At noon on the day of the wedding everyone stopped. The Duke and Mrs Simpson, the vicar from Darlington, the Duke’s equerry and solicitor, Cecil Beaton, Monsieur and Madame Bedaux, Connie and Val and the whole household of helpers sat down to lunch, while Wallis regaled everyone with her maid’s complaints about all the fuss that was being made. ‘I couldn’t let the poor girl be put off matrimony for life,’ she told them. ‘I felt it my bounden duty to say: “Oh, it’s not always as bad as this, but it just happens to be if you’re marrying the ex-King of England.”’ The embarrassed diners were unsure whether to laugh at her American wisecracking or to murmur politely into their soup. None of the guests, except Beaton, seemed to notice how strangely matched the bridal pair was: ‘The Duke, so blond and insouciant, exudes an aura of tweed, Scottie dogs and briar pipe, an essentially “out-of-door” type . . . [while Wallis,] so polished and sophisticated with her sleek dark hair, belongs to the world of restaurants and drawing-rooms.’ Beaton noted that the Duke’s mood alternated from gay and witty to frowning introspection. He had been deeply hurt that some of his personal friends had not attended, but the final snub came in a letter from his brother the King: his new Duchess was not to be accorded the title of Her Royal Highness. ‘This little action ruined my day,’ he told his equerry Walter Monckton.

  Connie was so anxious to create perfect flower arrangements that she re-did several times an enormous assemblage of mixed flowers with which she was not entirely pleased. When she had at last finished to her satisfaction, Beaton noted there was ‘a welter’ of flowers everywhere in the house – in the music room, in the hall
and in the dining-room for the wedding breakfast. ‘The flowers were out of all proportion to the scale of the house and the small numbers of people who would see them,’ he recalled, though the ‘overall effect was certainly gay and festive’. From this it would seem that Connie had become far too emotionally involved and had abandoned her own very strict rules about proportion and scale.

  Beaton, having taken dozens of photographs of the bridal couple, raced back to Paris with them, whereupon they were published in both the American and French editions of Vogue. Recently Hamish Bowles, now Vogue’s European editor, described a picture of Wallis Simpson wearing a dress by Schiaparelli, with flower decorations by Constance Spry and photographed by Cecil Beaton: ‘The florist of the moment, the woman of the moment, in a dress by the designer of the moment, by the photographer of the moment . . . what more could you ask?’ English Vogue, however, completely ignored the wedding, publishing instead a report of a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace.

  Connie and Val stayed for the short service, sitting at the back of the music room with its makeshift altar, pea-green walls and crushed-strawberry-coloured chairs. Val recalled that there were only about twenty people present and that ‘without the so English flowers, it might even have seemed rather forlorn’. Another guest said, ‘They were married in circumstances which all the art of Constance Spry and [couturier] Mainbocher could not redeem from shabbiness.’