The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  The two drove back to Paris, where Connie collapsed with exhaustion, her feet so swollen she could barely stand. After a night in a hotel she had recovered sufficiently to take the train home. The shop staff were in raptures when she presented them with a large wedge of wedding cake which the Duke had specially requested a footman to cut and pack ‘for his girls’ at the shop. Sheila Young wrote that they all slept with a slice under their pillows, except for one girl who kept hers in a box which has survived and is now at Longleat in Lord Bath’s collection of the Duke of Windsor’s artefacts.

  The new King and Queen lacked the Duke’s glamour and easy popularity. Many believed that the Duke should have been allowed to marry his mistress and keep his throne. George VI was shy and nervous, with a noticeable stutter. He relied heavily on his wife who, according to Harold Nicolson, possessed ‘an astonishing gift for being sincerely interested in dull people and dull occasions’. However, women’s magazines and newsreels regularly featured the King, Queen and the young princesses and their portraits were seen on numerous front covers. The couturier Norman Hartnell was summoned to help glamorize the Queen’s wardrobe, which proved a great success, and one evening in July 1939, almost two years after the coronation, Cecil Beaton received a telephone call from Buckingham Palace: ‘The Queen wants to know if you will photograph her tomorrow afternoon.’ ‘This honour came most unexpectedly,’ Beaton wrote in his diary. His glamorous and romantic portraits of the Queen were to play an important role in the creation of the new royal image. Beaton’s involvement with the Windsor wedding was quickly forgotten and he would often be called upon to photograph the Queen and the princesses.

  Connie, who had previously done the flowers for the homes and weddings of several members of the royal family, was not so fortunate; she would not be invited to serve them again for several years.

  NINE

  Silver-Tong Manners

  1937–1939

  Despite losing her royal commissions, Connie was still one of society’s most fashionable ‘flower ladies’, dominating the market in flower decorations for the upper classes. Titled mothers still made appointments with Mrs Spry at her shop in South Audley Street, bringing their daughters for advice about bouquets, headdresses and corsages, and ordering party decorations and flowers for their luncheon and dinner tables. Connie’s flowers were a crucial element of any London Season and she, chameleon-like as ever, put on her ‘silver-tong manners’ for her clients, who treated her as a friend, even a confidante.

  The Season began with the presentation courts held at Buckingham Palace, at which over a thousand debutantes curtsied to the Queen, many of them carrying Spry bouquets. On the first Monday in May the opening of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in the morning, followed by the opera at Covent Garden in the evening, set things rolling, and there followed a round of lunches, cocktail parties, dances and coming-out balls in the marquees and ballrooms, many decorated by Connie’s staff. Good manners were essential and the dress code strict: it mattered greatly how low the neckline, how long the train, how high the three white ostrich feathers. Many of the dresses were made by Connie’s friends Victor Stiebel and Norman Hartnell. One debutante recalled: ‘It would be put in the paper that one was in London for the season and then piles of advertisements would come through the door.’ But Connie never advertised; she didn’t need to. During the Season, her staff were in huge demand. Sheila Young recalled:

  There were times when in one day we made as many as 40 bouquets for the court, and then all hands were brought in to help. We made necklaces of fresh flowers, earrings of lily-of-the-valley, and corsages. Bouquets were made of tulip tree flowers and gentians, on bound white or gold stems, and fern was replaced by delicate trails of variegated ivies. Pepperomia and tradescantia foliage, seed heads of clematis and berries were all incorporated in unusual and delicate bouquets.

  Connie insisted that all the bouquets should be delivered personally, and her staff enjoyed seeing the excited girls unwrap their flowers and hold them against their gorgeous evening dresses.

  It was a time of feverish activity for the shop. Most debutante parties were held either in private houses or hotels such as Claridge’s and the Dorchester. There would be long formal dinner parties beforehand and, after the ball, breakfast at dawn. It was said that a young man who owned a white tie and tails could eat free for the whole Season. Sunderland House in Curzon Street was a particularly popular venue for summer balls. In one week alone, it was decorated by Connie’s team on three nights in succession. They often reused the same flowers, but in different arrangements so that clients would never notice. One decorator was once heard saying to a stem of eremurus: ‘Get in there, you really should know by now; you have been there three times already this week!’

  When the Season wound up in early August, the exhausted debs would either retire to the country or be off to Cowes to sail or to Scotland to shoot. Many were then sent to be ‘finished’ in Paris, Florence, even Munich or Dresden, or to enjoy winter sports in Austria. Already in 1937 there were rumours of trouble in Germany, where the Nazi Party had been in power since 1933, and some came home with unpleasant tales of anti-Semitism and German thuggishness. But the English upper classes seemed largely unaware of any threat from Germany, and possible war was simply not discussed. In August 1938 Lady Elsie Mendl gave a lavish circus ball for seven hundred guests in the gardens of her Villa Trianon at Versailles. House and gardens were transformed into an ‘enchanting setting’, where guests were entertained by satinclad circus acrobats and miniature white ponies from Finland, and danced on a specially sprung dance floor to three orchestras – an American ‘Negro’, a Cuban rumba and an all-woman Hungarian waltz band. Theatrical illuminations were by the great Wendel; Oliver Messel created a dance pavilion with his favourite artificial trees and Moorish statuary; Stéphane Boudin of Maison Jonsen in Paris made the candy-striped curtains and the parasol over the circular champagne bar; Mainbocher designed Lady Mendl’s white organdie dress; and Constance Spry, of course, did the flowers.

  Huge urns filled with cut flowers stood in the gardens, garlands of red roses were hung over the doorways and massed over the mantels, and the candelabras on the buffet table were smothered in pink roses. Vast quantities of flowers, many from Connie’s own rose gardens, had been packed in cotton wool and flown to Paris in three planeloads. According to Vogue they were a gift from Connie, which seems extraordinary given the sheer quantity and cost involved. Despite her husband’s immense wealth, Elsie Mendl, whose motto was ‘only the best, nothing but the best’, had taken a whole year to pay the flower bill after a previous party. Connie was often prey to the overgenerous grand gesture, and this latest extravagance must have caused great consternation to the directors of the company.

  But it was the success of the Wedding Room at the shop that was causing the directors the greatest problems. The top floor at 64 South Audley Street was let to a private tenant who claimed his privacy was disturbed by the stream of clients visiting the Wedding Room on the first floor and the noise of their loud chatter. By the terms of the lease, business tenants were not permitted above ground-floor level, so he was able to bring an action against the landlord and against Flower Decorations Ltd. The case dragged on for several years, causing considerable uncertainty.

  Even as the newspapers began to carry increasingly alarming news from the Continent, the lavish parties carried on regardless. For young and underpaid decorators like Sheila Young, working among such wealth and glamour must sometimes have been rather overwhelming: ‘What a pleasure it was to see all the gold and silver treasures and trophies which were brought out from the vaults for these special occasions. Once when I was fetching water to fill up the vases, I was fascinated to see 60 legs of lamb slowly rotating in front of a wall of red-hot charcoal.’ She remembered doing flowers for Lord Derby’s Derby night banquet in Stafford House near Oxford Street. His Lordship’s racing colours were echoed in the flowers. The buffet vases were filled with fruit
s and flowers sent up from the estate farms; peaches, nectarines and grapes, still covered in bloom from the hothouses, were piled on high compotes with camellias, orchids and stephanotis tucked in between them. For Henley Regatta, one host had a marquee erected on the bank of the Thames which Connie hung with straw hats trailing ribbon bows and filled with a profusion of summer flowers: cascading roses, sweet william, foxgloves and delphinium. Spry teams travelled all over the country decorating country mansions with fabulous displays, as well as doing the flowers for banquets at the Mansion House, the Guildhall and for the City livery companies.

  Connie’s position as the floral decorator led naturally to her becoming an arbiter of ‘correct’ taste. Many debutantes and young brides wanted her advice on the most tasteful ways of decorating their homes. Since the bulk of these enquiries concerned table decorations, Connie decided she would put on an exhibition of them and asked her friend the interior designer Herman Schrijver for help. Schrijver, who had already co-decorated with Connie on several projects, had great admiration for her: ‘She had a marvellous eye, not only for different colours, but for spacing and placing everything perfectly,’ he recalled. ‘She used such unusual materials.’

  Characteristically, Connie was quick to undermine the idea that she did things ‘in the correct manner’. She wanted to show – as she had always done – that anyone could bring elegance, charm and gaiety to their dinner table. ‘You can do it without the blessings of inheritance or wealth, [but] with a few yards of the right material, a needle and thread, some garden flowers and an absence of fear or ridicule,’ she later wrote, and typically illustrated her point with a rather uncomfortable childhood memory. She described the thrill of winning a prize at a table-decorating competition at school with a pretty display of pink roses and pink ribbon bows. But her moment of triumph was short-lived when the teacher dressed her down: ‘I should like to point out to you that the guests at dinner-parties are usually of more mature age than you have yet attained, and your decoration would be trying to the complexions of most of one’s guests. I hope in future you will show a greater consideration for the feelings of others in this respect.’ Even when Connie had attained a more mature age and was decorating tables professionally, it continued to amaze her that several of her grander clients still sent her swatches of the material of their gowns (though not necessarily those of their guests) so the flowers might complement their patterns or colours. ‘Gowns of the hostess, gowns of the guests, complexions of the young, the middle-aged and old . . . how can anyone ever decorate a table and live?’ Connie despaired.

  As she was well aware, table decorating was a minefield, and the unwary or nervous hostess could easily be caught out. Since, in the early nineteenth century, dining à la française, where food was set out on the table and guests served themselves, had given way to service à la russe where they were served individually by servants, the centre of the table had been left free for floral masterpieces of ever increasing grandeur and absurdity. What began with heavy epergnes, palm trees and pyramid arrangements of fruit and flowers was later followed by snaking garlands and trails of smilax.* Smart Victorian and Edwardian dining-tables would be laden with tiered flower stands, glass or silver trumpet vases and shallow bowls filled with lily-of-the-valley, maidenhair fern, forget-me-nots, pansies, rosebuds or small bunches of grapes. Reckless hostesses even cut holes in the dining-table and their best damask cloths in order that palms and ferns might appear to be growing through, giving a ‘tropical forest effect’. Such ghastly, if admittedly eye-catching, decorations simply afforded an opportunity for hostesses to vie with one another. For Connie, all this was anathema.

  Connie owned several books on table decorating, including Flower Decoration in the House by Gertrude Jekyll, whom she respected for encouraging women of her day to break away from stereotyped fashions. She shared in particular Jekyll’s battle with the ‘tyranny of damask’. Another book, Flowers in the Home by Menie Watt, suggested that instead of relying on one’s gardener, ‘a home horticulturist’ might visit daily and attend to plants and flowers in the house. ‘No one’, it added, ‘without knowledge and taste should be permitted the privilege of attending to these small matters.’ ‘Small matters indeed,’ Connie responded with disgust, ‘and privilege be damned.’

  The Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery, published in the late nineteenth century, had illustrations of fantastic table decorations. One in particular was so outrageous and caused Connie such mirth that she later reproduced it in her own, last, book, Favourite Flowers. Captioned ‘Artistic arrangement for the dinner table’, its central feature was a ‘gorgeous fountain of scented water’ which cascaded into a shallow lake in which real fish such as sticklebacks, minnows and small tench swam; model pagodas, swans, boats and lilies were cunningly tethered to the rustic banks. The ‘lake’ was surrounded by a sinuous frieze of mosses, studded with small flowers, encircling the table. The instructions warned, ‘Do not make up the aquarium effect with toads, lizards, water snails, tortoises, or any other such horrors’ – which might frighten the guests and possibly eat the wretched fish. ‘What time they devoted to their dinner tables,’ cried Connie in mock horror. ‘What fun they must have had and how exhilarating an objective for the prized but generally neglected stickleback!’

  Her exhibition opened in June 1937. Tables were laid out with inspiring ideas suited to every occasion. One memorable table had a wine-red linen cloth on which black candles in low holders were surrounded and linked by garlands of the brilliant autumn leaves of Virginia creeper – ‘nothing could have been simpler and nothing more vivid and exciting.’ On another, delicate flowers such as mallow, phlox, violas and garden pinks were laid in wreaths on pads of wet moss; others had scented flowers – short sprays of stephanotis, syringa, jasmine and gardenias – in old wine glasses or flat dishes, massed roses in simple containers, or solid blocks of camellias and iris. For a breakfast table Connie suggested a white jar of pinks or a mixed bunch of old-fashioned cabbage roses; for a spring table, a basket with mixed polyanthus, violets and wild daffodils, or some bright anemones in an old brown casserole or a mass of red geraniums. For an autumn country lunch she showed a table with a still more adventurous display: a rich, deep-coloured arrangement of brown toadstools, red wild arum berries, small wild ferns, cone twigs and sprays of bright-red miniature tomatoes all in a basket of moss.

  But not everyone favoured Connie’s casting-off of accepted conventions, and some critics mocked her use of vegetables on the dining table. ‘Cabbages are chic!’ announced the Evening Standard in its report on her exhibition: ‘Don’t be surprised next time you go to a dinner party to find yourself looking at a cabbage, a turnip or two and some tomatoes nestling among gladioli or roses or sweet peas. This is the latest table decoration.’ Soon afterwards at a public dinner, Brussels sprouts were heaped in front of her and she was invited, amid great hilarity, to arrange them for the table. She later regretted that she was too surprised at the time to come up with a suitable riposte. But had her detractors looked at the table dubbed Le Potager at her exhibition, they might have seen what wonderful things she could do with a pineapple, a melon, a cauliflower, green tomatoes, pea-pods, onions, a cabbage, a lettuce and mushrooms, along with yellow fennel flowers, pomegranates, passion flowers, thistles, clematis and marguerites. The much-derided Brussels sprout might yet have found its place.

  When once asked about decorating tables in restaurants, Connie replied: ‘Nothing short of an earthquake will bring about reformation here . . . Flowers on tables are either pushed out of the way or mangled by busy waiters – large groups strategically placed would be more effective.’ She persuaded one fashionable restaurant to discard its numerous small receptacles and put flowers in wall vases, which she designed for them. But she despaired of restaurants that ‘still have the old-fashioned conventional table decorations; the same old damask cloths, the same ugly table-napkins . . . one’s eye comes back from the beautiful display [of flowers] to the
anti-climax of an ordinary uninteresting table – the centre of the feast – the cynosure of all eyes – and it is dull, dull, dull.’

  In 1937 Connie’s second book, Flowers in House and Garden, was published. The foreword was written by her friend Phyllis, the wife of Sir Frederick Moore, Director of the Botanic Garden in Dublin. She dedicated the book to ‘my unselfish, generous and encouraging friends Jean and Violet Henson’. Rex Whistler did some witty drawings, and she persuaded Cecil Beaton and Hoyningen-Huene to photograph the flower arrangements illustrating the book. There are also three photographs taken in Tunisia, credited to ‘Gerard Auton’. Auton was in fact a pseudonym of the occultist Aleister Crowley, who lived in Tunis, not far from the Hensons.

  This new book was still some way from a hands-on gardening book. She assumed her readers not only had a large garden but also employed a gardener ready to give ‘the fullest co-operation’ in supplying cut flowers for use in the house. She continued to outline what had always been her basic philosophy – freedom of expression, breaking with old conventions and a complete absence of rules:

  I think there should be one clear and simple aim: to make flower arrangements of any colour or shape, of any flowers, vegetables, fruits or leaves which look well together, and are suitable to their background. We want to be born again with new eyes, so that we may be newly surprised with the beauty of much to which we have grown blind with custom . . . It is all bound up with the freedom to express our individual taste in our backgrounds, freedom from convention and above all freedom from a form of monetary-value snobbishness.