The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  America was still slowly emerging from the Depression, yet the numbers of people who found they could afford, even at New York prices, to have fresh flowers done regularly in their houses increased month by month. The windows of leading stores such as Bergdorf Goodman boasted Spry arrangements, too. Store flowers had to be done on Sundays, which meant that the flower staff worked a seven-day week. Some felt they were working twenty-four hours a day as well.

  By the time Connie returned to the US after celebrating a relaxing Christmas in Park Gate, the two English girls had had enough. Ivy Pierotti, who was engaged to be married, said she was going home. Margaret Watson was eventually persuaded to stay on for the summer and found herself working with Connie on flowers for the British Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, which opened on a sweltering-hot 30 April 1939. A gigantic vase of boughs and enormous leaves, in many tones of green and some of them the size of small tea-trays, reasserted Connie’s love of the natural all-green group. Up on the first floor a semicircular display of heraldry had niches built in at either side for two more huge vases – so large that ladders were needed to fill them – which picked up the heraldic colours with flowers in scarlet, blue and gold. Connie stayed for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth’s visit, then sailed back to England, leaving Margaret to tend the vases and battle against increasing ill-health and overwork. Finally, she collapsed with thyroid trouble and she too went home. There was now no resident English representative of the Spry style. The shop limped through the summer and the ladies waited anxiously and eagerly for Connie’s return for another triumphant winter season, bringing more vases and boxloads of the popular Czechoslovakian Christmas decorations.

  But Connie did not return. On 3 September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany. In the following years the lady backers of Constance Spry Inc. found that they too had other things on their minds. Josephine Forrestal and Mrs Mills now turned to their husbands’ political careers and the war effort. Adele Lovett’s husband was appointed special assistant secretary to the Secretary of War, so they left their garden at Long Island for Washington. The remaining backers grouped themselves under Mrs William Thayer, who did at least have some business experience. But her appeals to Connie to keep her promise and inject her vitality into the flagging concern grew more and more frantic. Connie’s replies became increasingly evasive: she couldn’t come because it would be dishonourable to leave England in her hour of need; she needed to remain in London during the South Audley Street lawsuit; there were royal parties and other prestigious events that she couldn’t possibly drop; it was unreasonable for the American customers to complain they never saw Mrs Spry – it had never been practicable for her to see clients individually. But next month perhaps, or next year, she might see her way clear to returning . . .

  Connie was certainly extremely worked up over the lawsuit, so much so that she said she could not go into the witness box. Instead, Val Pirie represented the firm and was cross-examined for two hours. Lady Violet Bonham Carter, a long-time customer, also spoke for them and confirmed that the business was a quietly conducted affair that could not possibly incommode tenants on the top floor. But the terms of the complainant’s lease were specific and judgement was given against Flower Decorations Ltd and its landlord. They were ordered to confine themselves to the basement and the ground floor, so the Wedding Room had to go. The embarrassing defeat added to the general air of depression.

  Meanwhile, the wretched Margaret Watson was obliged to return to New York. She had been turned down for war work on account of her poor health, and Connie somewhat forcefully convinced her that helping to keep the New York business going was an equally valuable contribution to the war effort and to the maintenance of British morale. She reminded Margaret of the important work she had achieved for the British Pavilion at the previous year’s New York World’s Fair.

  Some of the old clients trickled back, though their spending was no longer so lavish. But Margaret was no substitute for Connie, nor could she tell the American ladies the truth – that Mrs Spry was unlikely to face the dangerous ordeal of an Atlantic crossing in wartime. Eventually the ladies did grasp the situation, and when another New York florist offered to take over the business, name and all, on advantageous terms, they accepted. They had not gone into the business for profit but, being amateurs, neither had they envisaged an actual loss. Connie had brought not only prosperity, but fun and glamour, and it was largely for the fun and glamour that they had backed her. But Connie had not entirely kept her side of the bargain, and there was no guarantee that she would ever do so. Without her there was little else but hard work and worry, which they were not prepared to take on.

  The new management moved the shop to Fifth Avenue and restyled it on the lines of a conventional American flower shop, concentrating on profit – cut flowers were the order of the day, not Constance Spry’s elaborate artistic creations. Americans loved high-class artificial flowers far more than the English did, and the Fifth Avenue shop was one of the first flower businesses to use the new plastic materials. Margaret Watson stayed on under the new management and Connie, who seemed entirely unaware of what was happening, continued to try to involve herself from England. She badgered Margaret with suggestions and urged an all-white decor. But Margaret’s flower arrangements were either altered or dispensed with and she soon realized that the Spry style was no longer wanted. The beautiful specially designed vases that had been brought from Europe or found in junk-shops on Third Avenue were sold to customers. After a few miserable months, Margaret resigned.

  It is doubtful whether Connie ever fully grasped the implications of what she had done. A firm bearing her name was now at liberty to market throughout America the goods and services that bore her famous and distinctive signature. It was just as Shav had warned her – she now had no control whatsoever. All she could do, the directors decided, was to rename the London shop Constance Spry Ltd, which she did in March 1940.

  Connie later wrote to an American newspaper that the New York shop had nothing to do with her, that it had been started by some friends in her honour and merely called after her. This was typical of Connie – distancing herself from the facts and reinventing history when it did not suit her. If her own version was less than truthful, at least Patricia Easterbook recalled Connie’s contribution in America with generosity:

  Flowers are flowers, and she opened their eyes to the beauty of form – whether it was a poppy, a seed pod, a bunch of grass or a lovely leaf. She talked with great horticultural knowledge, which they respected, and she arranged with such joy and abandon that she released them from the Garden Club panic pressure and the Ikebana stuff. Not the whole country – it was too big a job for a couple of trips – but her name is still known after all these years, and it’s not because of the hats she wore.

  Connie’s ‘fountain of influence’ had flowed, if only briefly, and made a difference after all.

  TEN

  The Sprys’ Wartime

  Household

  1940–1945

  By the beginning of 1940 the British were slowly, anxiously, coming to terms with the idea of being at war once again. Connie, in a state of nervous exhaustion after her American experiences and the South Audley Street lawsuit, now had to face the misery and uncertainty of another war and the possible destruction of a decade of hard work.

  In despair, she rushed over to see Kate Barrett at Swanley College. ‘Would gardening and flowers and beauty and everything she had worked for, ever be wanted again?’ Connie asked. Dr Barrett replied that of course they would – she planned to carry on herself, and she urged Connie to do the same. Fired by her friend’s robust attitude, Connie returned to London. ‘Come what may, I shall keep this business going and your jobs open,’ she assured her staff. But they were already leaving, the men signing up for the forces and the women gradually trickling off into war work. For a while it looked as if Constance Spry Ltd would have to close. The Modern School of Flower Work had already closed and would re
main so for the duration of the war. Rosemary Hume’s Cordon Bleu cookery school was also suspended but the restaurant Au Petit Cordon Bleu remained open, and when her partner Dione Lucas went to America to set up on her own Rosemary was left to run the place single-handed.

  But after a few months customers grew tired of the ‘phoney war’ and returned to buy flowers again – just a few, to cheer themselves up. The few remaining staff were kept busy with embassies and society clients who felt it necessary to keep up a decorative front, while weddings and funerals still needed flowers, though on a more modest scale. The flower markets remained open, flowers continued to be sent up from English gardens, but there were no more baskets of exotics from abroad. Although the government was urging shops and small businesses ‘to keep going at all costs’ as reopening would be difficult after the war, for now they could only struggle on and wait and see what might happen. Connie expressed surprise that the interest and desire for flowers still seemed to be so strong, and with renewed optimism she wrote: ‘Miss Pirie and I looked at one another and said: “If we go on like this we shall soon be decorating parties again.”’ But the days of lavish parties and entertainments were over.

  In May, just as the war was hotting up, Connie’s third book Garden Notebook was published, and was welcomed as an antidote to the few ‘austerity’ books available in the bookstores. It had originally been commissioned to help ‘emerging’ American gardeners, but instead became a very English gardening book, full of seasonal advice and information. It was classic Connie – charming, chatty and very personal. The ubiquitous photographs of flower arrangements this time were mainly set in the home instead of against the professional lighting and backdrops of previous books. Informal photos of her house and garden invited readers to glimpse her simple all-white bedroom, flagstone floors, French armoires and indoor tubs of Sparmannia africana. Evocative descriptions of her life and her flowers set the daily scene, taking the reader through every month in her garden and never losing sight of the pleasures of gardening, even in the very depth of winter.

  Connie’s writing has a wit and freshness to it coupled with an encyclopaedic knowledge of plants, but her interest in cultivation never outstripped her enthusiasm for creating an exciting new display. She continued to search for new plants that would inspire her to do something surprising and different. Significantly, the magazine Gardening Illustrated noted that Mrs Spry’s abilities as a flower decorator were now combined with a talent for practical gardening fostered by years of experience, observation and study.

  Connie dedicated this book to ‘H.E.S., who makes all things possible’. It was her first published acknowledgement of affection and debt to Shav, the man whose name she had made famous. In one or two other books she would drop occasional remarks about ‘the master of the house’. But this book, and the one she was about to embark on, were her most personal in tone and imbued with a real sense of Connie at home with Shav. No one can be said to enjoy war, but for Connie these years were in many ways some of the happiest of her life. One reason was that Val Pirie, whom, quite unaccountably, Connie persisted in describing as her ‘partner, warmest ally, and friend’, had left Park Gate to work for the Red Cross in France, where her fluent French was invaluable. She was later appointed assistant to the Deputy Commissioner for Civilian Relief, North West Europe. Connie’s son Tony was convinced that with Val away most of the time, his mother and Shav enjoyed a more companionable and peaceful time.

  But Connie, now in her mid-fifties, was never a peaceful person and would not keep still for long. It could not have been easy for her suddenly to find, with the war, that her services were no longer required and that the demands of upper-class society upon which her business relied had diminished and changed. Many businesswomen in her situation might have felt shattered and unable to see any kind of life or future for themselves. For Connie it was an opportunity to move on. She began to realize that her exclusive and glamorous image was not the person she wanted to be. It was time to reinvent herself, find a fresh outlet and decide what she was going to do for the duration of the war.

  At first, as the war began to grip, Connie prepared her home for tough times ahead. She was determined not to destroy her garden, as many gardeners had done in 1914 in a surge of patriotic enthusiasm to make room for growing vegetables. Instead, she turned over those parts of the garden that did not involve digging up mature lawns and shrubs or her beloved rose beds. She installed an incubator for chickens and looked forward to her own fresh eggs and delicious petits poussins. She bought a horse and cart to use locally instead of the car. In a frenzy of activity, she and Gladys Trower threw themselves into making jam and preserving everything they could lay their hands on in late autumn. Connie then remembered that she had forgotten to take cuttings of some of the more precious old roses, so Walter Trower hastily dug trenches against a north wall, filled them with soil well mixed with sand and inserted cuttings where they could be left in peace until the next year. But autumn was followed by the coldest winter for forty-five years: pipes seized up, cars stuck in snowdrifts, railways were blocked, milk froze in their bottles on the doorsteps, as did food on larder shelves – even the Thames froze. Shops were bare of vegetables, which could not be dug from the iron-hard earth, and then in early January food rationing began.

  It was a difficult start for the Dig for Victory campaign, set up to encourage people to produce some of their own food. Households were bombarded with ‘Growmore’ and ‘Food Facts’ leaflets; women’s magazine articles and newsreels urged people to grow food; parks and open spaces were turned over to vegetables; allotments spread along railway sidings and roundabouts; tomatoes and herbs were grown in window boxes. Collecting wild food – the field and hedgerow harvest of rosehips, nuts, berries, crab apples, mushrooms – was encouraged. Burdock could be picked as a substitute for cabbage, dandelion leaves or wild watercress for lettuce, and stinging nettles for spinach. Civilians were urged to keep pigs, chickens and rabbits and to feed them with food scraps, lawn clippings, thistles, pea-pods and the like.

  In 1940 when the bombing raids began, Connie decided to join the local ARP (Air Raid Precautions), where she was remembered for wearing a blue serge uniform several sizes too big for her. Her anxious determination during practise sessions to extinguish smoke-bombs reduced her team to hysterical laughter. Fortunately, wardens with a sense of humour were considered a good thing and Connie herself was amused by the ARP poster put up in the shelters:

  ARP – All Right Presently.

  Air raid precautions can be fun

  If we’re cheerful – everyone,

  Don’t be dismal, wear a smile,

  T’will be quite OK in a while.

  But smiles began wearing thin quite quickly when the raids increased in both frequency and intensity and being a warden became much more dangerous, even in Kent. Connie and Shav found they were in ‘bomb alley’, where the enemy planes dumped surplus bombs over farms, villages and seaside towns in ‘tip and run’ raids on their return journeys. Barrage balloons filled the sky around them. ARP wardens had to patrol their area at night and if a bomb dropped, estimate the damage, alert the emergency services and help the survivors. Women were recruited for their maturity and their ability to keep calm and cope with civilians facing devastation to family and home. But Connie was not cut out for the ARP; perhaps her bloody and violent experiences of the Easter Rising might have been an asset, but her age and her nerves, which she tried to hide, were not.

  When the London Blitz began in September 1940 she continued to struggle up to London on erratic trains to the shop, where a skeleton staff kept the show going. She feared people would think her crazy to keep a flower shop open during a war – was it frivolously unpatriotic? The city was heavily hit by bombs, and she arrived one morning to find a near-miss had shattered the glass and the shop floor was under water from the firemen’s hoses.

  The whole place was in a dim half-light because of the broken and boarded up windows [she wr
ote]. A customer came in early for flowers, and because of the friendliness which was one of the features of those times, everyone gathered round to talk. As she left, we thanked her and apologized for so much confusion; she gave an indifferent glance at the mess around her and a smiling one at the flowers she carried, and she remarked that in her view flowers made one feel normal.

  Once again, the ‘freemasonry of flowers’ had performed its miracle, and Connie began to believe that the way she could best help in the war would be to try to make people feel normal and hold on to the hope of better times. ‘Whatever comes,’ she wrote, ‘however much destruction and devastation may be ahead of us, I am quite certain that gardens and gardening and flowers and their decoration will not decline in interest for us, but will become more and more a refuge and passionate preoccupation.’