The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Connie’s scheme was certainly not what Parliament had had in mind when it passed the new Education Act in 1944 and raised the school leaving age to fifteen, granting full access to free secondary schooling. It had also introduced the 11-plus examination, intended as a means of assessing pupils for the school best suited to their ‘abilities and aptitudes’. In practice the exam was divisive and widely loathed, since it meant that most children went to a secondary modern school while the ‘cream’ attended grammar school. Private education, the preserve of the upper classes, was unchanged: boys were generally sent to the public school their fathers had attended, while their sisters went to genteel nonacademic establishments in the country. Although day-continuation schools had long since disappeared, the idea of training the nonacademic in ‘vocational’ skills to fit them for work endured with colleges, as did apprenticeships for working people. In most kinds of further education, men outnumbered women by four to one; little consideration had been given to the women.

  Connie’s views on education were rarely bedded in reality and usually stemmed from her own memories. She continued to believe that, even in 1945, girls were divided into two camps: the Marthas and the Marys – or ‘the butterfly and the blue stocking’. The Marthas were encouraged to ‘look pretty, dress well, dance divinely, in short, to be attractive, even glamorous’. The Marys, on the other hand, belonged in the ‘be clever and you will be happy’ camp where scholastic attainment was encouraged. Connie had moved well beyond her old muse Mrs Earle’s belief that for most girls their highest vocation was marriage and motherhood, and was not against them being educated for a profession. She and Rosemary had after all been through it themselves, despite both having been thought of as duffers, and had thereby gained their own independence. They could hold themselves up as models of successful businesswomen.

  Connie and Rosemary’s new school was to be, in effect, a middle-class continuation school. It would be neither a domestic science school nor a finishing school like the ‘French’ schools which turned out fully polished young ladies with what Connie called ‘a touch of the mademoiselle à la cuisine qui fait des pâtisseries’. Rather, it would be a ‘beginning’ school for a new generation of wives, mothers and professional women. They would learn serious cookery, housekeeping, home decoration, flower arrangement, gardening, bookbinding and fine needlework. Connie persisted with the idea that whether clever or not, every girl should be given confidence ‘in charm, gaiety and elegance’. It was the kind of old-fashioned approach that liberated girls just a generation later would deride, but in postwar years when class and social conventions had changed very little, the idea seemed eminently sensible.

  They found the premises for the school advertised in Country Life. Winkfield Place was a rambling Georgian house with a large stable block, midway between Windsor and Ascot, perfect for the home counties families who were their target market. There was a large, dull-looking garden bisected by a rectangular lake, the remains of an eighteenth-century canal. But there was plenty of space for flowerbeds for commercial picking, and the price was low as the house had been used as a military orthopaedic hospital during the war and was in a poor state of repair. The walls were pitted with holes where patients had played darts, from the ceiling hung orthopaedic hooks used to support legs in plaster. Everything had been reduced to institutional paint and dark linoleum. The whole place had an air of ‘grey, brown and black’. It was a daunting prospect.

  But with characteristic enthusiasm and energy Connie launched herself into gathering together yet another team and transforming Winkfield into a ‘place of beauty and inspiration’. It meant, of course, that she and Shav would have to leave Park Gate. Although it was the home she had loved most and lived in the longest, she had grown tired of it; perhaps it was too grand, too perfect and she was restless. Connie was never sentimental about houses, gardens or objects – her peripatetic childhood had encouraged the nomad in her. But Shav was quite the opposite: he loved Park Gate and the garden, he loathed moving and had no wish to live in suburban Windsor. He had reached retirement age and was hoping for a peaceful end to his days in rural Kent. But Connie had always been the breadwinner, and though Shav probably had his own pension he had also become director of the company after the war and had little choice but to go with her. Val, without whose malign presence life had been relatively peaceful and happy for Connie and Shav, had returned from her war work. Perhaps Connie thought the move would keep Shav and Val apart, or perhaps she had simply ceased to care.

  So Park Gate was sold, the removal vans came and went, and yet again Walter Trower was told to move all the plants, including Connie’s precious collection of old roses, to another garden.

  The preparations for the new school turned out to be Connie’s greatest feat of improvisation. Much of the furnishing was war surplus. She was adamant that the girls should not sleep in dormitories but in bedrooms, where they would have curtains made of butter muslin, parachute fabric, rolls of braid stitched together and any unrationed textiles that they could find. As always, there were also the offcuts from Victor Stiebel’s workrooms, which were sewn into wild and flamboyant patchwork quilts and curtains. Connie’s needlework carpet, laboriously made during her wartime travels, was laid on the drawing-room floor. Carpet in the other rooms was made from bomber felt. Bettie Smail, who came to help, suggested it should all be dyed yellow, and the resulting carpets shone ‘like sunshine on the floor’. Connie and Shav had a modest flat above the stable block: a small dining-room and above it, reached by a steep little staircase, two sitting-rooms and a bedroom. Connie filled them with all kinds of enchanting objects and in one of the sitting-rooms she hung the mirror glass from Atkinsons’ shop. Rosemary commuted between London and Winkfield where she too had her own flat in the stable block, her elderly mother living with her as part of the family. Val, who had her flat in London, seemed to have no place at Winkfield and was entirely occupied in running the office at the London shop. Tony, meanwhile, had managed to get a job with the British Forces Network in Germany. Later he joined the BBC in London producing programmes for Radio Newsreel, where he could develop his talents as a writer. His wife Maggie by now was ill with muscular sclerosis, and it has been suggested that the couple had a drink problem. One Winkfield student remembers Connie locking the drinks cabinet whenever her son and daughter-in-law came to visit.

  Helen Kirkpatrick, helping out while on leave from Paris, was horrified to discover that much of Connie and Shav’s large collection of antiques and ornaments was put into the school, where it would surely be ‘unappreciated, ruined, kicked to death by a set of grubby little schoolgirls’. Connie argued that young women who had endured wartime schoolrooms or hideous barracks or offices should be able to enjoy surroundings that were elegant and of beautiful quality. If things got a bit damaged or scruffy, well so be it. She was never possessive or overprotective about precious objects. Their value was in their aesthetic appeal, not their resale price. She often gave away vases that had gone stale on her or no longer inspired her.

  Connie started to pick up school staff in her usual ad hoc way, rarely checking their qualifications or background, preferring to rely on her own instincts. Christine Dickie – Mrs Dickie, as she was always known – was working as a cook in an army hospital at which Connie gave a lecture when she spotted her and promptly offered her the job of warden of the new school. Connie was to be the headmistress, but since she would not actually have the time for all that entailed Mrs Dickie would be expected to take on most of the day-to-day administration and the discipline. Mrs Dickie was not at all sure about the proposition, but as usual Connie laughed her fears away, and when her job at the hospital was finished she joined the staff. There she found Connie’s new secretary Daphne Holden and Barbara Oakley, a young designer who would teach interior decorating. Several of the shop decorators, among them Evelyn Russell and Sheila McQueen, and veteran florists such as ‘Whitey’, occasionally came to teach. Tony, home on leave, and a mot
ley crew of friends with help from Carl, a German ex-POW who had chosen to stay on in England, raced to get the huge kitchen decorated in time. Then they discovered dry rot under the drawing-room floor and had to start all over again. In the evening Connie would produce a huge meal and regale everyone with her plans. The ex-military members of the staff urged her to ensure that discipline was strictly enforced. She waved them aside: ‘It will be alright, you’ll see,’ she told them. ‘It always is if you’re nice to people.’

  At the end of June 1946 they finally moved into the house, even though it was barely ready; some bedrooms had a grand four-poster bed but only a muslin-draped orange-box for a bedside table. Connie never seemed to be satisfied and was constantly suggesting improvements – a new classroom to be added on or a new greenhouse put up or the veranda glassed in to make a conservatory. In the end the place sprouted so many wings, annexes and outbuildings that Beverley Nichols complained one could never be sure which was the front door. Connie was driving herself too hard. She was now sixty but despite her age she seemed to be firing on all cylinders. Helen Kirkpatrick, though, noticed she wasn’t looking well. Connie, who feared doctors and ill-health, at last admitted that she had a swelling in her stomach. It turned out to be a benign tumour ‘as big as a football’ and was surgically removed. ‘I’ll be back in time for the opening of the school,’ she told her team, and sure enough, despite looking pale and tottery, she was there in September when her first girls arrived.

  Nancy Ritchie was the very first student at the school. She had wanted to do a course at the London flower school but as there were no vacancies she was instead offered a place at Winkfield. She arrived a day early on the overnight train from Edinburgh and was immediately put to work making lampshades. The twenty-seven students in that year, a mix of ex-service girls and a few debs, were more mature and appreciative of their surroundings than the girls in subsequent years. Nancy remembered sharing a room with four others, three Scots and a girl from Ireland: ‘It was all so attractive, the dressing table had organdie and muslin flounces, all so feminine and lovely. Mrs Spry taught us to make something out of nothing. We made evening handbags out of Victor Stiebel’s off-cuts of materials, parachute silk and sequins.’

  Connie got to know this small group better than later intakes. She even did some teaching, including flower work and a salad-making class. She tried to teach the girls to plan meals and created a menu-making game where each member of the group suggested an occasion, the guests, and the food she would choose to serve. She asked them to imagine themselves being entertained by a rich host at a grand restaurant – what food would they choose? None of them could get further than chicken with peas, and ice-cream – heaven after postwar rationing, but hardly haute cuisine. One girl suggested a birthday dinner for a grandmother which included corn-on-the-cob, fried fish and potato chips, toffee pudding and ice-cream – ‘crediting the old lady with the teeth and digestion of Red Riding Hood’s wolf’. Connie told them about an indigestible lunch eaten in America that she had never forgotten: rich cream of mushroom soup, boiled turkey in cream sauce, creamed sweet potatoes, and finishing with an even creamier zabaglione.

  Nancy recalled: ‘She never imposed herself . . . always used enthusiasm to get her way . . . She made things fun.’ Another girl remembered: ‘Her energy and bustle and ideas of all kinds constantly flowed from her; she fired the imagination of even the slowest of us.’ Connie had time and sympathy for every girl, particularly those who seemed to have problems. Gill Inchbald, who had failed to impress her teachers at school, still has a lovely letter Connie wrote to reassure her mother how well she was doing at Winkfield. ‘She was so kind to us,’ Gill recalled, ‘a terribly warm person – always called you darling – and so sensitive to people’s feelings.’ Students like Nancy who lived far away stayed on in the holidays, too. There would be shopping trips into Windsor and they were sent to London to visit art galleries and then on to Gunter’s tea rooms. Sometimes Connie would suddenly jump up and say, ‘Let’s go into the kitchen and have some fun.’ Nancy remembered baking a Victoria sponge with the tin lined with scented geranium leaves.

  That winter was marred by appalling freak weather; they were snowed in and could not even get as far as Windsor. The gardening lessons floundered in the March floods that followed, and fuel shortages and food rationing made it all even grimmer. But nothing could dampen their spirits, and Connie’s first-year girls remembered the cheerful, lively atmosphere. At the end of the course Nancy and her fellow students gave Connie an apron on which they had embroidered their names. It had been a supremely happy and successful year. Connie had fulfilled her long-held dream of establishing her own school; she had been close to her students and really made a difference in their lives, and she looked forward to many more similar years.

  But as the school roll increased to a hundred and twenty students and twenty staff, the intimacy and fun enjoyed by those early groups inevitably gave way to daily concerns about administration, budget, discipline and curriculum. Not all the girls behaved well, but Connie seemed not to mind and even encouraged their freedom. ‘You could have boyfriends from Sandhurst and cook them meals – there was always a relaxed atmosphere with a wind-up gramophone to play records and dance,’ recalled Gill Inchbald. ‘When we were invited to a party, Mrs Spry would come and say, “Make yourself a spray of flowers for your hair.”’

  But Ros Gould, a flower decorator employed in the shop, recalls going down to Winkfield to teach and seeing ‘some awful behaviour . . . silly stuff really, but lots of them just fooled around, didn’t really want to learn anything. Many younger girls, the debs, just treated it as a finishing school – which I suppose it was really.’ Helen Kirkpatrick described them as a ‘charming bunch, but hopelessly unworldly . . . They hung on Connie’s every word.’ One gardening instructor suggested that no matter how much training they got, many would never do anything of an artistic nature. But the rare gifted ones were taken on by Connie in the business or found work with her enormous range of influential friends.

  The students had their own ideas about what they wished to learn and some complained that some of the classes were out of tune with modern life. They loved the cooking and flower arranging, but were not so keen on gardening, unlike the Swanley students who had chosen it as a career. They wanted to be taught skills that would help them find employment, so a secretarial course was added. Few were interested in fine needlework, and the class was quickly replaced by dressmaking and fashion. Miss Oakley’s home decorating classes were popular, and worked well as long as there were rooms in need of decoration where they could learn to paint or hang wallpaper.

  The only thing Connie was surprised by – and reluctant to accept – was the students’ wish for end-of-year examinations, complete with a certificate of achievement. They wanted to compete, for there to be winners and losers, something Connie had always feared and loathed. But perhaps she was being naive, since competition is such a basic human instinct. Nevertheless, what students remembered later was not the satisfaction of gaining a diploma but the fun and stimulation Connie dispensed as they discovered how to do creative things for their own sake and learned to satisfy their individual taste and judgement – and, as Connie would say, ‘let the opinion of others go hang’.

  The principal aim in those early years was that the girls should learn to run civilized homes. To this end they planned menus, marketed, cooked and served the resulting meal to Mr and Mrs Spry and their guests. As Connie loved to entertain, there was always a flow of appreciative guests to whom the girls could show off their skills. Beverley Nichols, who dined there regularly, regarded Connie’s students as ‘rather tiresome debutantes who could not boil an egg, but who left at the end of their year having learned to make omelettes, how to arrange flowers and how to poke a cod in the stomach to see if it is fresh.’ They had become ‘brisk, efficient young women, thrilled with the romance of domesticity’. He described how guests were greeted in the hall with a breathta
king panorama of flowers and branches and twigs. In a drawing-room of ‘sparkling prettiness’:

  One was seduced by an unexpected cocktail tasting of iced blackcurrants accompanied by equally unexpected hors d’oeuvres. Finally one dined in the kitchen, on a scrubbed bare table glowing with arrangements of leaves and fruit, with debutantes hovering around in the guise of waitresses, offering dishes which were not only exquisite but, to most of us, unknown.

  There were also several big parties through the year: a harvest festival party when the vast scrubbed kitchen table was heaped with autumn fruits and glowing red flowers; an elegant party for Ascot Gold Cup Day in the dining-room with its gold walls and yellow carpet and vases overflowing with syringa, Lilium regale, delphinium, roses and pinks; and the enormous end-of-year passing-out party attended by all the parents, with Victor Stiebel’s mannequins putting on a dress show. Connie always insisted the several hundred guests sat down to a proper meal prepared by Rosemary’s students.

  Stiebel continued to support Connie as her friend and as a director of the flower business, and Oliver Messel often swanned in, threw out a few wild suggestions, made Connie laugh and was off again. ‘He was queer as a coot – total whimsy,’ one student recalled. But he was as brilliant and imaginative as ever and was always in huge demand, ‘frightfully busy’ doing sets and costumes at the London theatres. He gave lavish parties with his companion Vagn Riis-Hansen in their house in South Kensington, and it was always ‘Darling Connie, do send up something really lovely, won’t you.’ They still worked together on luxury parties and prestigious public occasions.