The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Arnold and Donald, who were inseparable, organized their own escape from home to a hideout in the Wicklow hills, a semi-derelict cottage reached only by foot which they named ‘Araby’, after James Joyce’s story of that name, written in 1904, in which a youth desperate to escape from his drab and restrictive world seeks an idealized Eden at the visiting bazaar. Every weekend the Fletcher boys fled on their bicycles into the hills to their ‘wild garden’. Connie, who adored her brothers, tried to escape with them. She loved to roam in the open green highlands and study the myriad flowers that grew all around their little secret paradise.

  But Authority was fierce with Connie and had ambitions for her only daughter to be groomed for fine ladyhood. Connie was in danger of being consigned to life in the domestic backwater. Fortunately, she discovered the pleasures of cooking and spent many happy hours in the kitchen acquiring from Mary the cook some of the skills and knowledge that would one day make her famous. It was here that she also learned from an early age that food and class were linked in several complex ways.

  Connie loved to hide away in the kitchen with Mary as she prepared for one of Mrs Fletcher’s ‘At Home’ days – dressy affairs with tatted doilies and tiered cake stands, smart hats and best behaviour. On the morning of one of these hallowed days, Connie recalled, the kitchen would be humming with activity, the fire roaring and the oven heating up. Everyone had their task and an exciting tension prevailed below stairs. Connie and her brothers hung around hoping for ‘an imperfect piece or two’ of cake or biscuit, while waiting, ‘unnaturally clean and restrictingly dressed’, to be called to the drawing-room to say how do you do. Connie would watch with fascination as the ladies, wearing immaculate white kid gloves, balanced cup and saucer in the air while conveying a ‘tremulous cucumber sandwich from hand to mouth without fault’. For Etty Fletcher, such refinement and delicate behaviour were social perfection, but Connie could not be bothered with etiquette and its ‘mincing ways’; she called it ‘sugar-tong manners’ – though she was aware of its importance at the time, both upstairs and down.

  She once described a very grand parlour maid who ‘wore her hair en Pompadour with a high teapot handle and a haughty cap with lace-frilled ends of greater length than other maids’. She would lift her tea cup ‘quirking her little finger, taking only the smallest sips’, and wielded her knife between thumb and forefinger like a pencil: ‘She had a special brand of gentility all her own.’ But generally it was in the kitchen that the children found a safe haven: ‘Downstairs was where you found a proper sort of tea: steps of bread and butter, home-made jam spooned out of the jar, watercress, perchance shrimps, and seed cake to fill in the gaps. You might blow upon your boiling sweet tea or pour it, if you chose, from capacious cup into sensible saucer.’ From her mother Connie learned the fine gradations of class difference. Table manners might seem easier in the kitchen but there were nevertheless rules there too: ‘you would be wrong to assume they were lax. It was just that the gentility was of another brand.’ Whatever Connie’s views of genteel behaviour, her familiarity with its complex rules would prove essential in her future dealings with all levels of society, from royalty and the haut monde to shopgirls and gardeners.

  As her mother climbed up the social strata to her mansion in Dublin, she had tried, in the classic Edwardian tradition, to train Connie in the homemaking skills necessary for her daughter to live as a lady. Although Etty would never countenance the idea of her studying horticulture, it became Connie’s duty to ‘do the flowers’, the arrangements for the public rooms of the house and table decorations for dinner parties. Connie enjoyed this and began to play with some ideas of her own. Her efforts began to be noticed, even admired by family friends. Invited to dinner at the home of an eminent Dublin QC, Connie was asked if she would like to do the flowers for the table. She took small red tulips and, to everyone’s surprise, turned back the petals and floated them in wide basins of water to make them look like water lilies – an unorthodox treatment of which her mother did not approve. Etty would not permit any innovation in her house and Connie recalled how she had to ‘fill great epergnes [table centres] with ferns and roses and carnations and, thinking back, I realize that a large proportion of the “creations” may have had merit as barriers during family arguments, but as beautiful arrangements they can have had little or none; they were, I fear, just grotesque.’

  During his tours of rural technical schools and societies George Fletcher had become deeply disturbed by the poor state of health he had found among young people and their large families. He decided to set up a course of lectures on simple hygiene and sanitation. Connie listened to her father’s descriptions of the terrible poverty in other parts of Dublin and, hoping to please him, she asked if on her sixteenth birthday she could invite a Dublin slum family to tea. Etty was horrified at the idea but George readily agreed, and a family with five children was duly found and brought home. They were so filthy that they had to be bathed on arrival. The eldest boy indignantly refused to go near Connie but finally allowed Mary, the old cook, to wash him.

  George suggested to Connie that if she was interested in the poor, she might find her vocation as a health lecturer. He knew that in England local authorities were already employing women health lecturers, who toured clubs and factories. Connie was desperate to make a decision about her future and, more important, to escape from home. Despite her dread of illness and distrust of doctors, she agreed. But the training would be tough, far tougher than she had realized. It meant another gruelling year at Alexandra College, studying hygiene and physiology, plus lessons in physics from George and lectures in sanitation given by the Professor of Public Health. This was followed by six months’ training in district nursing at St Lawrence’s Home for Jubilee Nurses and a summer course of instruction in food analysis at the Medical School. Connie always retained a keen interest in nutrition, but her only surviving written comment on this course was the stark word ‘starvation’ – the common cause of sickness, even death, in Ireland in the early 1900s.

  In 1905 when Connie was nineteen, she was shipped off to London to take the full health lecturers’ course instituted by the National Health Society. It was still quite unusual for someone of her background to do this kind of training and one can detect her father’s pioneering spirit and determination behind the project. Despite her belief that she had little academic ability, Connie completed courses on bacteriology and on the ‘Art of Lecturing’ at King’s College, a course in local government at the London School of Economics and one for sanitary inspectors at the Royal Sanitary Institute. She spent two years living in Hopkinson House, a dreary Victorian redbrick women’s hostel in Vauxhall Bridge Road. It seems to have been a grey and lonely place for the young student from Ireland. Her one friend, and roommate, was an art student called Florence Standfast, who would later play an important role in Connie’s life. Her only recollection of this period, written nearly fifty years later, evokes a picture of a young woman already thinking about how to decorate a party and seeing how it should not be done:

  I remember so well going to market with a group of fellow students to buy the flowers for our club dance. We didn’t have much money, but in those days flowers were cheap, and we could have bought a car-load of marguerites or other simple flowers. But of course, we had to have roses, and even of those, we got what seem now to have been a lot for our money. It was my first experience and I was intoxicated with excitement as we carried back armfuls of long-stemmed pink roses to the rather grim building which housed us. I came down to the dance in a flurry of excitement, expecting to see a bower of flowers, only to find in an enormous room isolated vases set about here and there – all the glory departed. That was my first lesson in how not to get effects on a shoe-string.

  Connie’s first job after qualifying was found through her father’s former boss, Robert Blair. Now Sir Robert, he secured an appointment for her as an assistant lecturer for the London County Council, demonstrating first aid and home
nursing. In January 1908 she applied to the Essex Education Committee for the post of Woman Health Lecturer in elementary schools. Whether her application was successful is not known, for Connie was suddenly recalled to Dublin. Her father had found much more important work for her in Ireland.

  On a Christmas visit to her family in 1905 Connie had joined the exuberant crowds watching the pomp and pageantry surrounding the arrival of the new Viceroy of Ireland. The streets were thronged with crowds eager to see the Earl and Countess of Aberdeen returning to Dublin for a second term of office. With fanfares and numerous outriders, the ornate high-sprung carriage, with bewigged postilions and drawn by gleaming black horses, proceeded triumphantly from Kingstown Harbour to Dublin Castle where the viceregal party made its state entry. Lord Aberdeen’s first term as Viceroy had been cut short by the fall of the Liberal government in 1886 when he was moved to Canada as Governor-General. But in their brief period in Ireland, Lady Aberdeen, or Ishbel as she was known to her intimates, had fallen in love with Ireland and all things Irish. She determined to help the people struggling to live with poverty and sickness. During their ‘exile’ in Canada, Lady Aberdeen had kept up her tireless philanthropic activity in the Irish cause, fund-raising and promoting Irish produce in America, Canada and England. She founded the Irish Industries Association, to promote a variety of traditional Irish arts and crafts, in particular lace-making and tweed-weaving.

  The Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, now very effectively run by George Fletcher, had already played an active part in the revival and renewal of Irish crafts. So it was not surprising that almost before the grand formalities and welcoming festivities were over, Lady Aberdeen made Fletcher’s acquaintance, and thus began a long and close friendship. George Fletcher was a man she could deal with: he had his own concerns and ideas for improving economic and health conditions in rural Ireland; he understood what needed to be done and how to go about it.

  Despite their very different backgrounds, their aims and personalities were similar; both had an affable manner masking a steely determination and a profound conviction in what they wished to achieve. George, being closer to the people with whom he worked, was more conciliatory, whereas Lady Aberdeen would aristocratically brush aside anything that impeded her plans. Consequently she made several enemies. She was also criticized by many members of the conservative Anglo-Irish society, who expected a Viceroy and his wife to put on lavish entertainments – much of it paid for by the Aberdeens, who were rich, but not that rich. Although they worked hard at the social circus of formal Castle functions, their real interest lay in what they could do for the Irish working people. It was well known that, despite taking care not to get involved in politics, the Aberdeens were in favour of Home Rule and hoped to be the last viceregal couple in Dublin. They were accused by some of being mean because they economized on state entertaining, preferring to spend money on welfare work. Their guest lists began to reflect their wider, more egalitarian interests, which caused endless carping within Dublin high society. People complained that ‘very little effort was made to uphold the dignity of the ceremonial at Dublin Castle’.

  Connie’s tough and rather colourless life as a student in London was occasionally enlivened by letters from home. Her father described the stimulus of working with the Viceroy’s wife and her mother sent cuttings from the Irish Times so that Connie could keep up to date with the glittering life in Dublin. One of these reported a reception in the viceregal drawing-room at the Castle: ‘Diamonds worn by the Marchioness Conyngham, Countess of Annesley, Lady Holmpatrick, and Lady Guinness’ made the event a ‘sparkling affair’, with the ladies’ coiffures reflecting ‘every style of hairdressing for the last half century’, some adorned with ostrich plumes ‘with picturesque effect’. The ‘perfume of lilies, gardenias and tuberoses’ was almost overwhelming in the hot rooms – it was the sort of glamorous occasion that would one day be very familiar to Connie. Her interest might have been caught by a description of the bouquets, which were criticized for being both large and heavy; and as if that was not enough, they also soiled the ladies’ evening gloves. But she was more likely to have approved of the ladies who had revived the fashion of carrying just a simple sheaf of lilies or a posy of three or four large blooms tied with silver ribbon or a chiffon scarf.

  The endless round of Castle Season events continued, with parades, military displays, receptions and a state ball with nine hundred guests. The Season concluded with a party at which Lady Aberdeen organized an all-Irish programme. Not everyone appreciated these unconventional entertainments. Lady Alice Howard, daughter of the Earl of Wicklow, wrote in her journal: ‘We all went to a party at the Castle; Irish music and an Irish play. All too horrid and vulgar for words.’ Later at a dinner party she recalled the guests were ‘a very common lot . . . there was hardly a soul we knew’.

  Page Dickinson, son of the Dean of the Chapel Royal, wrote in his memoirs that with the installation of a Liberal Lord Lieutenant, ‘social amenities were flung to the winds, and the rag tag and bobtail of Dublin went to Court’. People of breeding gave up going to the Castle and, he recalled, ‘without being a snob, it was no pleasure and rather embarrassing to meet the lady at dinner who had measured you for your shirts the week before’. Dickinson might have been describing Etty Fletcher herself when he declared that now ‘only the middle-class folk liked to attend, dressing up in feathers and trains, and strutting in rarely worn evening suits and swimming in a dashing social life entirely foreign to their upbringing, but congenial to their worldly ambitions’. Etty was extremely happy now that her worldly ambitions were fully realized. Her family had arrived, they had the entrée to the Viceregal Lodge, and her husband’s close association with Her Excellency meant regular invitations and considerable standing in Dublin society. Lynton, her youngest child, remembered the equerries, splendid in helmet and spurs, sitting on their horses in the drive at 53 Pembroke Road. They were not allowed to dismount, so they waited for someone to come out and receive a letter or an invitation from the Vicereine, while all the neighbours watched.

  George Fletcher worked closely with Lady Aberdeen on a number of projects, including an exhibition in the Home Industries section of the 1907 Dublin International Exhibition, which also featured displays by the Women’s National Health Association of Ireland (WNHA), recently created by Lady Aberdeen to fight the appalling ravages of tuberculosis in Ireland, where the death rate was twice as high as from all the other infectious diseases combined. The aim of the exhibition was prevention through education. Lady Aberdeen invited Sir William Osler, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, to give an inaugural lecture. He emphasized what was already known about tuberculosis: that it was not hereditary, but it was infectious and it proliferated particularly among people whose health and diet were poor and who lived in filthy, airless conditions. With weapons such as the segregation of the infected, plus good food, good housing and pure air, the battle against the disease could be won.

  Response to the exhibition was so positive that Lady Aberdeen bought a horse-drawn caravan christened Eire to take it to the most remote and poorest parts of the country. The Eire was equipped with simple diagrams, pictures and literature, pathological exhibits, a slide projector and a gramophone to liven up proceedings with traditional music. Slogans were brightly painted on its sides:

  Our enemies are Bad Air, Bad Food, Bad Drink and Dirt.

  Our Friends are Pure Air, Pure Food, Pure Milk and

  Cleanliness.

  A voluntary team consisted of a medical lecturer who spoke Gaelic, a cookery teacher and demonstrator, plus a driver. But journeys on the Eire were very hard going and volunteers did not stay long. What was required was proper paid staff. Connie Fletcher, now fully trained and working in London, was summoned home to be the first full-time paid lecturer.

  Connie had barely arrived back in Dublin in March 1909 when news arrived from Donegal that the Eire had been destroyed by fire and some of the team had suffe
red burns. Was it an accident or deliberate? No one was sure. Lady Aberdeen’s war on consumption inevitably ran into trouble; some superstitious Irish country folk feared the caravan actually carried the infection, and she acquired the nickname of ‘Lady Microbe’. Politicians and Irish administrators regarded her as a ‘meddling suffragette’, and the Irish ruling class saw her activities as a reproach for their own neglect of the poor, which they indeed were. Undeterred, a fundraising campaign for a new caravan was got under way. Meanwhile, Connie was put to work in Dublin lecturing and setting up mother-and-baby clinics.

  Connie immediately fell under Her Excellency’s spell. ‘Nobody who has ever worked under the influence of Lady Aberdeen is ever likely to forget it, it marked you for life.’ She always referred to her informally as ‘Her Ex’, and their relationship was profoundly important to her. Lady Aberdeen became a mother substitute, teacher and inspiration. Connie picked up many ideas and methods from Her Ex, one of which was promoting cheerfulness and taking people out of themselves; others were how to handle people from every kind of background, how to take criticism but ignore snubs, and how to teach using encouragement, praise and audience participation. She watched Lady Aberdeen fire up her workers and make them feel they were doing something of enormous importance and, when the work was done, reward them with fun and laughter – an approach that Connie would later adopt in her own working life. Lady Aberdeen’s high principles, born of her strong Protestant faith, tended to pass over the heads of her Irish audience, whereas Connie’s more down-to-earth style did not.