The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Connie and her growing group of co-workers were ruthlessly overworked; they travelled enormous distances in appalling conditions, doing gruellingly long lecture tours. She gave ninety-five lectures in one autumn season, speaking three times a day: to housewives in the morning, schoolchildren in the afternoon and to mixed groups in the evening. Lady Aberdeen was happiest surrounded by her eager girls. One contemporary recalled that she was quite unaware that her own amazing stamina for work was not matched by her loyal workforce: ‘she would sit up till the small hours rather than leave anything unfinished, while her companions were too weary to think of anything but bed’ – a description that could equally be applied to Connie in later life.

  In January 1909 Lady Aberdeen started a little magazine called Slainte, Gaelic for ‘health’. Issued monthly with pretty blue covers, nice large print and some simple illustrations, it cost one penny and was distributed everywhere they went. In the first issue Lady Aberdeen wrote: ‘the great thing is to create an interest in health questions and to connect them with bright little illustrated lectures and other entertainments and to make people feel how much more they will get out of life if they keep their windows open and their houses clean, and if they will eat nourishing food and practise temperance and self-control in all things.’ Unfortunately this sort of advice was of little use in a world where people lived in a squalor that was largely not of their making, and were unable to afford the food that would nourish them properly. It was the kind of statement that revealed Her Excellency knew nothing of the realities of Irish life for the majority of the population at that time.

  In its second issue Slainte reported that ‘Miss Constance Fletcher’s services are in constant request’, and in the April issue the secretary of the Association’s Wexford branch wrote:

  Miss Constance Fletcher is concluding a course of eight lectures every one of which has been closely followed by highly interested and attentive audiences. Her practical demonstrations, her lucid descriptions, and above all her charm of manner, have quite fascinated her audiences, and even the most unlearned can carry away something worth remembering. Her lectures on First Aid to the Injured, and on Home Nursing, have been specially popular, numbers of people remaining behind at her invitation to learn by actual practice upon volunteer patients.

  The girls of Wexford had been so impressed with Connie’s lively talks that they composed a song to show their appreciation and prove they had learned their lessons:

  We’ll bravely fight and conquer

  In this our native town.

  Our work is to endeavour

  To keep consumption down.

  And we shall win the day.

  Our hope – fresh air and sunshine –

  Will sweep the germs away.

  Slainte continued to report on Connie’s activities, and in July that year it was announced that she had been promoted to chief lecturer for an infant mortality campaign run by Lady Aberdeen in Dublin. In August she spent her holidays visiting children’s hospitals and clinics, and so rapidly had the movement grown that by October she was heading a team of four lecturers. Lady Aberdeen’s brother, then First Lord of the Admiralty, offered two disused coastguard stations to be turned into TB isolation clinics, so that patients could be removed from their homes, thus preventing further infection. This was not altogether a popular move, but Slainte offered several ingenious, even absurd, ideas for isolating patients in their own home: constructing small sleeping huts in the garden, hanging ‘balcony rooms’ outside a window or even a tent against the window inside. Amazingly, some of these makeshift methods began to work: deaths from tuberculosis dropped by a thousand in the first two years of the Association’s existence, and several thousand fewer cases were reported. The medical world was surprised but impressed, and Lady Aberdeen was elected President of the Royal Institute of Public Health, the first of several international honours she would receive. The Irish ruling class, however, was still of the view that the Lord Lieutenant and his lady should be decorative and hospitable figureheads and nothing more. The Nationalist movement had been pointing out for some time that the primary cause of both TB and infant mortality was poverty; it appeared that the Vicereine was even allying herself to revolutionaries.

  Violet Asquith, daughter of the Prime Minister, who would have married Lady Aberdeen’s beloved youngest son Archie had he not been killed in a car accident, was often at the Viceregal Lodge. She was the same age as Connie but from a totally different world, and they can have had little in common. Violet took a more disparaging view of life with Lady Aberdeen when she dutifully accompanied her to ‘busy afternoons of cattle shows, industry centenaries – tubercular congresses etc’. Violet described a woman at one particularly ‘frowstyish function’ at Alexandra College, quite possibly Connie herself, giving a lecture on lodging-houses with ‘Zola-esque detail about lice – vice – stench etc . . . At one point it became so lurid that the Reporters dropped their pencils and wrote no more – but sat in scarlet silence.’

  As soon as the new caravan, suitably named the Phoenix, was fitted out, Connie and her team were off on long tours all over Ireland. From Belfast to Galway, Killarney, Cork and Wexford the colourful caravan, with its chintzy curtains at the windows and ‘War on Consumption’ painted in large letters on its sides, was slowly drawn by a sturdy horse along narrow country roads and remote, almost impassable, tracks. The message was simple and effective, if crude: wash more, open your windows and don’t spit – a habit prevalent in both town and countryside.

  The arrival of this small travelling show was a big event in outlying country towns and villages where there was little to break the monotony. Many walked huge distances over the mountains and through rough country to stand for two hours and listen to Connie’s talks and later join in the music and dancing. Lantern slides, music and cookery demonstrations were novelties that the people enjoyed after listening to the lectures on hygiene, diet and health. WNHA health lecturers never wore uniform – it smacked of officialdom – so Connie wore her own pretty, fashionable outfits that always included a large, lavishly trimmed hat. It gave the people something to talk about, and hopefully they might even remember some of the advice they were given. Not everyone, though, appreciated these interfering do-gooders. One woman sitting outside a lecture was asked by another: ‘And what are they talking about in there?’ ‘Sure,’ replied the first woman, ‘they’re tellin’ us to be clane . . . and ain’t we clane as we can be?’

  The work of ‘Her Ex’ and her small army was nevertheless regarded by many as a success. ‘If you re-visited some village in the wilds of Donegal or Connemara, that you knew a few years ago, you would probably notice changes,’ Mary Fogarty wrote in her article ‘Influence on Home Life’ in an issue of the Irish Educational Review in 1910:

  Houses and cabins are cleaner and better kept, windows are made to open, the manure heap is less evident to the eyes and nose, the porridge pot disputes the monopoly of the hob with the little black ‘taypot’, and the miller has a tale to tell of busier meal bills. If you comment on those changes you will probably learn that the health caravan has passed that way and the doctor ‘that had the Irish’ and the lady that had the wonderful way with the cooking, had told of what’s come of keeping out the fresh air and letting in the pig and poultry, of having the manure heap by the front door, and giving the children tea and white bread instead of oatmeal and milk.

  Perhaps the oddest part of Connie’s experiences on these peregrinations was the contrast between her days spent travelling and meeting simple working Irish people, and the nights when, by prior arrangement with Lady Aberdeen, she slept in the grand homes of the local landowners – some of whom, she later wrote, were like fossils from a past age where ‘manners and fashions had a pleasant way of lingering almost a century behind the times and formalities of an earlier era were retained’. In one particularly remote place, she remembered, the elderly mistress of the house dined in formal Victorian attire and addressed her husband as
‘honoured sir’, to which he returned ‘dear madam’. Connie was shy and immature then; dining and sleeping in these bizarre old houses must have been quite an ordeal. But her wary eye for the social niceties was sometimes eased by her growing interest in flowers and gardening. She began observing flower arrangements and noting anything unusual or particularly memorable. One of her hostesses was a fierce amateur botanist who ruled her garden ‘by remote control’, but warmed to Connie when she discovered her interest in flowers. Connie recalled that the drawing-room was decorated with a ‘particularly interesting flower table’. It was glass-topped and covered with an array of crystal vases in various shapes and forms, ‘like a sort of altar of flowers’. Each vase held a single bloom or bouquet of something exotic, new or uncommon. The effect, Connie wrote later, ‘was charming – a jewel of interest. As a decoration it lacked coherence, but it made a rich splash of colour in the room.’ For Connie it was an early lesson in the value of concentrating plant material together and in the place flowers might hold in a decorative scheme.

  She stayed in a house in Tipperary where ‘my eyes were ravished by an arrangement of Iceland poppies in delicate glass specimen vases, set on a narrow shelf surmounting the dado; they encircled the whole room, a living garland of gold.’ In another mansion she found the dining-table decorated from end to end with little mossed baskets of scented wild violets brought in by the children and their governess. And in another of those remote and extraordinary noble Irish houses she found an enormous floor vase filled with beautifully scented flowers of the giant decorative seakale, Crambe cordifolia. The effect was spoiled for her because the flowers were ‘in a huge trumpet vase, reaching above my head, and at the base of it was all too clearly revealed the inevitable green sediment which no housemaid could reach and remove’. However, the idea of using such an unusual plant stayed with her and kale was to become one of her favourite decorative plants.

  Connie was becoming adept at conducting herself in polite society and was learning how to charm people from different generations and milieux. Her real sympathies, though, were with the country people who grew their own barely adequate food and still took pleasure in a few flowers cultivated in their tiny gardens and ‘wretched cottages’. While city dwellers looked down on the ‘ignorant peasant’ who never opened his cottage window, Connie saw lovingly nurtured flowers cramming with greedy tendrils against the pane seeking the light and felt that in their circumstances she would have done the same. But it could not be denied that in the confined space of a one-roomed cottage the air quickly became stagnant, and with some reluctance, in her role of health lecturer, Connie had to urge cottagers to remove their flowers, open their window and let in the light and air.

  Most of the Irish gentry whose houses Connie had explored during her tours in the Phoenix had hardly emerged from the ‘days of draped fire-places, bobble fringe and Eastern cosy corners, not to mention satin table centres over which loomed barricades of flowers’. She described how in one house long shoots of ivy growing in the garden were allowed to come through the window and trail around sofas and rustic picture frames, even trained over a ‘neat arch inside, where [the] fresh green foliage softened the harsh angularities of the builder and architect’. It was a curious contrast to the sealed cottage windows crammed with imprisoned flowers; here the ivy smothered any redeeming features the room might have had.

  Working for ‘Her Ex’ was tough and demanding but it was also stimulating, and Connie had enjoyed making new friends. Now twenty-four years old, fully trained and employed in a useful and respected occupation, she could feel that she had found her place in the world, won the respect of her father and, despite still living at home under her parents’ protection, gained some degree of independence.

  THREE

  The Mine Manager’s Wife

  1910–1916

  On a particularly bright and breezy day in April 1910 the Phoenix rumbled into the small mining town of Castlecomer in County Kilkenny. Connie leaped out of the caravan and put on her best hat decorated with wood anemones that she had picked that morning. She looked around her at the gloomy pitheads and the tired soot-lined faces that peered curiously from the doorways of cramped-looking cottages. She smiled and waved back cheerily, as she always did, despite feeling exhausted from long weeks on the road. Everywhere she went Connie’s charm and good humour broke down reserve and suspicion, and within a few hours she was treated like a visiting celebrity. Country people remembered the personable, lively young woman dressed in elegant clothes who came to talk to them and entertain them. Despite her claims of shyness, her natural gaiety and youthfulness were often noted and always appreciated.

  The Phoenix had been touring since January, starting in Armagh in the north and making a slow progress down the east coast to Drogheda, then inland to the countryside around Tullamore, Portlaoise and Kilkenny. Connie and her team planned to stop at Castlecomer for two weeks, to give lectures and first-aid and cookery demonstrations to the mining community that stretched around the Coolbawn hills. Lady Aberdeen had arranged for Connie to stay in the grand Victorian home of Captain ‘Dick’ Prior-Wandesforde whose family had arrived as gentlemen farmers from Yorkshire three hundred years earlier. They now owned the vast Leinster coalfields centred on Castlecomer and had amassed a substantial fortune.

  Captain Prior-Wandesforde was a fairly typical landowner. Most of the miners thought of him as the lord and master; stern and hard in determining salaries and conditions, he boasted of never having yielded to pressure or to strikes. However, compared to many parts of Ireland this was a thriving community and he took an unusual interest in the welfare of his miners and the tenants on his estate. He had made improvements to the mine workings, including overhead ropeways to transport the high-quality anthracite from the pits. He had also built a number of houses for his employees, established a school for the miners’ children, a basket-making workshop for the women and the elderly, an agricultural bank and a colliery Co-operative Society. And, like several of the more liberal-minded Anglo-Irish landowners, he invited Lady Aberdeen to send the Phoenix to address the villagers, the children in the colliery school and his men at the mines.

  As Connie walked around introducing herself and getting to know the town and its inhabitants, she noticed a pretty little girl of about five or six trotting along with her. The child told Connie her name was Joan and that her father was the mine manager. Children often attached themselves to Connie – her easy charm and attractive clothes drew an appreciative little following that would scamper around her, demanding to see inside the Phoenix and to pet the horse. Joan was in the colliery school classroom when Connie talked to the children and set them an essay on health. In the evening, when the miners attended her lecture on first aid, Joan’s father introduced himself. His name was James Heppell Marr, a middle-aged widower born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where he had qualified as a geologist and mine manager and worked for several years in the Durham coalfields before moving to Ireland. Connie’s first impressions of him are not known, but the mine manager was clearly taken with her and he and his daughter invited Connie for tea.

  After she left Castlecomer, Connie wrote a very favourable account of her two weeks, reporting that the miners had been keen students: ‘Their bandaging is excellent, and I am indebted to them for the first practical experience of a pit stretcher. They intend forming a First Aid Corps, and I should like to take this opportunity of wishing them every success, and also of expressing my thanks to those whose kindness and help made the fortnight a delightful one.’

  Who actually made that fortnight so delightful? The miners and their families who treated her like a celebrity, the Prior-Wandesfordes who offered her comfort and hospitality in their opulent home as though she were their equal, the adoring friendship of a motherless little girl or the flattering attentions of her father the mine manager?

  Marr, it soon became clear, had fallen in love with her. He told a friend he could not get Connie out of his mind, he w
as fascinated by her, ‘she was so gay and wore large hats with such an “air”’. He pursued her with letters and protestations of admiration and affection as she travelled on in the Phoenix, through Tipperary, Fermoy, Waterford and finally home to Dublin in July, where he visited her, bringing Joan with him to smooth the way. He met Etty and George Fletcher and her brothers, none of whom were at all impressed by this ‘rough diamond’ from the North East. Etty, though she no longer wielded control over her daughter, had nurtured ambitions for Connie to marry someone of good family and had been furious when she had earlier refused to marry a titled admirer. George, now full of respect for his daughter’s considerable achievements and her position as Lady Aberdeen’s favourite protégeée, was unable to understand what appeal an uneducated mine manager could offer. He had hoped she would choose one of the bright young men working in his Department. Connie’s brothers were simply bemused. But to everyone’s astonishment Connie Fletcher agreed to marry James Heppell Marr.

  Why did Connie choose to give up her promising career in health education? Why did she abandon her relationship with Lady Aberdeen, who must have been equally baffled by her protégée’s sudden decision to marry? Did she talk to Connie and try to dissuade her? Connie was now at least partially free of her mother’s authority, if not of the cold shadow of her disapproval. Perhaps she was excited by Marr’s attentions and the allure of making her own home and garden with a nice little girl to care for. Was this her escape from the family to her own Araby? Many years later Connie told a friend that she had married to escape her mother, but to another she explained she had been afraid of being left on the shelf.