The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Whatever her reasons, on 10 November 1910, at the altar of St Philip and St James in Booterstown Connie said ‘I do’ – barely seven months after she and her bridegroom had met. Lord and Lady Aberdeen ‘graciously’ signed the register as principal witnesses. Joan was bridesmaid and Connie’s brother Gilbert was page. He remembered his brothers Arnold and Donald bought a fake ink-spot from a joke shop and stuck it on Connie’s wedding dress just before she was due to dress. Connie’s outburst of fury was so uncharacteristic that the family were quite shaken. Perhaps she knew she was making a terrible mistake, that the ink-spot had been no joke. Amongst all the many weddings that Connie later decorated with flowers and subsequently wrote about she never once referred to her own. Her wedding flowers were never described.

  Everything about James Marr was different. They had nothing in common. Whereas Connie was warm and expansive, he was dour and taciturn and had no interest in things of beauty. Was she flattered to have aroused so much passion in this strong, silent man? If she was, she quickly regretted it. As a trained health lecturer, Connie must have known the facts of life. Compared to most rigidly moral Edwardian households, her own family were fairly liberal and well read and it is unlikely she could have claimed either ignorance or surprise. It is possible that Marr was a cold, inept lover who killed off any youthful ardour that Connie might have had. The result was sexual rejection of her husband, which left him humiliated and hurt. At first he was angry, later violent. Connie’s brothers recalled his temper on visits; Arnold felt that both Connie and Joan were afraid of him. But Connie could not run home to her mother, nor admit failure to her father nor appeal to Lady Aberdeen, who was not sympathetic. Her views on marriage and working women were ‘Do your duty to both husband and work.’ It is likely that ‘Her Ex’ had expected Connie to carry on her important work in the coalmining settlements around Kilkenny.

  Many loveless marriages had to be endured at this time, and it is clear that Connie had not married for love. But it was not just relations with her husband that were a disappointment. On her first visit to Castlecomer Connie had been received like a celebrity. She had been admired by everyone, from the lord and lady of the manor down to the barefoot village urchins, gruff miners and timid young mothers with babies. She had probably seen herself returning as a leading figure in the town, but it proved a very different matter when she came to live there with no other social position than that of the mine manager’s wife. She had stepped into an unpopular role; she could look down on the villagers now, and they would no longer either respect her or confide their troubles to her.

  From her new home Connie could hear the mine buzzer go in the morning, at lunchtime and again in the evening. Occasionally it sounded ‘out of turn’, which signified an accident. With her first-aid training she was sometimes called to treat someone’s injuries, though there were no serious accidents while she was there. Day and night could be heard the distant but constant noise of machinery, the screeching of pit wheels as they hauled the great rope round and round carrying the coal up to the surface, with the breaker, the washer and the screens all keeping time as they graded the coal for market. All day she could hear the rattle of the donkeys as they made their way from the pits to the yard with their wagons loaded with coal.

  At first Connie tried to continue Lady Aberdeen’s good work by visiting the miners’ homes to talk to the families about hygiene, food and health. But the miners and their families had their pride, Connie’s visits were not regarded as neighbourly and she was treated with suspicion. She saw families of ten or more crammed into the small houses. Life was very tough for the miners and their families; pay and housing conditions were poor, there was no union then, and the miners received no coal for heating their homes. Instead they used ‘culm’, which was coal dust mixed with yellow clay and lime, to make homemade ‘bombs’ to burn in their fires. There were no washing facilities at the pitheads, so the miners had to walk home in their wet, dirty clothes, which were then given to the women to wash. They would be hung round the fire overnight in an effort to get them dry for the next day, when the men would take them into the yard and bang them against the gable end of the house to knock the stiffness out of them before heading back up the road to the pit. There were no lavatories, so they used the ‘gobbin road’, a disused mine road where rats flourished and ran down into the mines to attack the ‘piece-boxes’, the miners’ tin lunch boxes.

  As for the mine owners, Connie’s social position had changed there too. She was no longer the Vicereine’s representative, and though the Prior-Wandesfordes did their best to be kind to her the fact remained that Marr was an employee and not of the same social class. They could not imagine how he had persuaded such a girl to marry him. The family spent much of their time improving their estates in the landscape style, adding two artificial lakes for fishing and boating and planting woodland trees – one for the birth of each of their children (one of the pits was named Vera after the eldest child). The main social activities were hunting, shooting and fishing, and though Connie loved to walk in the gardens she had no interest in country sports. Invitations to Castlecomer House were rare.

  Feeling increasingly confused and isolated, Connie began to think of herself as a failure. Stoical and proud, she did the only thing she would always do in adversity: she retreated into the garden. ‘I was singularly unequipped,’ she wrote, ‘for I lived in a very remote place many miles from village, town, station or shop. If I wanted flowers or fruit or vegetables I had to grow them’ – a challenge she took up with all the enthusiasm she could muster. She learned about gardening from catalogues sent to her by the Royal Horticultural Society, in which she read descriptions of plants, their characteristics and how to cultivate them. In those days such catalogues had no photographs; Connie recalled, ‘I had a fixed idea that a viburnum would be like the snowball-tree, and could not visualize the wax-like scented blooms of Viburnum carlesii.’

  Hers was not, however, the sedate, orderly old garden of her dreams; instead Connie was faced with a garden that had been neglected for years and was filled with a tangle of prolific weeds and old, unidentifiable plants and shrubs. She set about making her own first garden with only the help of ‘a poor, delicate handyman’: ‘He carted water for the house, groomed a horse, carried in turf for fires, undertook dozens of chores, and, when he thought about it, did a little gardening. He had no knowledge or experience beyond growing the few cabbages and potatoes on which his large and ever-increasing family seemed to subsist.’

  Her first act, in a spasm of house-proud enthusiasm, was to tear away a mass of weeds just below the drawing-room window, where she found to her delight great clumps of iris. ‘The word “iris”’, she wrote, ‘in those days meant only one thing to me – the German flag iris – and I had a vision of a sea of pale mauves and purples lying below the windows in May and June. The untidy rushy leaves might have warned me, but I knew too little for them to convey anything.’ When May came the flowers were a dirty brownish-white, inconspicuous and evil-smelling, and in a fury of disappointment she dug them all up and threw them on the rubbish heap. The following winter she saw in the house of a neighbour an old copper jug filled with brown leaves and brilliant orange seed-heads. She asked how she could grow these delightful seed-heads for winter. ‘But your garden used to be full of them,’ her neighbour said. ‘My plants came from there.’ And Connie discovered she had thrown away Gladwin irises, or Iris foetidissima.

  Always quick to criticize her own actions, she did not spare her predecessor, Alice Marr, for planting the irises so conspicuously under the drawing-room window. ‘I might have had a fine border of them for cutting in an out of the way place where the insignificance of the flowers would have been unimportant and I should have enjoyed using the seed-heads for winter decoration.’ This was the first time that Connie addressed her lifelong conflict between growing flowers for cutting and cultivating them so as to create a beautiful effect in her garden. Unlike Gertrude Jeykll or the
Irish gardener and writer William Robinson, both of whose ideas she admired and copied, Connie was less concerned with using her floral palette to create beauty and harmony in the garden when something more exciting could be achieved in a container indoors. If a plant like the Gladwin iris had ugly leaves or insignificant flowers or flopped untidily or clashed with its neighbours, Connie did not mind, so long as something about the plant – its seed-heads, glossy foliage or striking form – excited her artistry.

  Connie was now learning fast, and enjoying discovering by trial and error how to produce structure, line and colour in her garden. Every day she escaped the dismal house and, with occasional help from the ‘delicate’ handyman, dug cartloads of stones from the stream bed to make a path to run under a pergola. Along its edges she set low-growing plants such as cerastium, aubrietia, alyssum and pink and blue forget-me-nots which thrived in the cool, deep root-run under the stones. The plants quickly seeded themselves in all the crevices so that her path became a sheet of blue and soft pinks. ‘This, of course,’ she recalled, ‘is not what a path should be, since it is an essentially functional thing, and walking on this one was apt to be rather disconnected; all the same it was a lovely sight.’ It was here that she first began to understand what gardening could mean in one’s life, particularly the excitement of seeing plants ‘luxuriating in that kindly climate . . . where rare things flourish, common ones ramp, and all the personality of a plant shines out’.

  When she could drag herself away from her new garden, Connie found she also had the freedom of the kitchen to explore. She had a couple of local girls as servants, neither of whom could cook, so Connie began experimenting with homegrown vegetables and baking her own bread. Vera Prior-Wandesforde, then a schoolgirl, later remembered how impressed her family were by ‘Mrs Marr’s dashing housekeeping and experimental food’. Her husband’s friends, however, were less keen: the estate land agent, another ‘rough diamond’, growled that he ‘couldn’t stand those sort of kickshaws’, and there was much mockery locally of the strange domestic activities of the mine manager’s wife. Connie became increasingly depressed and isolated. When her brothers visited they were furious with the way Marr shouted at her, and were scared of his quick temper.

  Connie’s closest companion was a book given to her as a wedding present and written over a decade earlier by Mrs C.W. Earle, an independent-minded woman with a dull husband and three sons. She used her shrewd, disillusioned and wide-ranging mind to escape a stultifying domestic life by writing a bestseller. Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden was a jumble of personal opinions and advice on gardening, cookery, childcare, interior design, flower arranging and women’s domestic and social responsibilities. Mrs Earle had possessed a remarkable library of gardening books, from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarian herbals of John Gerard and John Parkinson to books by her contemporaries such as Canon Ellacombe’s In a Gloucestershire Garden and Alphonse Karr’s The Garden That I Love. Captain Earle timorously urged his wife not to publish her book. When he received his presentation copy in 1898 and had had time to read it, he decided that after all it did not disgrace him – then mounted his bicycle and rode off to meet his death in a road accident.

  Mrs Earle, a widow at sixty, continued with her new career as a writer and her books achieved phenomenal success. Pot Pourri went into eighteen editions and the sequels were equally well received. She spoke to a generation of frustrated women, showing them how to make the best of their lot. The book was an inspiration to Connie and offered her a whole new world of gardening instruction, opinion and advice: ‘It became a sort of Bible to me.’ It had a lasting effect on her ideas and her writing, and contained reflections of several of her own interests and views on both gardening and design, expressed later in her books. Some of the ideas that later made her famous may well have started with Mrs Earle. There is mention of an all-white dinner table, a suggestion for introducing a flower table ‘which does flowers or plants much more justice than dotting them about the room’; plus unusual suggestions for decorations using seed-heads of honesty and large dishes of brightly coloured gourds to brighten a winter room. Mrs Earle also recommended growing and cooking unusual vegetables such as salsify, celeriac and cardoons, which she prepared herself with a ‘foreign recipe’ because ‘Cook said she didn’t know how to cook them.’ Although Mrs Earle advocated growing aspidistras and India-rubber plants, both of which Connie hated, it is easy to imagine her trying the idea of floating sweet-smelling geranium leaves in a saucerful of water.

  Fired with enthusiasm, Connie began sending off orders for gardening and cookery books and vegetable seeds and waited impatiently for their arrival. In reading, planting and experimenting she found a way to escape from her unhappy marriage and her loneliness. Marr was no doubt pleased to see his wife more settled, but Joan later said that she retained no happy memories of these years. Connie was concerned about how to relate to her stepdaughter, and once again turned to her ‘Bible’ for advice. She underlined several passages in the chapter on how to bring up a daughter. Mrs Earle’s views on the thorny subject of education for women – always central to Connie’s interests – were strangely inconsistent. She suggested that the kind of education that Connie’s father had striven to provide was not necessarily the best. She held that a girl with a real vocation for a career might be given the same facilities to train for it as a man. ‘But’, she warned, ‘the vote so ardently campaigned for would prove no short cut to feminine equality and prosperity’; nor would a degree, should a girl be fortunate enough to gain one, lead automatically to a good job; and anyway, it was almost impossible for a woman to keep on with her profession after marriage.

  Indeed, in Mrs Earle’s view, a professional career was not much use if marriage was planned. She cited How to Be Happy Though Married, written by ‘a graduate in the University of Matrimony’ in 1889, which claimed that the one attribute the ‘lottery of marriage’ required was adaptability:

  It is far better for a woman to be strong, healthy, intelligent, observant, and, above all, adaptable to the changes and chances of this mortal life, than that she should be well educated. Intelligence is no doubt inborn, a gift that belongs to no class; bad health may injure it, but no higher education will ever give it to those who are without it, nor will it ever make what I consider the ideal woman.

  ‘The longer I live,’ she continued, warming to her subject, ‘the more I believe that a woman’s education, if she has not to learn some special trade, should be awakening and yet superficial, teaching her to stand alone and yet not destroying her adaptability for a woman’s highest vocation, if she can get it – which is, of course, marriage and motherhood.’ And woe betide the disillusioned wife who did not try to make the best of it: ‘For a woman to fail to make and keep a happy home is to be a greater failure, in a true sense, than to have failed to catch a husband.’ This and another of her homilies must have struck a painful chord in Connie: ‘No woman has a right to eat a man’s food, dress with his money, enjoy his luxuries to the full, and then not in every way try to please him.’

  Lady Aberdeen gave Connie a diary for the year 1912 with ‘Constance’ embossed in gold on its red Moroccan cover and with an inscription: ‘Dedicated to the use of Constance Marr, in the hope that she may have much happiness and much blessing and much helpful service to record.’ Perhaps she expected Connie to resume her work in Castlecomer. The diary remained bleakly empty; not even an entry recording the birth of her son Anthony on 23 March that year – the ‘blessing’ that Lady Aberdeen had been referring to. At first it hardly seemed much of a blessing to Connie. The labour was agonizing, long and frightening. She struggled on the same bed in which Joan’s mother had died in childbirth and, after she had recovered, she was determined never to go through it again.

  A baby improves relations with everyone – at least for a while. Lord and Lady Aberdeen stood as godparents and even after they had left Ireland remained in close contact with Anthony. James Marr adored his s
on – a consolation perhaps for the lack of love from his wife. George Fletcher was an equally proud and devoted grandfather and even Joan seemed happier with a baby brother to cosset and play with. Connie, though not a natural mother, did her best. A photo from this time shows her looking tired, thin and dispirited.

  Life, however, had to go on. Every day Connie would walk out into the countryside pushing baby Anthony in a beautiful, elaborately woven wicker pram made in the Arts and Crafts basket-making workshop established in Kilkenny town by Captain Prior-Wandesforde and his ‘progressive’ Anglo-Irish neighbour Lady Desart. She also visited the Arts and Crafts model village built by Lady Desart for her factory workers. It was Connie’s first real introduction to interior design, and here she discovered the idea of a unified design style. The Arts and Crafts movement, which rejected modernity and industry, had been founded by the socialist William Morris in an attempt to reclaim the pre-industrial spirit of medieval English society. Utopian in theory, Morris’s intentions were to create affordable, handcrafted goods that reflected the workers’ creativity and individuality, qualities not found in industrially produced goods. Ironically, in the end, high manufacturing costs made the objects too expensive for many to purchase. In her books Connie cited the views of both her mother and Mrs Earle on the Arts and Crafts style. Etty, who had natural good taste and loved fine things, especially Georgian furniture which she collected, disliked the fussy detail. Mrs Earle’s views were more favourable: