The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  The first time I went to Mr Morris’s old shop in Queen’s Square was a revelation. It had the effect of a sudden opening of a window in a dark room. All was revealed – the beauty of simplicity, the usefulness of form, the fascination of design, and the charm of delicate colour. Added to this came the appreciation of things that had gone before, and which in my time had been hidden away.

  Years later, when Connie herself visited the William Morris gallery in Walthamstow, she wrote that she was unable to understand Mrs Earle’s sense of ‘revelation’. She particularly disliked the objets d’art so loved by the Arts and Crafts movement. Whenever her mother received gifts of fashionable bowls and vases of this kind, they were hastily rewrapped in their tissue paper and, Connie wrote, ‘I remember the light of disapproval in her eyes.’ Her mother could not reconcile these ‘tortured objects’ with the fine traditional furnishings that graced her own rooms. Unusually, mother and daughter even agreed that the arsenic green and fierce magenta wallpaper of this period was over-busy and that ‘nothing will go against it’. But her father was enormously influenced by the movement and for her twenty-seventh birthday gave Connie a copy of The Man of Sorrows by Elbert Hubbard. An American writer, publisher and philosopher, Hubbard was inspired by William Morris to found the Roycroft Arts and Crafts movement in New York. Whatever Etty Fletcher and Connie felt about the latest mode in interiors, other, more enlightened Dubliners were embracing the change. ‘I remember’, Connie wrote, ‘artistic friends of my parents who chose pale cream distempered walls and dark brown paint with lots of blue and white plates and reproductions of pre-Raphaelite pictures on the walls.’

  *

  For both Connie and James Heppell Marr the outbreak of war in August 1914 was the opportunity for release. There was no conscription then but Marr immediately volunteered, along with Connie’s brothers Arnold and Donald, and in March 1915 he was given a commission as captain in the Royal Irish Fusiliers. Soon afterwards Connie abandoned her isolated life in Castlecomer and with her son and stepdaughter returned to Dublin, where Lady Aberdeen’s magnetic influence quickly swept both Connie and her father back into her orbit. There was then no Red Cross in Ireland so Lady Aberdeen naturally established herself as president of a new branch in Dublin, and convened a meeting attended by representatives of all the voluntary societies and medical associations. She explained to everyone present that George Fletcher, head of the Department of Technical Instruction, was now undertaking to organize classes in first aid and ambulance work. In a letter to Lady Aberdeen, Fletcher later recalled ‘how you pressed a somewhat unwilling Department into service, and how in spite of lions in the path you were the cause of our training nearly ten thousand VADs’, as the members of the Voluntary Aid Detachments were called. Connie was appointed Honorary Secretary for the City of Dublin branch of the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) and Assistant County Director of the joint Voluntary Aid Detachment selection board, with an office in the Castle where the state apartments were converted into a Red Cross hospital. She and her team collected and distributed tons of clothing and food, and organized clubs for soldiers’ wives and work-rooms for unemployed women. They continued to set up children’s playgrounds, mother-and-baby clinics and pasteurized milk depots – for, as Lady Aberdeen wrote in Slainte, in time of war there was an even greater need to save the country’s babies.

  Etty and George had moved from the Big House out to Shankhill on the outskirts of Dublin, so Connie and the children lived in a small flat in Leeson Street which she quickly made pretty and homely. All day was spent in arduous work: lecturing, fundraising, planning subscription concerts and dances. At night she was responsible for a canteen at the National Shell Factory. Everyone who had contact with Connie in the early years of the war remembered her as a wonderful organizer, always inspiring, elegant and gay. ‘I think we all had a bit of a crush on her,’ recalled Eva Hackett, who trained under Connie as a young VAD. This period marked a radical change in Connie’s life: she no longer lived under the protection of either parents or husband; she was independent, earning her own salary, and she had become a team leader with responsibilities, no longer merely an acolyte of Lady Aberdeen. This was particularly significant because, suddenly, the Aberdeens were given their marching orders. The Prime Minister Mr Asquith decided that nine years as Viceroy was long enough and it was time for them to go. The King handed them a consolatory marquisate, and they set out on a two-year fund-raising tour of America.

  It was a terrible blow. But although there were protests from the viceregal couple and their many friends and supporters, Lady Aberdeen had made too many enemies in high places, so there was also considerable jubilation. Nonetheless, her influence and legacy remained for years after their departure. She retained a private apartment at the headquarters of the WNHA, which kept active, and she left behind the Peamount Isolation Hospital near Dublin plus numerous projects such as a children’s playground, mother-and-baby clubs and milk depots – and, more significantly, a considerable drop in the numbers of people suffering from TB. The Aberdeens’ formal departure took place on 15 February 1915 with all the usual pomp and ceremony of a state occasion. George Fletcher and Connie Marr said their goodbyes privately and remained in touch with the Marquis and Marchioness of Aberdeen and Tara, as they styled themselves, for the rest of their lives.

  Almost exactly one year later, when Connie was still working in the Red Cross offices at Dublin Castle, she found herself caught up in a brief and bloody event which was to change the course of Irish history. Irish nationalism was now vigorously asserting itself and British domination slowly coming to an end. On 24 April 1916, Easter Monday, the streets were almost empty as most people were on holiday enjoying the bright sunny weather. Just before noon a group of men and a few women left Liberty Hall and began marching determinedly up Sackville Street. They were an oddly assorted group: some wore the dark-green uniform of the Irish Citizen Army, others wore the grey-green of the Irish Volunteers, but by far the majority were in their ordinary clothes. Armed with rifles, shotguns and handguns, they headed straight for the General Post Office. When they arrived their leader, James Connolly, gave the order to charge. The guards were taken completely by surprise and the rebels quickly took control of the building. They pulled down the British flag and replaced it with two others – a plain green one emblazoned with the words ‘Irish Republic’ and a green, white and orange tricolour. Meanwhile, small groups of rebels had taken control of other key buildings in the city. The rising had been planned for some time and was originally to be supplied with German weapons. Although these weapons had been captured by the British, the rebellion went ahead, ill-equipped and undermanned.

  Working at Dublin Castle, Connie was one of the first to hear of the Rising, and over the following five days she found herself actively involved. The British authorities acted quickly: troops poured into the city and surrounded the rebel strongholds, which were hopelessly outnumbered but put up a fierce resistance. For two days Connie and the Red Cross staff prepared to receive wounded at the Castle hospital, while ambulances drove round the bullet-swept streets and volunteers went out under fire to find and bring in the wounded – soldiers, rebels and numerous civilians hit either by stray bullets or deliberately shot by British soldiers, who also fired on Red Cross workers. The injured had to be pulled on makeshift stretchers along the ground under fire as volunteers crawled about on the rubble and tried to avoid burnt-out cars and broken tram wires lethally coiled in great loops. On the Tuesday a British machine-gun crew positioned themselves on the roof of a hotel at the top of Leeson Street, near Connie’s flat, and began firing into the city centre. Connie took Joan and Anthony to a large Georgian mansion on neighbouring Fitzwilliam Street where she had orders to set up a temporary hospital to receive the wounded. People outside Dublin were blithely unaware of the full horror of the events; Connie’s schoolboy brothers Gilbert and Lynton, living out at Shankhill, thought it a lark. They crept into Dublin to watch the fighting from
the Leeson Street Bridge and were lucky not to have been killed.

  By the Wednesday the city centre was surrounded by mounted howitzers, and a British patrol boat stationed on the River Liffey shelled the rebel positions. More and more victims were being brought into the hospitals while building after building was burned or shelled and the streets littered with broken glass and blood. Food, medicine and linen were running short, and the gas had been cut off. Connie got volunteers to visit private houses and beg for supplies of coal, food and bedding. The VADs slept in chairs and worked round the clock, baking bread, washing linen, making bandages and preparing soup. Dr Ella Webb and her colleague Dr Lumsden, the energetic leaders of the St John Ambulance Brigade, cycled through the firing line to reach the hospitals that had been set up around the city.

  By Friday afternoon the roof of the GPO was ablaze and the rebels were forced to evacuate. General Lowe, commander of the British Forces, ordered a savage frontal attack on the rebels that lasted until the Saturday morning. The British soldiers, unused to fighting men not in recognizable military uniforms, took their wrath out on the civilians. After five days of mortar shells, gunfire, street fighting and burning buildings, four hundred and fifty rebels had been killed and the survivors had surrendered. They were taken to the gardens of the Rotunda Hospital where they gave up their arms and spent the night in the open, huddled under guard. Meanwhile, Connie returned to the Red Cross hospital at the Castle.

  In the morning as the surviving rebels were led away to jail, many locals sided with the British, shouting abuse and hurling rotten fruit and vegetables at the ragged army that had wrecked their holiday, left blood on their streets and almost destroyed their city. But the British response was so brutish that public opinion quickly changed. Every day people became increasingly disgusted by news of further executions of rebels after notional trials – almost one hundred men were shot. The most shocking news was of James Connolly, whose leg had been so badly wounded that he had to be strapped to a chair to be executed. The British Army came out of this with no credit. Indeed their actions made martyrs of the republican leaders and revived the spirit of separatism.

  There is no evidence that Connie ever wrote about her experience of this bloody week. But later in life she told friends that she had been horrified by the violence and by the executions of the Rising’s leaders. However, her humanitarian work and her courage, along with those of Dr Lumsden and Dr Webb, were recognized. All three were awarded silver medals for their services during the week of riot. Connie’s citation said: ‘Mrs Heppell Marr . . . was at her post at 29 Fitzwilliam Street each day, along with many members of the BRCS Detachments who took their share of carrying the wounded in under fire and caring for them . . . and treated casualties on both sides and fed and cared for evacuees.’

  In the summer of 1916, Captain Heppell Marr returned home on leave and Connie took time off to go home to Castlecomer; perhaps she planned to try to make her marriage work. Relations between James Heppell Marr and Connie’s brothers seemed to have changed. They were now fellow soldiers; to Donald and Arnold, Marr was a comrade in arms, to the younger brothers he was a hero, and Etty suddenly decided she liked him after all – perhaps he looked more gentlemanly in his uniform. ‘Never liked your husband till you’d left him,’ she is alleged to have said. The family no longer sympathized with Connie and were keen to see reconciliation. Her friend Eva Hackett records that when Connie knew Marr was coming home on leave she seemed excited, even pleased. But the reality was that the situation was as bad as ever; Joan remembers the rows starting up all over again. Connie was no longer prepared to be shouted at; she felt that her marriage was beyond saving. She had her own flat in Dublin as well as responsibilities and plenty of work to give her financial independence and confidence to lead her own life. In September 1916 she answered an advertisement for the post of welfare officer to women employees at the Vickers armaments factory in Barrow-in-Furness. With her excellent training and references, she got the job. She handed Joan back to her mother’s family, ‘tucked her son under her arm’ and left for England. It was the end of her marriage and of her life in Ireland.

  FOUR

  The Freemasonry

  of Flowers

  1917–1928

  After life in provincial Dublin, Connie’s first day at work at the opulent headquarters of the Ministry of Munitions in January 1917 must have been quite a shock. Before the war the Cecil Hotel had been one of the most popular and fashionable hotels in London. It stood on the Strand between the Adelphi Buildings and the Savoy Hotel. Its monumental façade and imposing courtyard boasted of elaborate accommodation and luxurious ‘appointments’ covering three acres. ‘Very few buildings so impress the visitor with a sense of amplitude and security,’ it claimed; it was perfect for American tourists, to whom particular attention was paid. But now the tourists had gone and the hotel had been requisitioned by the Ministry for its aircraft production staff. Military personnel of every rank plus clerks and secretaries, including a surprisingly large number of women, were housed in the vast warren of offices and carpeted corridors. The glittering public rooms became canteens and meeting-rooms; people scuttled back and forth across the marbled entrance halls and up and down the imposing staircases. But the constant activity and the general air of wartime utility never quite expunged the tasteless Edwardian lavishness.

  After the introduction of conscription in March 1916, the government encouraged women to take the place of male employees released to serve at the Front. They ranged from working-class women who took jobs in factories and on the land to educated ladies who worked as clerical and administration staff. Women such as Connie with professional training found themselves quickly elevated to jobs with considerable responsibilities and good pay.

  After fleeing Ireland, Connie had spent a few months with Vickers in Barrow-in-Furness, where she proved her competence reorganizing the work and living conditions of Irish ‘munitionettes’, who had been risking their lives and their health handling poisonous substances without wearing protective clothing or taking safety precautions. Connie’s ability was quickly noted and she was transferred to London to be appointed director of women staff at the Ministry of Munitions. She was now thirty-one, an independent woman living alone but for her son and responsible for the welfare of several thousand female workers. Once again her job took her around the country – this time, though, visiting aircraft production factories to inspect their health-and-safety conditions, which were often poor. But the women workers were paid good wages and were glad to escape the drudgery and poverty of home or domestic service. With a female doctor and nurses Connie organized medical treatment for them at their workplace. She established rest and recreation rooms, got up a sickness benefit scheme and found a holiday cottage for girls in need of rest or convalescence. She planned training classes for the clerical staff, and it was on her advice that women personnel officers were appointed in all branches of the Ministry. Connie’s confident good nature and easy, unaffected manner were welcomed by both factory workers and employers, and at her office in the Cecil Hotel she made several good friends, two of whom were to have a lasting influence on her life.

  Marjorie Russell, known to everyone as ‘John’, was the public relations officer. She had come from a good job in advertising, ‘knew everyone’ and was generous and sociable. Her husband, ‘a distinguished literary man’, was away serving in the war and she invited Connie and baby Tony to share her flat in St John’s Wood. Strangely, one of Connie’s closest friends at this time was Jos Cook, her estranged husband’s sister-in-law. Alice, Heppell Marr’s first wife, and her sisters Josephine and Enid had been brought up on a large farm in North Yorkshire to which Tony and his stepsister Joan were sent for summer holidays; both remembered very happy times there. They were particularly fond of Aunt Jos, a beautiful and gifted woman who had studied music. The Cook parents were authoritarian and none of the sisters pursued careers, although Jos would spend a good part of her life work
ing with Connie. When she heard that Connie was working in London and had no one to care for Tony during the day, she joined them in St John’s Wood and looked after little ‘Toto’ until he was packed off to prep school at the age of only six.

  In April 1917 Connie received the news that everyone dreaded: her brother Arnold had been wounded and was in the Red Cross hospital at Rouen. Her father hurried out to be with him, but Arnold died a few days later. Before George could return from France, Connie received another telegram: Donald had been killed, on almost the same day, in Salonika. Gilbert, who had been was staying with Connie in London, now made the long night journey to Dublin to break the news to their mother. The death of two sons was such a terrible shock for Etty that she did not speak again for two years. Indeed, everyone in Dublin was horrified by the tragedy. In Ireland, where there was no conscription, family losses of this kind were relatively rare. The front page of the Dublin papers carried the news, and the poet Katharine Tynan, who had been a close friend of Lady Aberdeen and the Fletcher family, published a poem recalling the boys’ ‘Araby’, their hideout in the Wicklow hills. She described the brothers:

  As oft before, breasting the Wicklow hills

  Light-foot and leaping

  Over the bog-pools and the singing rills,

  Side by side keeping.

  These deaths were a terrible blow. Connie began to feel increasingly guilty about escaping and leaving her family in Dublin. She missed her father very much and she knew that her little boy also missed his father. But she was determined not to go back. For Connie retreat was never an option.

  In March 1918, the House of Commons passed a bill giving women over the age of thirty the right to vote. But when the hostilities ceased, huge numbers of women who had worked during the war and earned a good wage found themselves reluctantly driven back into domesticity. Those who managed to stay in the workforce were criticized for competing with the men for a diminishing number of jobs. Postwar women’s magazines tried to elevate housekeeping to a more professional status. ‘We are on the threshold of a great feminine awakening,’ gushed the editors of Good Housekeeping, while offering readers a correspondence course in managing home resources, improving cooking and needlework and advising on how to take advantage of the new mechanical household aids being tested by the Good Housekeeping Institute. Women were encouraged to make their own furniture polish and buy seasonal foods for bottling and jam-making; and the better-off, now coping with fewer domestic servants, were advised to ‘be kind to servants as that way one can get the best out of them’.