The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  The magazine also urged its readers not to allow drudgery in the house: ‘There must be time to think, to read, to enjoy life’, sentiments of which Connie would have approved. She supported the idea that women’s role in the home deserved proper training – it was an idea she nurtured until it bore fruit many years later. But, for now, satisfaction through domesticity and motherhood was not for her. Connie was a single working mother at a time when a woman was either a spinster, married or widowed, but she somehow always managed to keep her status and the whereabouts of her ‘Irish husband’ rather vague.

  After the war the more independent-minded women were busy grasping new opportunities in order to realize at least some of their professional ambitions. But Connie was not sure what her ambitions really were. Was she determinedly heading towards senior positions in personnel and management, or did she still nurture her father’s enthusiasm for work in education? Perhaps she had dreams of doing something creative. Her flower arranging was still a hobby, something to enjoy and develop outside her career. One thing was very clear: if she was to remain independent and support herself and her son she would have to earn her own living. In 1919 she applied for the post of deputy principal of women staff for the Inland Revenue. Her boss in Munitions wrote a glowing testimony describing how her patience, sympathy and wisdom had smoothed over difficulties, righted injustices and ensured a high standard of efficiency and morale. He deeply regretted losing her ‘in every respect’. It was a moving tribute from someone with whom Connie had come to form a very close relationship while working at the Cecil Hotel. It was signed H.E. Spry.

  Henry Ernest, known to his brothers as ‘Shav’ or ‘little Shaver’, was thirty-nine – six years older than Connie. After public school and Cambridge, he had gone to India’s warm climate because of poor health and had joined the Indian Civil Service, where he was quickly promoted through the legal and financial departments. He returned home at the outbreak of war and was seconded to the Ministry of Munitions as head of personnel. Charming, with the classic arrogance of a colonial civil servant, Shav was cultivated, witty, erudite and attractive. At least, Connie found him so. He loved the same things that excited her: beautiful design, gardening, antique furniture and good food. He was in every way the antithesis of James Heppell Marr. Connie was lonely living in London with a small child, even with several good friends for company. And despite successfully holding a well-paid job she craved security and stimulating male companionship of the kind her beloved father, whom she still badly missed, had provided in her youth. For his part, Shav Spry had fallen very much in love with Connie. But she was still a married woman and it is unlikely that their relationship was more than platonic. Shav was also married, with two young children, but had reached that stage in life when some men seem to have more in common with the bright female colleague than with the devoted wife at home.

  By April 1919 Connie and Shav had become so close that they decided that one day they would be married. Connie left the Ministry to work for the Inland Revenue. Shav, however, now that the war was over, was obliged to return to India and put in a further two years with the Indian Civil Service in order to be eligible for his pension. They would be separated for a very long time.

  Connie soon tired of being a civil servant and wrote to her father that she wished to devote herself to working in education. George Fletcher was of course very pleased, and contacted his old boss. Sir Robert Blair, now Chief Education Officer for the London County Council, offered Connie the headship of a pioneering new school. It was one that would embody the principles that both she and her muse Mrs Earle espoused: that education should directly prepare children for the life they were going to lead.

  The 1918 Education Act, passed under the auspices of Herbert Fisher, President of the Board of Education, was intended as a radical approach to education that would give children in the aftermath of war a better chance in life. (In 1920 only 12.6 per cent of children leaving elementary school continued in full-time education.) Fees were abolished in state elementary schools, the leaving age was raised to fourteen, and teachers’ salaries were increased. The great novelty of the Act was Section 10, which provided that all boys and girls between fourteen and eighteen who had not gone on to secondary schools should compulsorily attend day-continuation schools, their employers giving them leave from work for one whole day or two half-days per week. The curriculum was designed to prepare a child for a working life in a factory or workshop.

  Sir Robert Blair, also chairman of the Liberal Party’s advisory committee on education, was able to exert a significant influence on Fisher’s Education Act which gave day-continuation schools a central role. Since his spell in Ireland, Blair had remained a strong advocate of educating adolescents for employment, particularly through technical instruction. But the training in these new schools was not to be entirely technical. It also aimed to open the young person’s mind to wider aspects of life beyond the workplace: to the theatre, the art gallery and the concert hall, and to an aspiration to enjoy and even create a better and more pleasant living environment – concepts that became the cornerstone of Connie’s own principles of education. Elementary school staff tended to be rigid disciplinarians used to teaching the three Rs to huge classes in grim surroundings; Blair’s advisory committee recommended that the new schools should train their own staff and urged the local authorities, which would run the schools, to look for men and women with experience of a world beyond textbooks.

  But the day-continuation schools were no more than a half-baked idea, with an inadequate budget, unsuitable buildings, untrained staff and, apart from Blair, few who actually believed in or supported the scheme. The failure of most of these schools was the result of postwar economic depression, a lack of vision and the opposition of vested interests. London, however, under Blair’s energetic direction, set an example to the rest of the country, and two of the schools proved successful because they were set up and run by individuals with the right vision and ability. One, in the East End of London, was the Homerton and South Hackney Day Continuation School. Its headmistress, appointed on Sir Robert Blair’s recommendation, was Mrs Constance Marr.

  The concept of the schools was so novel that, much as George Fletcher had in the Department of Technical Education in Dublin, Connie found herself making things up as she went along. It was exactly the sort of challenge that she thrived on. Everything she had learned from her father and Lady Aberdeen, plus her own creative ideas and her determination to produce something worthwhile from very little, spurred her on.

  The grimness of the East End, even after Ireland, was nevertheless quite a shock. The building, in a tree-lined avenue, was a Georgian mansion with an imposing portico, a relic of the days when Homerton had been a smart area where wealthy City merchants built homes. But it had recently been used as a teachers’ training college and the interior was dark, dingy and institutionalized. Connie wanted the school to be an oasis of pleasure and beauty, so she immediately set about making it inviting and attractive to the young people living in the decaying slums that surrounded it. She had the classrooms painted in cheerful, bright colours and made regular visits to County Hall to demand more equipment, books and furniture. If the supply department failed to produce what was needed, Connie would breeze into Sir Robert Blair’s office, perch on his desk and argue her case. They were well matched. Blair, an impressive figure with ‘a magnificent leonine head’ and a forceful personality, admired Connie’s resolve and good humour, and she usually left with what she wanted.

  Putting together the right team proved equally challenging. Connie was supposed to recruit suitable men and women from business and commerce rather than traditional teachers, but instead found herself luring the best teachers she could find in the elementary schools. She was able to offer secondary-school salaries, which caused considerable ill-feeling. Florence Thurston, then a young sewing teacher in a Stoke Newington school, later remembered an inspector coming round to tell the staff of the new projec
t and asking for volunteers. The headmistress had gloomily remarked: ‘The head of that queer new school is coming to pinch you.’ For an extra hundred pounds a year, Miss Thurston moved to a far more interesting job with Mrs Marr – ‘a charming headmistress’. Typically, Connie also drew on her friends and relations, quickly persuading Jos Cook to come and teach music and drama.

  The Homerton school was officially opened in 1921 by Mrs Herbert Fisher, wife of the President of the Board of Education. Jos had trained her small choir to perform a medley of songs, including ‘Forty Years On’:

  Forty years on, when afar and asunder

  Parted are those who are singing today,

  When you look back, and forgetfully wonder

  What you were like in your work and your play.

  Mrs Fisher was heard to observe in the staff room afterwards that the public-school ethos of this song could mean little to children from the slums. Connie quickly replied that she could not see why stirring words and a fine tune should be the exclusive property of Harrow School.

  The lethargic attitude of many local authorities to funding and running these ‘compulsory’ schools was reinforced by pressures brought to bear on them by local employers. Lloyd George’s hard-faced businessmen who had done well out of the war detested the scheme: young labour was cheap labour, and if it had to be freed from the shop or bench for a whole day a week, it ceased to be as cheap as all that. Many even refused to employ children attending the schools. One of the tasks that Connie most feared was having to go round the shops and factories making it clear that she would have the law enforced. Many parents, too, were opposed, and Connie was also obliged to knock on the doors of tenement homes and confront enraged fathers who saw no point in educating a child who should be out earning. Some actually encouraged their children to behave badly in the hope that this would finish the school.

  With the parents, Connie won her own victory. She issued an open invitation to them all to come one evening and hear her point of view and why she and the children needed their support. A surprising number turned up and listened while she explained the practical and personal advantages their children would gain from the school. Though hostile at first, gradually the mood of the meeting swung round and when she had finished she announced, ‘Now we’ll have a concert . . . you all know “Old Folks at Home”?’ Jos Cook struck up on the piano and suddenly the East End was singing along and the parents, at least, were on her side.

  The pupils might have been obliged by law to attend, but most had to be charmed or coerced into doing any work. No punishments or sanctions were allowed and many of the children, used to Victorian class discipline, were rebellious or larked about. Connie and her team faced the challenge of making every task so interesting and attractive that the children wanted to do it. Lily Cullen, one of the first pupils, recalled how the school treated the children like adults and made them ‘feel alive and free’. Here in the cheerful, busy atmosphere Connie created, Lily and her school-friends found themselves far removed from the harsh realities of their daily lives, and only occasionally were they ‘suddenly brought back to reality with the smells of a pickle or glue factory which penetrated the school’. Connie’s policy was and always would be to praise first and comment after. She was particularly horrified by the treatment of the ‘truancy boys’, most from violent and unhappy homes, who came to her from a special school for consistent truants. They were treated as potential criminals, segregated from the other children and made to wear humiliating short trousers. Connie soon put a stop to all that, and the sense of failure and injustice that many felt began to disappear.

  Her firm belief that gardens and flowers had healing powers took shape at this school; in the harsh postwar environment it seemed more important than ever, and not just for the children. She described interviewing the mother of a particularly unmanageable boy. ‘I confided in her,’ Connie wrote, ‘telling her of the efforts we had all made to do anything with him; all the while she remained silent and wooden-faced. At last she spoke, looking me coldly in the eye. “Jim is a perfectly good boy at home,” she said. “We don’t have no trouble with him, none at all. Every time he opens his mouth his father hits him over the head.”’ Gradually Connie discovered that the father’s nerves were so bad that even the noise of a chair accidentally scraped back from the table was a signal for an outburst of anger. ‘He can’t help it,’ the mother said tearfully. ‘It’s his nerves; he’s bin like that since the war.’ Connie was sensible enough to know that gardening would be an unrealistic option for such war-ravaged people. Nevertheless, the healing powers of gardens and gardening are today generally acknowledged.

  If Connie could not help the adults, she could at least make a difference for the children. She used her instincts and imagination to humanize the curriculum and relate it to daily life. As well as literacy, numeracy and bookkeeping, she believed in the importance of good manners and good social behaviour generally, and got Jos to run drama classes to improve her pupils’ confidence in their speech and deportment. Dance classes and ‘socials’ were organized to which staff and parents came. In their carpentry classes the boys made attractive objects for the home, while the girls did dressmaking, copying the latest styles, though the materials available were very limited. All her life Connie showed a mastery in producing something beautiful out of very little; she had an extraordinary flair for ‘making a purse out of a pig’s ear’, as she put it. On one occasion she and Miss Thurston made themselves each a dress with some horrid bright-green material. Miss Thurston worked a daisy chain into a yoke; Connie embroidered hers with brilliant small flowers. They modelled the dresses in class and the effect was electric. ‘The memory that is still vivid in my mind,’ recalled Lily Cullen, ‘is of Mrs Marr sweeping into the school full of zest and flamboyance, always dressed very, very smart and modern which to us being young was a thrill, especially after our ordinary LCC teachers who were very Victorian and dowdy.’

  Connie was determined that all the children should experience the pleasures of beauty. She described one girl being hauled up before her for stealing a shilling. The child had spent the money on coloured paper flowers. ‘I only wanted something pretty,’ she wailed. Nothing could have brought home to Connie more clearly the hunger for beauty in the grimy homes set in those wretched surroundings; it was reminiscent of her own childhood, and she remembered so well her own desperate search for flowers to please the eye and gladden the heart. From then on she ensured that every classroom was generously decked out with fresh flowers; she got the children to colour-wash old earthenware crocks for vases – a technique she was to use later in her shop.

  After a long, tough schoolday Connie longed to escape to somewhere peaceful. Early in 1921 she and Jos took a cottage in Billericay in Essex, an easy bus ride from the school, where they set up home for Tony, now aged ten, and shared their passion for gardening. This was Connie’s second garden, and she crammed it with a great bounty of colourful flowering plants whose blooms she cut and piled into baskets every day to take to school: ‘according to the season the basket would be filled with pansies and pinks, roses and phlox, sweet rocket and wallflowers, primroses and daffodils; whatever might be in bloom.’ But she never reached school with a full basket:

  One way or another they used to be scattered along my route: the bus conductor who had to have a pansy for his buttonhole because his grandmother grew them in the garden when he was a little boy, and the ticket collector who hadn’t smelled a mignonette for he didn’t know how long, and quite a few ‘give us a flower lady’ urchins and some shyer ones who only asked with their eyes. And so, little by little, the contents of the basket dwindled. The journey ceased to be dreary and was enlivened with garden chat, homely personal memories of an earlier, more sunlit world, which were added to day by day, grew into sagas, nostalgic human stories. That is one of the things flowers do for you.

  She even turned a blind eye when itinerant hop-pickers grabbed flowers from her garden. ‘You migh
t call it the freemasonry of flowers,’ Connie wrote thirty years later in 1953, when she was running quite a different sort of school but with very much the same beliefs and values – personal fulfilment and the appreciation of beauty, whatever one’s background.

  Connie visited the National Gallery and Burlington House (the home of the Royal Academy) for inspiration and ideas for the school. Reproductions in The Studio, which she read as a child, had familiarized her with the paintings which she now saw as potential inspiration for her students. She bought postcard reproductions and stuck them around the classroom walls. Her favourites were the flower compositions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painters such as Cornelis de Heem, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Justus van Huysum and Jan Brueghel the Elder, which were once popular with wealthy patrons across Europe. Many of these paintings were rather stiff and unnatural; some were carefully arranged to give prominence to the highly valued tulip, while many of the earlier ones carried symbolic and religious significances in which Connie had no interest. They often featured an idealized or imaginary still-life composition that could never have worked as a living arrangement – gravity was defied, branches and tendrils poised without means of support, and flowers from different seasons were mixed together.