The Surprising Life of Constance Spry

by Sue Shephard

  For the school’s passing-out party in 1952 Connie and Rosemary decided to do something very original and ambitious. They thought it would be interesting for the students of the postwar era to prepare a buffet supper in the fashion of a century earlier and set it beside an ‘austerity table’. They pored over their collection of old cookery books and came up with a lavish menu for 1852 including consommé flecked with gold-leaf and a huge langouste rampante decorated with truffles and glazed with aspic. Unable to find a boar for stuffed boar’s head, they used a pig’s and blacked it with lard and soot, giving it wax tusks wreathed in bay leaves and filled with pâté. There were raised pies and mousses of veal and salmon. The coup de grâce was a tall pyramidal croquenbouche, which in Rosemary’s recipe was made of tiny meringues stuck together with spun sugar, surrounded with bavaroises; plus jellies, trifles and two fine swans made from painted cellophane and holding sweetmeats. In the centre of the table was a gigantic epergne spouting a fountain of asparagus fern, with the inevitable garlands of smilax clustered around the edge of the buffet – exactly the kind of decoration that Connie had fought against for so long.

  The 1952 ‘austerity table’ was composed of many kinds of homemade bread, homemade cream cheeses and a huge dish of crudités all arranged on a warm yellow hessian tablecloth. Although they clearly had a brilliant time preparing the nineteenth-century table, Connie, not surprisingly, favoured the simple homespun look of the contemporary fare. It was a small lesson in culinary and social history, a reminder that things had changed radically in a hundred years. Connie and Rosemary were attempting to show their students that the days of lavish and spacious living when kitchens teemed with cooks and scullions sweating over the roasting pits were a bygone age. The war had changed the way people cooked, ate and made their homes for ever.

  Winkfield was now the real hub of Connie’s interest and energies. She had ceased doing much teaching, though she lectured to the London school two or three times a term and gave out the end-of-course certificates. She preferred to spend most of her day in the garden at Winkfield, writing her books in her office and walking around the school keeping an eye on everything. Neither Winkfield nor the flower and cookery school in London made money – both were subsidized by the shop. Despite the tough postwar period, business had picked up quickly and Constance Spry Ltd was once again a huge concern, with a large staff carrying out a wide variety of commissions for a demanding and varied clientele. There were once again regular flower contracts for private houses, government offices and embassies, parties, weddings and debutante balls. Clients now ranged from No. 10 Downing Street where the Churchills had been back in residence since the 1951 general election, to the ICI headquarters and big commercial showrooms such as Elizabeth Arden and Cyclax.

  The shop’s charges were now high, but the Constance Spry brand had retained its pre-war cachet and their many customers were happy to pay premium prices for sophisticated Spry arrangements. Their chief competitors were Moyses Stevens. ‘But’, Connie said, ‘they had a different way of doings things . . . more cheap and cheerful.’

  In 1947 Connie had at last been rewarded with a new royal commission. She was invited to do the flowers for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip in Westminster Abbey. Thrilled and flattered, she dropped everything and summoned her best decorators for the prestigious challenge. The government, hoping that a royal wedding would cheer people up with a bit of colour and spectacle, agreed a generous but not enormous budget. Even Princess Elizabeth herself was not entirely immune from postwar regulations, but she was given a special extra allowance of one hundred clothing coupons for her wedding dress while her bridesmaids got twenty-three and the pages ten. ‘It was considered not proper to spend large sums of money on the wedding when we are asking the workers themselves to economise in the necessities of life.’

  Connie was instructed to do two large arrangements on either side of the altar. The colour scheme, chosen by Buckingham Palace, was white and pale pink. They used camellia foliage, lilies and roses with variegated dracaena leaves. Sheila McQueen remembered being driven in a large Rolls-Royce, first to Buckingham Palace to decorate the wedding cakes with garlands of white roses and then down the Mall, which was closed to traffic, and being cheered all the way to Westminster Abbey by the waiting crowds. Suddenly Connie and her flowers were back in the limelight, and prestigious commissions poured in.

  In March 1950 Vincent Auriol, the President of France, and his wife came to London on a state visit. The highlight of the week was a gala ballet performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Oliver Messel designed the costumes for Beryl Grey, Margot Fonteyn and Nadia Nerina, and collaborated with Connie on decorating the auditorium and the royal box. Messel ordered the walls to be painted pale blue and white, while the marbled pilasters had their capitals picked out in gilt. The magnificent Opera House chandelier was cleaned so that it glittered for the first time in years, and the wall brackets, black with discoloration, were regilded and fitted with burnished-steel mirror backings. For the auditorium Connie made garlands of leaves, sprayed lightly with colour to resemble fine carving. Below the wide span of the royal box and the adjoining grand tier she hung hundreds of camellias – ‘formal, sweeping and massive’. Unable to obtain sufficient flowers, she sought the help of Royal Horticultural Society gardeners, and eventually had so many that she used them to frame the mirrors inside the royal box, made circles of them to catch up the folds of the muslin ceiling draperies, as well as constructing tall artificial trees of foliage and camellias on the staircase leading to the box. ‘I confess that never in my life did I think to see the camellia used to such abandon,’ she recalled. The effect was breathtaking. And there were enough left over for her own table at home.

  When Connie made one of her regular visits to the shop in South Audley Street, her arrival always caused excitement. If any arrangement particularly pleased her, she would ask who had done it and give much cherished praise. For big important commissions she continued to head the design teams, but left the day-to-day running of the shop to her trusted old staff. Her long-serving stalwart George Foss was now Managing Director; ‘Fossey’ was greatly loved and respected by everyone. Many of the pre-war decorators also remained: Sheila McQueen and Joyce Robinson, who supervised the younger decorators such as Jill Waring, Evelyn Russell and Amanda Williams who was taken on after coming out top of her class at the flower school. ‘We had to be punctual,’ Amanda remembered, ‘you’d be sacked if you were late. We weren’t allowed to go out on a contract without wearing a hat and pink overalls.’

  Life in the shop was now a disciplined, well-run affair, and much of the party spirit that had once made it all so worthwhile seemed to have been lost. The girls in the work-room were quietly diligent, working their fingers off wiring and twisting and making bouquets and wreaths. ‘They were so clever but had to concentrate. One didn’t just walk into the work-room in case you disturbed them,’ Amanda recalled. The shop itself, however, was still pretty lively, with people coming and going all the time while Fossey went round doling out encouragement and praise and occasionally commenting on the choice of material or the costing of a bouquet. Connie was never averse to new ideas, even sales gimmicks: hers was one of the first shops to produce pre-arranged bunches that could be dispatched ready for slipping into vases. Sheila described how: ‘The snip of a securing string loosened the stalks to their predetermined “freedom”, with exquisite grading of colours and variations in form.’

  But the bulk of the shop’s work was still in commissions for private clients, and Amanda Williams remembered going out to meet them at their homes:

  Some were fabulous with wonderful furniture – gosh, it made you think . . . We would price up the job, you know, three vases at £3 each say, and we would decide on the flowers and vases, unless the client chose the flowers or had a special preference. When we knew what was needed, we made a list and gave it to the Head of Decorators and the plant buyer Mr Price would g
o to the market; some flowers came from the Winkfield gardens as well.

  For country jobs they took the van filled with material but they never stayed the night. ‘We made jolly sure we got home, though it was often terribly late.’ Clients rarely fed them or even gave them a cup of tea. Tips were often a source of dispute; some decorators frowned on accepting them, but as the pay was only £5 a week they were keen for any little extras, even if it was just the pairs of nylons that one client always handed out. Some clients were rather eccentric, and the decorators had to cope with all sorts of strange situations: ‘You never knew what you would find.’ Once, called in to do the flowers at the Persian Embassy for a visit by the Shah, two decorators were locked in and only let out when they had finished the job. Amanda Williams remembered a debutante party given by three ‘witches’ in a house in Knightsbridge:

  They only wanted poisonous plants, Giant Hogweed for example, which is illegal to pick. Someone said there was some growing in a bomb-site nearby, so we had to get permission from the Council to pick it. There were great big vases of flowers going up the stairs filled with hogweed, foxgloves, laburnum, delphinium, oleander and trailing deadly nightshade – so bizarre. They really were witches you know.

  On another occasion Amanda was told to grab a taxi and take some lilies to Abbey Road studios, where Connie was decorating the set for a Cadbury’s chocolate commercial. After handing over the flowers, Amanda was told to sit in a chair and pretend to read a book while she was filmed. ‘I was wearing a blue top and pink skirt . . . of course, I wasn’t paid,’ she remembered, ‘but I don’t think I was in the final film.’

  The decorators were still overworked and conditions at the shop were surprisingly bad. The staff lavatory was disgusting and the little corner where they could make tea or coffee was horribly dirty and cramped. ‘We had to put up with such a lot, but no one dared complain.’ But on the whole the atmosphere was cheerful and many women recall their time there as marvellously happy and great fun. ‘Of course we were worked into the ground,’ recalled Daphne Holden, ‘but goodness, how we laughed. We’ve never laughed like that since she died.’ They always looked forward to Mrs Spry’s visits with a mix of fear and excitement. They all remembered her as a great artist and a wonderfully inspiring, though also sometimes a rather frightening, even hard, presence. Connie had aged and, perhaps inevitably, had lost some of her joie de vivre. ‘She didn’t like any girl being ill, she could be very unsympathetic.’ But they all still loved it when she noticed and approved of something they had done or if she selected them to do a special job. There were days when it was like old times, when inventive ideas would seem to come bursting out of Connie, and her staff could spot the signs:

  She would grow abstracted, and her thick, springy hair would literally stand on end. Then she would need all her ‘black boys’ to help her carry out [her ideas], to draw and paint and gum and glitter, and twist wire, and fabric, perhaps till two in the morning. ‘Oh, why haven’t you got a third hand?’ she would wail, or with compunction: ‘You don’t mind, darling, do you?’ One was not supposed, ever, to say no when Mrs Spry had a creative fit, and it took a good while to be forgiven if one did.

  Connie might still have reigned supreme, but Val Pirie ran the London office with an iron hand. Miss Pirie was, it appears, loathed by all. As one woman recalled, Val was not at all artistic and this stuck out among so many who were: ‘Miss Pirie terrified the daylights out of me. Like a hard schoolmistress, always neat and tidy in a black suit and very bossy.’ Another recalled: ‘She was mostly in the office, stuck to the business side of things, but caused a bit of an atmosphere, you know.’ ‘She was an absolute bitch,’ was the uncompromising view of another. Sometimes the tall, lean shadowy figure of Mr Spry would quietly appear in the shop or work-room, like a ghost. ‘He never said “Hello” or “How are you?”’ The staff remembered him as arrogant and distant. ‘You know, the “we are up here and you are down there” sort of thing.’

  ‘We all knew about them, but never spoke about it, never indulged in gossip or anything, just knew,’ one of the decorators recalled. ‘It took me ages to realize what was going on, no one said, but then when you did, you wondered how anyone could have wanted to be involved with a woman like Miss Pirie. Mrs Spry just seemed to ignore it all. I think most of us were too young to take it in or understand.’ As another one-time decorator suggested, with sixty years’ hindsight, ‘Perhaps [Connie] was rather a damaged person, after so much in her private life. She never confided in anyone that I know of, but then she wouldn’t to us, would she?’ But she must occasionally have let down her guard a little. One of her greatest admirers, Dora Buckingham, once angrily demanded to know why Connie didn’t ‘just chuck the pair of them out’. The answer remains a mystery.

  Life at Winkfield was always noisy, chaotic and almost entirely lacking in privacy. Beverley Nichols found ‘quite indescribable chaos and almost hysterical confusion’, with Connie presiding as a sort of amiable queen bee while her young ladies swarmed over the place. Connie’s ‘daughters’, as she called them, and visitors too, were welcomed at all hours in the Sprys’ tiny flat. Her old friend Charles Laughton once came to visit and after dinner read some passages from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the students could hear his sonorous rendering of Bottom in loud, bucolic overtones throughout the building, which caused great amusement.

  But Shav was now seventy, and he hated the lack of privacy and peace more with every year that passed; he disliked Winkfield and missed the Kent countryside. For several years the Sprys had been visiting Scotland and Shav had fallen in love with the wild scenery and the peaceful retreat it offered. He had found an old whitewashed cobbler’s cottage called Ard Daraich on the shores of Loch Linnhe, which he bought and over the years extended and rebuilt. It was here that he now spent all but the winter months, with Val looking after him when she wasn’t running the London office. Connie came for the summer holidays in a blaze of energy, often bringing guests, to write her books and spend some time with Shav. They enjoyed walks together along the loch or boating on its smooth waters; sometimes they drove to Inverness to indulge their passion for antique buying, or they spent time together in the garden.

  Behind the cottage was a steep hill of heather and bracken and bare grey rockfaces topped with a high wire deer fence. Val tried to take in hand the little bluff of land that sloped sharply down to the house. Without Connie around to interfere, she indulged her own ideas and created a garden she and Shav could enjoy together. But the task was fraught with difficulty, and Connie was full of admiration for Val, ‘the real labourer in the vineyard’, as she battled with the inhospitable environment – the torrential and unceasing rainfall, the violent gales, dark boggy ground and huge rocks. Yet, as Connie recalled, it was not all bad and some plants flourished beyond expectations: ‘The moist clean-washed air intensified the scents of garden and countryside. An impalpable essence of sweetness pervades the place, giving the colours of the flowers a depth and richness we do not know in the south.’

  Val installed drainage channels and pipes to prevent the plants being washed out of the ground every time it rained. It was effective, but provided open doors for the local rabbits to enter the garden and eat the plants. She created ‘sleeves’ of ship’s canvas weighted with stones and wired to the drainpipes so that the edges lay firmly together, only opening to the pressure of water above but not to the rabbits below. In pockets of enriched soil made among the huge outcrops of rock they planted silver birch and silver-leafed cytisus and large clumps of Hosta sieboldiana, their grey-green leaves covered in pearls of water after the rain. In spring there were camellia, erythroniums, delicate Japanese woodland plants and sulphur-yellow Anemone alpina. Lower down was a thick border of blue and white agapanthus.

  At first Connie respected Val’s way of doing things: ‘she has confounded me too often, knows the way of this garden,’ she wrote, generous as ever. But however tactfully she tried to let this be Val’s garden, Connie
could not resist the challenge of growing plants in these difficult but gloriously beautiful conditions. She was soon experimenting with many of her favourites: Lilium regale, which looked very happy in the wet, warm summer; astilbes, Alchemilla mollis, even the supreme challenge of the deep blue Meconopsis grandis. ‘If a plant decides it will grow here, it will do so with full heart and grandeur’, and none more so than their favourite Lilium giganteum which grew in the shelter of some shrubs. ‘No matter how often you may climb the narrow mossy path to look at them, you feel a little shock of surprise at the nobility of their stature and at the fine form of the great glossy leaves.’

  Connie wrote, with real love and depth of feeling for Shav, that these lilies were his particular pride and joy: ‘the real fount and source of all that we enjoy in this garden . . . I think in imagination he sees the garden given over to them.’ Shav does seem to have found peace and happiness in the Scottish wilds and in his garden. He was always a keen and knowledgeable gardener, but perhaps too often sidelined by Connie’s assertive ways in the garden. At Ard Daraich he could retain some control, as Connie herself conceded:

  Beyond his position of generous provider the master might be described as more of an overseer than a working head. Every once in a while he disproves this and, disappearing somewhat privily from our midst, becomes dynamic. On one occasion he saved the life of a eucryphia: prodding about with a garden fork, he had discovered a nice deep island of soil in a sheltered spot; to this, with firmness of purpose, he moved the tiredlooking shrub, and in this place it now flourishes.

  Val appears to have been content to look after Shav in Scotland, but there seems little doubt that the relationship between Shav and Connie, whatever its problems, was still as important and mutually enriching as ever. Connie had tolerated Val’s presence in a long and loving life with Shav which, despite the hurt, clearly still meant so much to her. Unsurprising then, perhaps, as Vita Marr later asserted, that Val was terribly jealous of Connie.