by Sue Shephard
Connie was meanwhile writing another flower-decoration book, How to Do the Flowers, published in 1953. It was one of a series of small books that she hoped would appeal to less well-off readers, though they were still generously illustrated. In fact, this book was paid for by a firm of metal-polishers who wanted a booklet on flower arrangements in metal containers and were prepared to pay £1,000. Many of the containers photographed in it are of well-buffed silver, brass, pewter, tin or copper. Connie distilled all that she had learned, and all that she felt was important about flower decorations, in this small publication. After twenty years of writing about flower arranging, she still stuck pretty much to her original principles. Its chief interest here, though, is in the foreword written by Beverley Nichols who, in characteristically over-ripe language, extolled the many virtues of his dear friend.
Time and again I have heard people say: ‘It makes me want to do a Constance Spry’ – which means standing before a bed of hydrangeas, when summer has fled, and seeing beauty in their pallid, parchment blossoms. It means suddenly stopping in a country lane, and noting for the first time a scarlet cadenza of berries, and fitting it, in one’s mind’s eye, into a pewter vase against a white wall. It means bouts with brambles, flirtations with ferns, and carnival with cabbages.
It was Connie, he continued, who broke down the prejudices between the flower garden and the kitchen garden. She was ‘the first floral artist who ever walked straight from the herbaceous border to the cabbage patch’. But there was nothing ‘airy’ or grand about her:
She may have gold in her heart but she has mud on her hands, and scratches too. And to her ardent labours a grey and troubled world is most deeply in debt.
THIRTEEN
Lights Up – Lights Out
1952–1960
King George VI died suddenly on 6 February 1952. On the 15th, a cold grey day, a sombre funeral procession bore his coffin to Paddington Station, where a steam train took it to Windsor, for burial in St George’s Chapel. At the Winkfield school and at the shop in South Audley Street students and staff had worked for days making up many of the wreaths and other floral tributes that were now massed on the ground outside the Chapel.
Princess Elizabeth, newly returned from Kenya where she had learned of her father’s death, had been proclaimed Queen on 8 February. Winston Churchill, now Prime Minister again, quickly overcame his reservations about the new Queen’s youth and lack of experience, realizing that her accession gave his government an opportunity. The coronation of this ‘fair and youthful figure, Princess, wife, and mother’, would herald the dawn of a new Elizabethan Age. It would also help the British people out of the post-imperial hangover they were still suffering and enable them to look with renewed hope and optimism to the future. It would strengthen the monarchy, improve the country’s international standing and, in particular, galvanize the Commonwealth, a newfangled term which so far had meant very little to the British people.
However, in order to realize this ambition several obstacles had to be overcome. First, there was the Duke of Windsor’s wish to attend, to which Churchill responded bluntly that it would be ‘quite inappropriate for a king who had abdicated to be present as an official guest at the coronation of one of his successors’. There was the Queen Mother, bereft and grieving, unsure of what her role was now that her daughter was her sovereign, but determined that the coronation should follow exactly that of King George VI. There was the wounded male pride of the Queen’s husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, whose role was now utterly secondary. To placate him, the Duke was appointed chairman of the committee organizing the coronation. In practice, however, he was to play second fiddle to the vice-chairman, the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshall of England, a bluff, hearty figure who had overseen the coronation of George VI, was very conservative, and determined to maintain tradition and continuity.
While His Grace was in overall charge, much of the planning and stage management of the coronation fell to the Minister of Works David Eccles, a rising member of the Cabinet, if distrusted by some Conservatives for his apparent self-regard. ‘Smarty Boots’ Eccles had initially been given a comparatively lowly job to keep him out of trouble. Now he was delighted with the chance to make his mark. He did not impress officialdom by describing the coronation as ‘show-business’ and the Queen as the ‘perfect leading lady’. But that was exactly what it was. It was a huge undertaking with less than a year in which to plan it all. Eccles, who described himself as the Earl Marshall’s ‘handyman’, said at his first press conference: ‘My job is to set the stage and to build a theatre inside Westminster Abbey. It is also to provide seats, standing room and decorations along the processional route; to arrange flowers, floodlighting, fireworks and other expressions of public rejoicing; and to take care of newspapermen, broadcasters and cameramen.’
After setting up his planning committee, one of Eccles’s first acts was to invite Constance Spry to decorate the processional route with flowers and to join the committee as honorary consultant on floral decoration. Eccles and his wife Sybil had been close friends of Connie’s for many years; Sybil’s mother, Lady Dawson of Penn, had been a Spry client since the early Thirties. According to Sheila McQueen, Eccles and Connie were known to be ‘really hand in glove; very, very close friends, both artistic, with much in common’. Having done the flowers for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Connie had clearly been forgiven for the Windsor wedding, so there was no problem in gaining royal approval for her appointment. Eccles wrote to Connie that when he told the press that he expected a major contribution from Mrs Spry, ‘they murmured (this is equal to cheers in the House of Commons) their approval.’
But neither she nor Eccles had reckoned with opposition from the mandarins at the Ministry of Works – Sir Eric de Norman, the Permanent Secretary, Major Hobkirk, the Bailiff of the Royal Parks, the architect Sir Charles Mole and Eric Bedford, the Ministry’s chief architect. ‘Over our dead bodies,’ they told Eccles. But he held firm. ‘I wasn’t going to have them just wheel out the geraniums,’ he wrote to Connie.
Before attending the first planning meeting in April 1952 Eccles warned Connie that the going might initially be rather sticky. To her surprise she found herself patronized, cold-shouldered and barely spoken to by the kind of men she would normally have felt comfortable with; she was not used to this kind of treatment. ‘But she soon seduced them,’ Eccles recalled, and stunned them with her professionalism, knowledge and flair. She turned on the old Connie Fletcher charm. A team player herself, she told them, she would have no problem in working with Eric Bedford, who was to be the chief designer, and Mr Hepburn, the Superintendent of Parks responsible for cultivating most of the flowers required. She could show them all she knew about flowers and how they could be effectively used – though of course, she added tactfully, she had much to learn from them about the techniques of decorating on a vast processional scale.
Connie soon won them round and in no time had persuaded the committee that the flowers should be banked in blocks and drifts of colour rather than dots or straight lines, and that however patriotic red, white and blue might be, the heraldic colours of scarlet, pale blue and gold were preferable; that white flowers, always difficult, were most effective when blocked together; that a blue scheme enlivened with white would be appropriate outside the Admiralty; that the parterres outside the Abbey annexe might show the soft pinks and mauves of an English country garden in high summer; and that the ubiquitous scarlet geraniums around the Queen Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace would stay – indeed, would be reinforced with more red flowers such as verbena, salvia and Phlox drummondii.
By the time an agreement had been reached and Connie was deemed acceptable, her remit had increased substantially: she was required not only to decorate the processional route, including the Commonwealth stand in Parliament Square, but also to organize a luncheon for visiting dignitaries immediately after the coronation ceremony. Now that she was a fully accepted membe
r of the team, her ideas, not just about flowers, were listened to. At one planning meeting they argued over the colour of the banners that would hang on each side of Eric Bedford’s four graceful tubular-steel triumphal arches, surmounted by gold and silver lions, white unicorns and a coronet, which would rise seventy feet high and span the Mall. The banners had to stand out against the pale yellow-green of the plane trees. When Connie suggested two vertical panels in clashing reds, a ripple of consternation went around the planning table. She picked out two roses, in vermilion and crimson, from a bowl of flowers on the table and showed them how it could work.
David Eccles had been told that there was the potential for over twenty million television viewers to watch the coronation. There was initial opposition from both Church and Churchill, but the Queen insisted on allowing the cameras in, which added to the problems inside the Abbey. Over the following months, as the plans evolved, David Eccles and Connie kept up a constant and often comic correspondence.
Minister of Works to Constance Spry, 16th August 1952:
You are quite right about plenty of gold. When I had the 1937 films [of George VI’s coronation] run over I saw that white is a cuckoo of a colour and the enemy of good pictures. So I told my people to cut it out and put in gold whenever they could.
Arrangements had to be put in hand for ten acres of flowers to be grown to bloom on exactly the right day. While gardeners in the Royal Parks greenhouses were busy growing vast quantities of Connie’s chosen flowers, the Ministry’s workshops were making the golden crown-shaped baskets that she and Bedford had designed to hold the masses of flowering plants to be hung high on standards along the route. Connie was adamant about keeping the flowers high up, so they could be clearly visible, as for a party. These were days of shortages and profiteering, and the small practical problems seemed limitless: for instance, timber and building supplies were in short supply, and some things seemed unobtainable. ‘The Department is in the dumps about gold ropes,’ Eccles wrote. ‘It seems that for the thickness we want they cost 6s. 6d. a yard and we need 7000 yards (for the Mall principally). They want therefore to give up ropes, but I am not yet satisfied that we need be beaten.’ Connie was never beaten, and in this case tracked down surplus rope from navy supplies and treated it with gold paint.
Eric Bedford, who believed in functional design and technical innovation such as pre-stressed concrete and lightweight tubular steel, designed a temporary annexe outside Westminster Abbey which was to be an assembly point for the processions and a retiring room for the Queen and other members of the royal family. Eccles wrote:
The design and decoration of the annexe to the Abbey are coming on well. I will try and do you a sketch, however badly. The colours will be red and gold with a blue lining to the top canopy. The roof of the lower canopy will be glass to help the cameras, and we must not put too much drapery as they want to get angle shots of the Queen alighting, etc.
Running round the base of the annexe we can have a hedge of flowers. Of course they want hydrangeas but I hanker for yellows. Anyway you can do a design and we’ll put our heads together over it . . . I am very pleased with my notion to put a file of the Queen’s Beasts – lions or unicorns – on the skyline of the west end of the annexe.*
Meanwhile Connie also had to organize the post-coronation luncheon. After the service three hundred and fifty dignitaries from all over the world would need to be fed. Government hospitality had been the responsibility of the Minister of Works since the days of George III, who, it is said, considered that the then holder of the office was the only man he could trust not to put the funds allocated into his own pocket. David Eccles had assumed that the meal would be provided by one of the top hotels or restaurants such as the Dorchester, but by the time the team had got round to considering the problem, they found they had underestimated the massive public interest in attending the first really exciting postwar event – every good hotel, caterer and waiter was fully booked. Eccles wrote frantically to Connie that he was at his wits’ end.
‘But let me and Rosemary Hume do it,’ she replied. ‘Our students from Winkfield and the cookery school will do the cooking and waiting. You find us a room somewhere near the Abbey, and we’ll do the rest.’ Eccles had complete faith in Connie’s powers, but the mandarins were horrified yet again, as was the hospitality committee: ‘You are entrusting the lunch to a set of amateurs and a cookery school?’ they gasped in horror. ‘What else do you suggest?’ was Eccles’s riposte. Since no one offered an alternative, Connie and Rosemary took on yet another huge challenge.
David Eccles found a venue, the great hall of nearby Westminster School, originally the Abbey dormitory. It would have been the ideal setting of medieval splendour – vast hammer-beam roof and oak panelling – except that most of it had been destroyed in the Blitz. What Connie and Eccles found on their first visit was an ugly temporary ceiling, bare, pitted and scarred walls, an atmosphere of sombre austerity with little warmth, and absolutely no splendour. This was not the empty canvas, the whitewashed walls that Connie yearned to work with; it would require an enormous leap of imagination to conceive of any scheme sufficiently grand or impressive to entertain visiting potentates, royals, presidents and dignitaries for luncheon.
‘Well?’ said Eccles, looking around the hall and hoping that Connie would come up with some suitable and reassuring scheme in the face of such desolation. She tried to imagine how her friends Oliver Messel and Norman Wilkinson would have designed a period play in this empty stage. How would they have done it? What theme could she evoke, what colours and lighting, what materials could she use? After a ‘terrible fit of nerves’, Connie recalled, she found herself thinking of those monks reading their illuminated missals. She ‘muttered an incoherent reply about scarlet and blue and gold’, and prayed for time to think.
Connie and Rosemary, who had been busy planning the menu, put their heads together to hammer out the problem. Realizing that the effect they were after could not be achieved with flowers alone, they came up with a scheme in which the long serving-tables down the sides of the hall would be draped in gleaming gold, while the dining-table cloths would be of rich blue, and the flowers of glowing scarlet – now the official coronation colours. Alternating between elation, terror and depression, they considered, argued, and developed the details.
Mindful of postwar austerity and the tight budget, Connie drew on her skills of improvisation. She wanted the gold draperies down the lengths of the serving-tables to look like gilded leather and got the effect by painting thin plastic curtain material in graduated shades of gold – which, recalled Evelyn Russell, took wearisome hours – then draping it in heavy, classic folds. They found a cheap furnishing taffeta with exactly the right soft texture and in the desired rich blue – ‘brighter than powder [blue], deeper than ice’. To give Rosemary and her students sufficient serving space, the table flowers would be in specially made tin stands, to be concealed with painted gold crowns and raised on curving metal legs, the base of each stand encircled with a garland of modelled leaves in different shades of gold. Medieval tapestries would be borrowed from the Victoria and Albert Museum to add warmth and colour to the bleak walls, and generous arrangements of flowers in rich glowing reds would be set around the hall to distract the eye from the temporary roof.
Connie’s plans seemed to be shaping up and she was ready to report back to the committee. But her fear of disappointing authority – the ‘cold douche of snubs and rejections’ which always threatened to derail her confidence – was never far beneath the surface: ‘Suppose those in authority thought we were going too far, suppose they thought we might produce something not sufficiently dignified, suppose, suppose – serving tables draped in gold! Blue cloths! They could sound tawdry – better be careful.’ But Eccles wrote to reassure her: ‘If, in all this, there is no cause for dismay, that must chiefly be because you are enlisted in our handful of “metteurs en scène”. I believe in our team success.’
That Christmas C
onnie sent Sybil and David Eccles a coronation flower tableau made by Flo Standfast. Eccles immediately replied:
Minister of Works to Constance Spry, Christmas Eve 1952:
You have a special genius for pageant in miniature – the gift of perishable splendour.
But oh! The very reason why
I clasp them is because they die.
There’s a flower-seller’s song for you. Strange that England, who used to be in love with ‘fantaisie’, with poets and processions, has been now so long content to live on bread and rations. Our immediate fathers seem to have forgotten that the imagination is as powerful as the stomach. Our fantasy has been sleeping, but now it yawns and stretches, and if you and I pull the clothes off next June, it will get right out of bed. Only we have to navigate a new sort of imagination, a popular imagination flooding round the single lighthouse of the Throne, an imagination Commonwealth in extent and far simpler in quality than the Edwardian and Georgian mixture of peers, courtiers, and money-bags.
Eccles was reflecting on the government’s wish for the new Queen to be a beacon of hope for a future of optimism and post-imperial unity. The Queen herself has always attached considerable importance to this role and at the time of her accession said: