The Surprising Life of Constance Spry

by Sue Shephard

  During the weeks before and after the coronation Connie’s team lost count of the parties, balls, receptions, banquets and gala performances that were got up in celebration. They raced from one venue to another in taxis loaded with flowers, vases and all the necessary equipment. It was exhausting but fun, and sometimes comical. Connie recalled one grand coronation buffet luncheon given for ‘important visiting dignitaries’, among whom was a very young ‘eastern potentate’ arrayed in magnificent colourful robes and accompanied by his watchful tutor. Connie observed the boy slip away from his guard and, taking in one hand his silver-headed cane and in the other his umbrella, proceed to clear a passage for himself through the assembly until he reached the buffet table. Here he collected onto one plate a heap of food: finger savouries of anchovy, sardine and cheese, sandwiches, salads, meringues, fruit salad and chocolate ice-cream. Having filled his plate, the child stirred the whole ill-assorted conglomeration together and ate it rapidly with a spoon. He then retreated to the edge of the banqueting room, curled up, and fell into a sound sleep. ‘Forthright, adequate and extraordinarily satisfactory,’ Connie noted with approval.

  The Coronation Banquet, traditionally given to the monarch by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs on the occasion of the coronation and held at Lancaster House, was particularly special. Connie and her team were well known at Lancaster House, an important venue for government entertaining, where over the years they had decorated numerous important events. During the planning Connie was again juggling with several official bodies and high-ranking civil servants. She worked closely with Clarissa Eden, wife of Anthony Eden the Foreign Secretary, who had decided views on the flower decorations. But that May her husband had undergone a botched operation for gallstones and was seriously ill. Eden was persuaded to go to America for another operation and Clarissa Eden had to withdraw from the planning. She wrote to Connie: ‘I would like to tell you how very sad I am about Lancaster House, so sad in fact that, although Lady Churchill asked me to continue the arrangements, I felt I couldn’t bear to do so.’ With her unfailing good manners and magnanimity, Connie immediately sent Lady Eden a lavish and gorgeous arrangement of flowers. At this very late stage, Clementine Churchill took over; fortunately for Connie, she already had a very good relationship with the Churchills.

  In contrast to the make-do approach to the war-damaged hall at Westminster School, Lancaster House was richly decorated and boasted many rooms of opulent magnificence. The banqueting room, the anterooms and drawing-rooms, resplendent with fine gilt mirrors and ormolu furniture, were a marvellous challenge to Connie. Preparing for this banquet was like being a child in an Aladdin’s cave of treasures from which she was given the freedom to choose, she said.

  Museums, stately homes, private and public gardens vied to provide myriad items for her to use. She could have gold and silver from the Wellington and Ormonde Collections at Apsley House, the residence of the Duke of Wellington, and anything that took her fancy at the Victoria and Albert Museum. For the Queen’s table she borrowed the Deccan set of gold and silver tureens and a slender, graceful candelabrum in which, instead of candles, she placed tiny posies of jasmine, myrtle and miniature rosebuds. To complement the gilded plaster ornamentation on the walls she took inspiration from Grinling Gibbons’s carved panels of fruit, flowers and trailing vines and made long wall drops of garlands, fashioned with extraordinary delicacy and precision from seed-heads, fruits, ears of corn and grasses, all entwined with ribbon. Her colour scheme was creams, yellows, greens and ‘softest shell pinks with a touch of blue’. A lavish cornucopia of flowers poured in as gifts from private homes and from Covent Garden: dozens of stems of several varieties of lilies, roses, carnations, stocks, sweet peas, arums, gladioli, peonies, delphiniums, rhododendrons and tropical leaves.

  Connie was enjoying every minute; when she had written to Sir Brian Mountain of the Covent Garden Property Company with her wish-list of flowers, she had confessed that ‘it looks on paper a particularly greedy compilation’. David Eccles came up with a pair of giant malachite urns from the Victoria and Albert that were set at the head of the grand staircase and proved quite a challenge to fill. Kew produced giant leaves up to fifteen feet high from the Palm House, plus some bright hippeastrums and eremurus. Proteas left over from the Africa section of the Commonwealth stand were used along with cases of lotus flowers, still looking surprisingly fresh. Fossey had to stand on a ladder to fix them, and the completed urns stood seventeen feet high. ‘We ought to have borrowed a couple of Guardsmen,’ he said camply, ‘to give a real sense of scale.’

  Amanda Williams, one of Connie’s decorators at Lancaster House, remembered her walking round to inspect the work. She nodded with approval at the garlands, which had been exquisitely made up by the inveterate Whitey. Then she stood back and looked for a moment at the low vases of roses and blue-black muscat grapes set in mounds on gold-leaf plates. ‘“I know what that needs,” Mrs Spry said, and with her unerring sense of what she called “suitable”, took a bunch of stephanotis and lightly scattered the pink flowers like stars among the grapes; the effect was perfect. God, she was artistic.’ After the banquet Lady Churchill wrote to Connie: ‘I do want to congratulate you upon the lovely flower arrangements at Lancaster House. Everybody admired them. Really it was a fairylike and yet dignified scene. I know what infinite time and trouble you must have taken.’

  In the Coronation Honours Connie was awarded an OBE and David Eccles received a knighthood. Later in the year she went to Buckingham Palace for the investiture accompanied by her son Tony and her secretary Daphne Holden. She was in a nervous and emotional state, and when they looked for her after the ceremony she was nowhere to be found. Overwhelmed by the occasion, she had jumped into a taxi and gone straight back to the shop.

  Once the excitement had died down it was business as usual, and in September Connie went to Norway to lecture to groups of NATO wives. She was now sixty-seven and found lecturing more of a strain and Sheila, who often accompanied and usually did the actual demonstration while Connie sat and watched, remembered that she would sometimes clutch the demonstrator’s hand or demand an arm to help her up onto the platform. But once she had stood to speak, she seemed to find all her old fire again. Connie also produced a new book after the coronation, Party Flowers, in which she described some of the work she had done for the great state occasion. She dedicated it to Sir David and Lady Eccles ‘with all my love and in appreciation of a never-to-be-forgotten experience’.

  Connie might have thought then that the coronation was the pinnacle of her achievements, but her work was far from over and the next few years were spent producing what, surprisingly, would turn out to be her most lasting memorial. The names Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume were now synonymous in the public mind with their school and with the coronation. The dish that Rosemary had invented for the occasion was inexpensive and easy to prepare. Coronation Chicken quickly became a popular dish at buffets and parties – and not just in England. Several women’s magazines, sent out to Commonwealth countries, printed the recipe and it was proudly served up in homes in Australia, South Africa, Canada and India. Rosemary, though, was not entirely happy about the attention her dish was receiving. This was less because she was by nature a very modest person, though she was, but because it was not Cordon Bleu, not French, not really professional cooking as she knew it. Connie, who was always happy to see something made popular and accessible, was at first bemused by her friend’s view. ‘If I can make flower arranging accessible to all, then surely first-class cookery can similarly be made attractive to ordinary housewives.’

  Having successfully collaborated in setting up the school at Winkfield Place and in producing the coronation luncheon, Connie and Rosemary decided to take on an even more ambitious project together. They had been friends for nearly thirty years and had a very warm and mutually respectful working relationship. Rosemary was a very private woman; she was over twenty years younger than Connie and it is unlike
ly that they exchanged personal confidences. But they understood each other and spent a considerable amount of their lives working together. According to Rosemary’s niece, she was probably dyslexic – ‘her spelling was a family joke’ – and her first book was almost certainly written by her business partner and co-author Dione Lucas.

  Now Connie suggested to Rosemary that they could join forces to produce a cookery book. They would combine their skills: Rosemary would provide clear and foolproof recipes and techniques and Connie would write them down, interspersed with some good stories – usually from her own past – which would help make the book less starchy. Connie was careful to explain in her Introduction that she should be regarded as ‘Rosemary’s stooge’; had watched, copied and queried, demanding fuller explanations of processes that an expert might take for granted.

  In the new book Connie recalled childhood delights and her struggles as a young wife in Ireland. In the bread-making chapter she exhorted readers to bake their own. She drew on her memories of the childish pleasures of baking day: the smells that greeted their arrival home from school on a frosty afternoon, and munching on warm crusts and melting butter. She understood the reader’s reluctance to prepare something that seemed fraught with effort and difficulty. She described her own first housekeeping days in Ireland when she lived miles from the shops, except for the ubiquitous public house, and even those shops were inadequate – ‘the butcher who killed at very long intervals’, the grocer with his limited stock and, worst of all, the bread baked in the local pub:

  Very dubious stuff it was, both in colour and content: one never quite knew what one might find in the way of odds and ends in a loaf; their presence there was always ascribed to some unaccountable malignancy by the ingenuously surprised publican. New at the game, unlearned in the domestic arts, I was taken aback and really did not know what to do, unless to abstain from eating bread at all.

  But the gift of a bread-making machine and a simple recipe was a revelation, ensuring a ready supply of fresh homemade bread and a new confidence. Those isolated days of her unhappy marriage in Ireland seem to have been formative, making her self-reliant, and looking back she was keen to share the pleasure of growing fresh food and the satisfaction of providing a healthy if frugal diet.

  Connie liked to poke fun at the more esoteric cooking parlance, particularly the French, though she respected it and defended it against accusations of snobbery: ‘I have found myself instructing you to stand in a bain-marie till dinner-time, to cook the saucepan, and to pour the pudding over the sauce.’ The ideas she propounded – not to waste food, to teach children early on to appreciate good food, the importance to good health of fresh food and a balanced diet, even the iniquitous food miles – are all familiar today. She was rarely dogmatic when a telling story or witticism would do the job better: ‘The distribution of fish in our country has its oddities. I am sure there are adequate though not good reasons for the fact that if one eats fish at the seaside, more often than not it has had a look at London before being served up in its own home town – misguided travel which may have broadened its mind but has not improved its quality as food.’

  In the Introduction to The Constance Spry Cookery Book, as the new book was called, Connie revealed that it was originally envisaged as a supplement for students at the cookery schools. But it became far more than a teaching aid: it was a massive undertaking, and took three years to produce. In it, Connie turned cookery into a pleasurable, fallible, human activity, something to be done with love and enjoyment without fear of failure – at least, not if you followed Rosemary Hume’s admirable, straightforward recipes: ‘All you have to do is begin at the beginning, continue until you reach the end, and then stop.’ There was never compromise, always clarity.

  Here she is on eggs:

  As though one imbibed knowledge of cookery with a mother’s milk the scornful say, ‘My dear, she can’t even boil an egg’, the implication being that all you have to do is to put it in boiling water for four minutes and there you are. Well yes, so you are, but did you by chance bring the egg from a cold place and put it straight into boiling water and wonder why it cracked? Or have you ever turned a nice little aluminium saucepan black by boiling eggs in it? Or have you ever found your hard eggs soft in the middle, although you thought your timing had been right? Well, these things have happened to me, and now I’m glad to know the reasons why, and if the next few paragraphs sound like lessons in a kindergarten you must forgive them.

  The Constance Spry Cookery Book was not initially intended to run to its weighty twelve hundred pages, nor indeed to become a bestseller. Published in 1956, it was an instant success and the first definitive cookery book to appear since the war. It challenged the place – and the bulk – of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management on British kitchen shelves. But Connie was embarrassed by the title because it carried her name only. One can only presume that Rosemary did not protest or mind that her enormous task had gone unrecorded, except as the co-author. Constance Spry was a famous name and Rosemary Hume was not, the publisher had insisted.

  The reviews were all very good. According to the Sunday Times: ‘This fat, full, delectable opus could easily prove the favourite wedding present’, while the Daily Telegraph commented: ‘The recipes take you from a boiled egg to a dinner party’; and the Listener: ‘This book has everything. It explains how to make the homely things – for instance, a successful rice pudding, and how to make the exotic things – for instance, lobster américaine.’ The Lady, at least, acknowledged Hume as an author: ‘The authors’ names are household words, their Cordon Bleu restaurant and school well-known.’ The Illustrated London News correctly prophesied: ‘[Here is] a book, which, without a shadow of doubt, may be classed at once as a classic, and which is destined to remain a classic and a household god for the next hundred years or more.’

  In 1957 Connie produced her tenth book, Simple Flowers – A Millionaire for a Few Pence. One of her short, brisk little publications, its subtitle is a quote from a poem by Vita Sackville-West and was intended to encourage readers to find flowers for decoration at little cost. Unfortunately it was widely misunderstood, many readers assuming that it would tell you how to make a fortune by becoming a florist. However hard she tried to distance herself from it, Connie still seemed to be saddled with the image of the society flower lady rather than the Everywoman she believed herself to be.

  Early in 1959 she went on a lecture tour of Australia. She had been invited by the Women’s Day Association of Australia and sponsored by two department stores, David Jones Ltd and George’s of Melbourne. Now in her seventies, Connie again persuaded Sheila McQueen to leave her husband and children behind and accompany her as both her support and her demonstrator. On a grey cold day in February they embarked on the P&O Himalaya with huge quantities of luggage including vases, tablecloths and other props, plus a mirrored trough and two urns in a new kind of glass that was thick enough to hide the stems of flowers. On board Connie wrote articles and prepared the forth-coming lectures on flower arranging and cookery. They stopped off for one day at Colombo in Sri Lanka, where Connie gave a talk and did a round of sightseeing. ‘We found ourselves ensnared in a wealth of richness and colours,’ Sheila recalled, ‘flowers we’d never seen before: orchids galore, gardenias, amaryllis, anthuriums and tropical leaves.’ They dined on a beach on subtle curries and mangosteens under a velvet starlit sky. But Connie then became alarmingly exhausted. ‘I shall have to be more firm,’ Sheila wrote home.

  This would prove far from easy. Illness and doctors were taboo, and Connie resented any attempts to check her activities or hold her back in any way. Back on board, she quickly recovered and seemed in excellent health and spirits for the rest of the tour. At Perth they gave a talk and attended a welcoming reception given by the mayor, then sailed on to Adelaide for several more lectures and demonstrations. Everywhere they went was sold out, and the press reported that ‘no overseas celebrity has had a more spontaneous welcome from Aust
ralians than Mrs Spry’. Connie was overwhelmed. At each city – Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane – the cream of Australian society organized garden parties in her honour, the ladies vying with each other to wear the most eye-catching flower-bedecked hats. Connie usually outdid them; she had brought with her one of her favourites, decorated with yellow mimosa. ‘I thought it would be a gesture Australian women would appreciate,’ she wrote.

  Connie, who disliked travelling great distances and steadfastly refused to fly anywhere, took the train to Sydney and spent a happy journey chatting with the conductor about orchids, which he and his wife grew as a hobby in their ‘backyard’. In every city she appeared on television and radio programmes and, assisted by Sheila, gave two lectures a day to packed audiences. ‘She went to town more than I ever heard her,’ Sheila wrote home. Sometimes their hosts were disappointed to find Connie flagging as she toured their gardens, preferring to sit swapping stories in the cool of the house. But she never lost her sense of humour and at one event, amid the popping of flash-bulbs, when a photographer admitted he wouldn’t notice a flower arrangement at home and just ate the food put in front of him, Connie sighed and said, ‘What would one do with a man like that?’

  The press loved her. ‘A short, twinkling and decided person’ was how one journalist described her. ‘The internationally famous “Flower Girl”,’ wrote another. They reported on the enthusiasm of her reception wherever she went and on her many outspoken views: