Bouquet of scandal: Her cookery and flower-arranging inspired a generation of housewives. But as a new play reveals, Constance Spry's life wasn't always rosy

By Jan Moir

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Although she has been dead for more than 50 years, Constance Spry is having something of a moment.

Not quite a revival, perhaps, but certainly a new-found appreciation of her incredible skills and her unconventional life — not to mention her enduring flower-power.

For a start, there is the new West End play Storm In A Flower Vase by Anton Burge, based on Spry’s life, loves and floristry rules (‘Never over-vase’). 

Behind the scenes: Constance Spry inspired a generation of housewives with her stunning flower arrangements but her own life was just as colourful as one of her bouquets

Behind the scenes: Constance Spry inspired a generation of housewives with her stunning flower arrangements but her own life was just as colourful as one of her bouquets

Spry is portrayed by Penny Downie, who manages to imbue the role with just the right amount of hearty, Joyce Grenfell-type cheeriness, leavened with much private distress.

There are a few moments when poor Constance, so business-like and determined to inject beauty into the lives of others, realises she has been forsaken herself. On stage, with a trembling lip and her hair falling out of her cottage-loaf bun, she crumples like a scythed daff. It is terribly affecting.

Though all that remains of her now is captured in old black-and-white images, her life was as wildly colourful as one of her own exotic bouquets.

The title of the play comes from a passage in the recent, highly successful biography by Sue Shephard, The Surprising Life Of Constance Spry.

Shephard tells the story of a woman who conquered high society, whose professional zenith of her life’s work was doing the flowers for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding and, later, her Coronation procession in 1953, right down to supervising the giant tubs of poppies that lined the route.

She was more than a flower-arranger, though: an accomplished cook, her recipes were followed by thousands, as were her household tips. 

A surge in popularity: A new play based on Spry's life has hit the West End starring Penny Downie

A surge in popularity: A new play based on Spry's life has hit the West End starring Penny Downie, pictured

However, her own private life was secretly tempestuous, involving a violent marriage, a surreptitious divorce, a sham marriage, a lesbian affair with the famed painter Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein) — and all the while running a successful business at a time when few women had careers. Indeed, most were expected to stay home, do embroidery and keep their opinions to themselves.

Ms Shephard, who is the goddaughter of Spry’s great friend and collaborator Rosemary Hume, used the ‘storm’ phrase to describe the last time Mrs Spry’s fragrant persona reared itself in modern life and caused a bit of a stink. 

In 2004, an extraordinary row erupted over an exhibition of Spry’s work at the London Design Museum. Two of that institute’s founders, Sir Terence Conran and bagless vacuum cleaner inventor James Dyson, were appalled at the inclusion of a mere florist in the serious world of proper, grown up, boys-only design. No room in the club for a mere tulip-shuffler, if you don’t mind.

The play comes after a highly successful biography by Sue Shephard, The Surprising Life Of Constance Spry, pictured in 1953

The play comes after a highly successful biography by Sue Shephard, The Surprising Life Of Constance Spry, pictured in 1953

Both men threatened to resign over the matter. Conran called Spry’s work ‘high-society mimsiness’.
However, the show was a huge hit and the public flocked to marvel at the lifetime’s work of an incredible woman.

For Spry was so much more than someone who knew how to throw an arrangement of roses together. She was, initially, a health worker, a Red Cross assistant in Ireland and the headmistress of an innovative school in the East End of London.

Then she became, through her own determination, a noted florist, educator, author and dispenser of household wisdom and ingenious recipes. Indeed, she introduced Coronation chicken to a startled nation.

She was a style revolutionary, too. Pussy willow in vases, daisies in jam jars, a cold chicken salad spiced up with dried fruits and curry powder?

None of these things would have happened without the efforts of Constance, born in a terraced house in Derby, who went on to reinvent herself through several astonishing lives and ended up being one of the most popular and influential women of the age.          

By the time of her death, aged 74, in 1960, she was an international household name: a woman who had single-handedly revolutionised flower-arranging across several continents; a lover of natural beauty who appreciated a clutch of humble cowslips as much as a spray of the finest orchids.
Quite an achievement for a woman who grew up in a house without a garden.

‘Do what you please, follow your own star, be original if you want to be and don’t if you don’t want to be,’ was her kindly advice to all.

The only thing she insisted upon was that we be open to every form of beauty, be it a buttercup or a prize rose.

Secret life: Spry had a tempestuous private life which included a violent marriage, a surreptitious divorce, a sham marriage and a lesbian affair

Secret life: Spry had a tempestuous private life which included a violent marriage, a surreptitious divorce, a sham marriage and a lesbian affair

Her father George was a railway worker with a burning desire to better himself. Mother Henrietta was a socially ambitious shopkeeper’s daughter.

Connie was one of five children who watched as her father studied at night class and, through hard work and diligence, moved from the Midland Railway Company to a top job in the education system.

At the age of 19, she enrolled in a course for health lecturers and got a job in Dublin, where her parents had moved following one of her father’s promotions. There, she married James Heppell-Marr, a mine manager from the north of England, and gave birth to her only child, Anthony.

Later she would ask James to divorce her. Apparently their wedding night was so brutal it shocked her for years to come, and though they had a son together, she would reject her husband’s sexual advances and he would become increasingly violent.

Spry's lesbian lover was the artist Gluck pictured at her exhibition of paintings at the Fine Art Society 's Galleries in New Bond Street in 1926

Spry's lesbian lover was the artist Gluck pictured at her exhibition of paintings at the Fine Art Society 's Galleries in New Bond Street in 1926

Some might think, like Conran and Dyson did, that Spry’s achievements were frivolous. Sticking a few blooms in a vase? How hard could that be?

Yet think for a moment about the importance of flowers in our lives. They usher in the newborn, they are a comfort and solace at death, they mark important anniversaries throughout lifetimes. They can say ‘I love you’ just as easily as ‘I’m sorry’. Flowers turn gardens into quiet havens of joy and wonder, they bloom unchecked in meadows and hedgerows. No wonder we love them — and those who make them enrich our lives.

So let’s just say that Constance Spry is to flowers what The Sex Pistols were to rock music. She shook it all up. She changed everything, heralding in a new dawn of post-pinks anarchy.

Her friend, the writer and gardener Beverley Nichols, once described the art of flower-arranging as ‘pre-Spry’ and ‘post-Spry’ — and that still holds true.

Back in 1928, when she opened her first shop, Flower Decoration, in London, the arrangements the public were familiar with were expensive, stiff and soulless affairs, geometric arrangements of hot-house blooms that were the sole preserve of the wealthy.

Triangles of chrysanthemums. Closely packed carnations. Spry particularly loathed both these blooms and hated floral affectations which were beyond the reach of the pockets of most ordinary housewives.

She was a natural democrat who, with little fanfare or ceremony, changed the floral status quo in ways that were shocking at the time.

In 1929, she literally stopped the London traffic when she created a winter window display of hops, old man’s beard, copper beech leaves and green orchids for Atkinson’s perfumery in Mayfair. She famously used dark green kale leaves and vivid red roses for another dramatic display which people clamoured to view.

And, as the play reveals, she urged housewives to use pickle and jam jars in which to display their arrangements, and to scour hedgerows, gardens and potting sheds for beautiful things to put in them.

Spry’s message was that the ordinary and the humdrum were just as valuable and precious as the fabulous displays she created for her wealthy clients and supporters, such as Cecil Beaton, Wallis Simpson, Oliver Messel and Syrie Maugham. Bouquets tied up with string, wedding nosegays of blood-red roses and striped parrot tulips, table decorations of rhubarb leaves, tomatoes and seed heads? She created all this beauty and more, despite — or perhaps because of — the sadness of her private life. 

Constance Spry and Eric Bedford, Chief Architect of the Ministry of Works, discuss the placement of six tubs of poppies arranged by disabled servicemen for the coronation route of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953

Constance Spry and Eric Bedford, Chief Architect of the Ministry of Works, discuss the placement of six tubs of poppies arranged by disabled servicemen for the coronation route of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953

On the surface, Constance was as conventional as a rosebud: a society florist, a respectable woman running her own business in Mayfair. In reality, she was divorced, leaving her husband and child behind in Ireland — scandalous at the time.

In London, she met Henry ‘Shav’ Spry and they fell in love, although he was married at the time. Later they lived together, pretending that they were married. He had a long-running affair with one of her flower shop employees, while she had a happy, four-year lesbian affair with the artist Gluck, who painted some of her floral designs.

The relationship ended badly. Gluck took up with another rich patron and, according to Burge’s play, terminated the affair by sending Connie a package containing her nightdress and toothbrush.

No one did it better: Constance Spry could count numerous Royal among her clients for a floral designs

No one did it better: Constance Spry could count numerous Royal among her clients for a floral designs

So both Shav and Gluck broke her heart, but she gloried in her work. From start to finish, from social reformer to society florist, hers is a Cinderella story, a transformation from working-class Derby to the perfumed salons of the rich and famous in London.

Throughout her cookery schools, flower-arranging schools and world lecture tours, Spry remained true to herself, a thoroughly decent woman who was kind to all, believed in the underdog and conquered society with her charm and sheer hard graft.

When speaking to her adoring audiences in Adelaide and Sydney, she wore a giant hat decorated with the native Australian flower yellow mimosa. ‘I thought it would be a gesture Australian women would appreciate,’ she wrote.

She never stopped believing that every living thing, including weeds, had the potential for a beautiful arrangement. She urged housewives to beware of stylising. Accept no rules and remember that one is not human unless one has a way of expressing oneself. ‘Use flowers as your paint box,’ she’d cry.

Perhaps one of the most telling stories about Constance Spry is that when the Prince of Wales married Wallis Simpson after his abdication, Spry risked social and royal ostracisation by agreeing to do the flowers for their wedding.

Simpson had been a good client. Spry would not turn her back and let her down on her big day like so many others did.  

In the end, even the young Princess Elizabeth forgave her, bringing Spry back into the fold for her own wedding to Philip Mountbatten. After all, nobody did it better. Now that is style in every sense of the word.

  • Storm In A Flower Vase is at London’s Arts Theatre (020 7836 8463, artstheatrewestend.co.uk) until October 12.

The comments below have been moderated in advance.

She looks a real goer.

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What a very well written and interesting piece DM. Perhaps we could have more from Jan Moir?

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What an uninspiring, overly long piece. You've managed to make a fascinating subject boring.

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style without politics ... as it should be

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