Constance Spry

Constance Fletcher was born in Derby in 1886, eldest child and only daughter of George Fletcher and his wife Henrietta Maria (née Dutton).[1] After studying hygiene, physiology and district nursing in Ireland, she lectured on first aid and home care for the Irish Women's National Health Association. She married James Heppell Marr in 1910 and moved to Coolbawn, near Castlecomer. In 1912, their son Anthony Heppel Marr was born.

World War I had a profound impact on Constance Marr, and the Fletcher family. After the beginning of the war in 1914, Constance Marr was appointed secretary of the Dublin Red Cross. In 1916, she left both Ireland and her husband, escaping a violent marriage, and moved to Barrow-in-Furness with her son Anthony to work as a welfare supervisor.[2] In 1917, she joined the civil service as the head of women's staff (welfare and medical treatment) at the Ministry of Aircraft Production. The same year, two of her brothers - Lieutenant Arnold Lockhart Fletcher and Second Lieutenant Donald Lockhart Fletcher - were killed in action, on 30 and 28 April 1917 respectively.[3] After these losses, her mother didn't speak for two years.

In 1921, she was appointed headmistress of the Homerton and South Hackney Day Continuation School in east London, where she instructed teenage factory workers in cookery and dressmaking, and later flower arranging. In 1926, she married her second husband Henry Ernest Spry.

Spry gave up teaching in 1928, to open her first shop, "Flower Decoration", in 1929. After securing a regular order from Granada Cinemas, she caused a sensation in fashionable society by creating an exquisite arrangement of hedgerow flowers in the windows of Atkinsons, an Old Bond Street perfumery. Constance Spry ransacked attics for unusual objects to use as containers and drew inspiration from the Dutch 17th- and 18th-century flower painters, while she popularized unusual plant materials to offset flowers, like pussy willow, weeds and grasses and ornamental kale.

When she opened a larger shop in South Audley Street in Mayfair in 1934, Spry was already employing seventy people. In the same year, she published her first book, Flower Decoration, and established the Constance Spry Flower School at her new premises.

The biographer Diana Souhami revealed the painter Gluck had a romantic relationship with Spry, whose work informed the artist's admired floral paintings.[4] In 2012 English Heritage marked Spry's tenure at 64 South Audley Street with a blue plaque.[5]

In 1936, "Flower Decoration" created the flower arrangements for the royal weddings of the Duke of Gloucester to Lady Alice Christabel Montagu-Douglas-Scott and the more private wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in June 1937. When World War II began in 1939, Spry resumed her teaching career and lectured to women all over Britain. In 1942, she published Come into The Garden, Cook, hoping to help the war effort by encouraging the British to grow and eat their own food.

In 1946, she opened a domestic science school with her friend, the accomplished cook Rosemary Hume, at Winkfield Place, at Cranbourne in Winkfield, Berkshire. Constance lived at Orchard Lea, across the road, and then over the stable block at the Place. In 1953, Spry was commissioned to arrange the flowers at Westminster Abbey and along the processional route from Buckingham Palace for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. The Winkfield students were asked to cater a lunch for foreign delegates for whom Hume and Spry invented a new dish – coronation chicken. She was appointed OBE in the 1953 Coronation Honours.

At Winkfield Place, Spry devoted years to the cultivation of particular varieties of antique roses, which she was instrumental in bringing back into fashion; David Austin's first rose introduction, in 1961, was named after her and is considered to be the foundation of his "English rose" series.[6] In 1956, she and Hume published the best-selling Constance Spry Cookery Book, thereby extending the Spry style from flowers to food. On 3 January 1960, she slipped on the stairs at Winkfield Place and died an hour later. Her last words were supposedly, "Someone else can arrange this".[7]

Spry's books remained in print for many years after her death and her floristry business thrived. Constance Spry's influence in floristry remains strong in the modern era. Luxury florist Nikki Pierce cites her as an inspiration.[8]

• Constance Spry, Flower Decoration. Dent, 1934
• Constance Spry, Flowers in House and Garden. Dent, 1937
• Constance Spry, Garden Notebook. Dent, 1940
• Constance Spry: Come into the Garden, Cook. Dent 1942
• Constance Spry, Summer and Autumn. Dent, 1951
• Constance Spry, Winter and Spring Flowers. Dent, 1951
• Constance Spry, How to do the Flowers, Dent, 1952, 1953
• Constance Spry, A Constance Spry Anthology. Dent, 1953
• Constance Spry, Party Flowers. Dent, 1955
• Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume, The Constance Spry Cookery Book. Dent, 1956
• Constance Spry, Simple Flowers 'A millionaire for a few pence'. Dent, 1957
• Constance Spry, Favourite Flowers, Dent. 1959
• Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume, Hostess. Dent, 1961

• Elizabeth Coxhead, Constance Spry: A Biography, W. Luscombe, 1975
• Mary Rensten, Knowing Constance Spry, Samuel French, 2004
• Sue Shephard,The Surprising Life of Constance Spry: From Social Reformer to Society Florist, Pan MacMillan, 2011