A trailblazing steel magnolia

BIOGRAPHY: ROBERT O'BYRNEreviews The Surprising life of Constance SpryBy Sue Shephard, Macmillan, 337pp, £18.99

OVER THE HALF-CENTURY since the death of Constance Spry, her reputation has suffered grievous damage, not least from feminists, many of whom would regard her as promoting precisely the kind of stultifying domesticity they seek to eradicate. That Spry made her name as an arranger of flowers seems only to confirm the widespread impression of her as an anachronism any intelligent person should abjure. Six years ago the vacuum-cleaner inventor James Dyson resigned as chairman of London’s Design Museum when the institution’s director, Alice Rawsthorne, insisted on organising an exhibition dedicated to Spry, whose career was dismissed by one of the museum’s founders, Terence Conran, as nothing more than “high-society mimsiness”.

These glib verdicts say more about the male prejudices of Dyson and Conran than they do about Spry and her considerable achievements, which were twofold. In the first place she revolutionised flower arranging, which, while undoubtedly a minor art, is nevertheless one that impinges on all our lives, often for the better. Spry spurned the stiff and excessively formal style of floral decoration that predominated in her youth and replaced it with a looser approach, recognising that every plant, whether cultivated or wild, had potential; for a London society wedding in 1938 she filled the church with vases holding nothing but cow parsley.

In the wake of Conran's criticism it was pointed out by the Guardian's James Fenton that the decorative tricks found in every Conran store – a bundle of twigs in a glass vase, say, or an amusing confection of ornamental cabbages – were all first found in Spry's work. Furthermore, as an ardent gardener she helped to save many rare plants, especially varieties of old roses, from potential extinction.

Spry’s innovations within her field deserve to be acknowledged, but so too, and more importantly, does her position as a role model for women seeking to take control of their lives. In this respect she already had the example of her father, a remarkable man called George Fletcher, who left school in Derby at the age of 14 with minimal qualifications and no social advantages but, thanks to his appreciation of the benefits of education, finished by being head of technical instruction in early 20th-century Ireland.

Even before her brief marriage to a Kilkenny mine manager, his only daughter, Constance, had likewise become involved in education, employed by the government to travel throughout this country, lecturing on the advantages of sound healthcare. After the first World War she was appointed head of an innovative new children’s school in London’s East End. A woman who had the courage to leave her husband and search for employment to support a young son: there was nothing mimsy in Spry’s background or character. She started to arrange flowers professionally in response to demand for her services, and her achievement in this field was entirely unplanned, a coincidence of circumstances to which she responded with avidity. Here is where the real significance of Spry lies: as one of a number of pioneering women in the 1920s who demonstrated that it was possible for members of their sex to develop and run successful businesses. During the same period, for example, Syrie Maugham established an interior-design company of international renown, while soon afterwards Rosemary Hume founded the original Cordon Bleu school of cookery; both women were friends and associates of Spry. The characteristic she shared with them was an ability to recognise the potential in a supposedly mundane skill and transform it into a viable commercial concern.

Spry, Maugham, Hume et al should not be castigated for their choice of careers; neither they nor most other women of their generation had been trained for anything else. They had no professional predecessors from whom to learn, the expectation being that, like their mothers before them, they would marry and raise children.

But, breaking free from the constraints of their upbringing, they had the foresight to recognise how a natural aptitude could be deployed to generate income and provide employment. Thanks to flower arranging, Spry gained global fame, publishing books and giving lecture tours around the world while running a school where other women could learn the skills that had proven so profitable for her.

Splendid as were Spry’s accomplishments in the field of floral design, they take second place to what she achieved as a businesswoman. It’s a pity her latest biographer prefers to focus primarily on other aspects of Spry’s life, devoting an inordinate number of pages, for instance, to speculation about her subject’s personal life. A woman who wisely cherished privacy, Spry may or may not have been legally married to the man whose surname she bore from the mid-1920s onwards. Likewise, during the following decade, she may or may not have had an affair with the lesbian painter Gluck.

These conjectures are of no consequence to her attainments, and giving space to them distracts from what really matters. Practical information is also too scarce, particularly with regard to the running of Spry’s business, which, it appears, risked becoming overstretched on more than one occasion. In 1945 she and Hume opened a combined cordon-bleu and flower school with annual student fees of about 40 guineas. Though today that sum would be regarded as absurdly small, according to Shephard it was “not cheap”. Without knowledge of the era’s average yearly incomes, how can we judge?

More than just the price of tuition has altered since Constance Spry’s day. To a greater extent than this book would suggest, she deserves to be given credit for encouraging some of the better changes.

Robert O'Byrne is a journalist and writer. His latest book, Style City: How London Became a Fashion Capital, is published by Frances Lincoln