An Most Interesting
Spry
Connecting
the "dots" of the different Spry generations becomes most difficult
the further into the late 1800's it becomes.
By now each generation has children with traditional names, William,
John, Edward, Elizabeth, Mary to name a few.
Often it is by sourcing the names of the spouses that more information
can be gathered. It was custom to
include the mother's surname as a "middle" name for sons or
daughters. Often names became
hyphenated.
An
example is Charles Arthur Gordon Purkis Spry - who was in the Admiralty of the
Navy. Named after his father, his stepfather
and his mother!
His
brother was Henry Ernest Spry CBE.
Henry, like so many others, worked in India.
He
worked for the Indian Civil Service working in Finance and Legal sections. He returned to England and was seconded to
the Ministry of Munitions. After the
war, he returned to India.
Appointed to the I.C.S., 1903;
Magistrate and Collector in Bengal; Secretary to the Govt. of Bengal (Finance
and Commerce Depts.), 1922; retired, 1925. During the Great War, 1914-19, Chief
Establishment Officer (Aircraft Production Dept), Ministry of Munitions.
C.B.E., 1921
He married in 1902, Clare
Kathleen Moffatt, and they had three children, Barbara Kathleen Lois Spry, Geoffrey
Charles Moffatt Spry and Sheila Elizabeth Spry.
But this marriage was not
destined to last.
By
1922, Henry had become attached to a divorced lady, Constance Fletcher.
Constance was the daughter of
George and Maria Fletcher, and one of eight children. Her parents took the
family to Ireland, and it was there that she married James Heppell Marr.
James had been married to Blanche Cook, in
1902, and they had a daughter Blanche Joan Marr, in 1903. Blanche, his wife
died soon after.
Constance married in 1910 James
Heppell Marr, in Rathdown. They had a
son, Anthony Heppell Marr born 1910. James
died in 1950, and by then his son Anthony worked for the BBC.
She met Henry while working for
the Inland Revenue Department, and not long after they began their affair.
Constance eventually set up
business as a florist and a writer, and became known as Britains, Martha
Gardner. She was accepted in the Social
Ranks, and was sought after to undertake the floral arrangements for many distinguished
people, including Ex-King Edward, and Mrs Wallis Simpson, and then later for
Queen Elizabeth.
She had an assistant, Valerie
Marguerite Pirie. Henry and Valerie then
formed a relationship, and Constance sought pleasure with a famous painter.
Constance died in 1960, and Henry
eventually married Valerie in 1962, after the death of his wife, Claire.
Her Biography
1886 - 1960 Constance Fletcher
Born in Derby, Constance Spry was
the only daughter and eldest of six children and grew up in a number of homes
due to her father's successive jobs in teaching, living in Devon and Birmingham
before moving to Ireland in 1900. From 1905-1908 Spry worked as a lecturer for
the Women's National Health Association in Ireland. Travelling from village to
village Spry lectured on the basic principles of first aid and nursing. In 1910
she married James Heppell Marr and had a son with him, Anthony, in 1912.
The marriage didn't last and
after James volunteered for military service in 1914, Spry moved back to Dublin
and later to London in 1917. It was in London, while working at the Inland
Revenue she met and fell in love with Henry Ernest "Shav" Spry. By
1923 Constance had divorced her husband and set up home with Henry, but he
could not bring himself to divorce his wife.
In 1927 she received her first
commission in flower arranging from Sidney Bernstein, owner of the Granada
Cinema chain. He introduced her to the designer Norman Wilkinson; a turning
point in her career, as Wilkinson asked her to arrange flowers for a new branch
of Atkinson's perfumery in Old Bond Street. Spry decorated the shop with
displays of autumn leaves and berries mixed with green orchids, drawing great
crowds to the window, this new style was revolutionary. Refusing to be
associated with the dated Victorian and Edwardian styles of "carnations
and asparagus fern", Spry made a name for herself using all kinds of plant
materials. From wild flowers and twigs to moss and fruit and vegetables,
anything that looked beautiful and suited the occasion was used.
By the following year, Spry had
given up her job to concentrate on her new business. In 1929 she set up a small
shop in Pimlico which she called "Flower Decorations" to distinguish
her work from the standard floral arrangements supplied by other florists.
Stock from her own garden was supplemented by flowers from Covent Garden, and
Spry recruited a dedicated team to cope with the increasing amount of orders.
Spry's way of working continued to be unconventional; she scoured junk shops
for unusual vases to hold her displays and she insisted that every arrangement
should be composed in situ, as opposed to in her shop, so it would fit in
perfectly with the surroundings. She challenged the view of florists, classing
her and her staff as artists. She called at the front door rather than the
tradesman's entrance, and in return she offered an impeccable service.
Commissions flooded in and larger premises were needed, Spry moved to Mayfair
to be closer to her society clients and by 1934 took on the lease in South
Audley Street.
The move to her shop in South
Audley Street marked her arrival as the most fashionable florist in London. It
was in the same year she published 'Flower Decoration', the first of her 13
books and she also established the Constance Spry Flower School. Society weddings
were a major part of her work and she turned the first floor of her shop in to
a wedding room where her innovative crescent-shaped bridal bouquets were much
in demand. One of Spry's most daring displays was the great urns of flowering
cow parsley which she used to decorate the wedding of Jo Grimond and Laura
Bonham Carter in 1938, confirming the vogue for "country weeds". She
counted Edward, the Prince of Wales as one of her favourite clients and, after
his abdication, travelled to France to decorate his wedding to Wallis Simpson
in 1937. As a consequence, Spry received no commissions from Buckingham Palace
until 1947 when she was asked to supervise the flowers at Princess Elizabeth's
wedding.
The onset of war inevitably meant
her business was pared down but Spry kept the shop in the public eye by
decorating the sandbags outside it. She turned much of her garden over to
growing vegetables and keeping chickens and began to write a cookery book. Come
in to the Garden, Cook was published in 1942, and by 1945 Spry had reopened her
flower school in partnership with a cookery school run by Rosemary Hume.
The two women were to become
lifelong friends and went on to co-write The Constance Spry Cook Book (1956),
although it was published only under Spry's name at the insistence of her
publishers.
By 1952 Spry received the most
important commission of her career, to oversee the floral decorations at the
Coronation the following year. This meant not only decorating Westminster Abbey
but also the ceremonial route from Buckingham Palace for which crates of
flowers from across the Commonwealth were requested. She persuaded chief
designer Eric Bedford, and the Minister of Works' David Eccles to adopt a
simple palette of heraldic colours of scarlet, pale blue and gold. Spry also
volunteered, alongside Rosemary Hume, to provide lunch for 300 guests, where
they devised the famous Coronation Chicken dish.
Number 64 South Audley Street was
the site of Spry's shop until the 1990s. It was her workplace for 25 years; on
the day she was presented with an OBE by Elizabeth II, she was so overwhelmed
she escaped Buckingham Palace and took a taxi to the shop which was her refuge.
In early January 1960, she suffered a fall at her home at Winkfield Place and
died soon after.[1]
English Heritage recognised her
achievements with a Blue Plaque.
Daily Telegraph 28 August
2017 Reported:
Open your minds to every form of
beauty,” wrote society florist, home-style adviser to a nation and
working-class Derby
girl, Constance Spry, in her advice to flower arrangers.
It was not only sage advice but
also essentially a mantra by which she chose to live her own life. Hers was a
life that, by the middle of the 20th century, had seen her installed as the
arbiter of taste and elegance in floral home decoration. She had secured
commissions from the highest echelons of British society, boasted the richest customers
and satisfied the most exacting clients.
All of this would seem to belie
her relatively humble beginnings as the daughter of a Midland Railway engineer.
Born into an ordinary Derby household, at 58 Warner Street, in 1886, Constance
was only too aware of the difficulties facing working families like her own.
Setting an important example, her
father studied to become a science teacher and was able to move the family first to a large
home at 59 Wilson Street and then to King’s Norton, near Birmingham, before
eventually settling in Ireland.
Constance studied hygiene and
district nursing. She took her first job in 1907, as a lecturer in first aid
and health with London County Council. After her marriage to James Heppell Marr
in 1910, she moved back to Ireland.
In 1914, she was appointed
secretary of the Dublin Red Cross but her marriage was, it seemed, unhappy and
violent and, in 1916, Constance left Ireland and her husband behind, taking a
job as a welfare adviser to female armaments workers at Vickers in
Barrow-in-Furness.
The following year, she became
head of women’s staff at the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Her love of
teaching led to her returning to that profession and, after the war, she was
appointed as headmistress of the Homerton and South Hackney Day Continuation
School, where she instructed young factory workers in homemaking skills.
To brighten their surroundings,
Constance brought in posies of flowers from her own garden and was struck by
how each student seemed uplifted just by seeing them. She began to incorporate
flower arranging, for which she had already developed a considerable flair,
into the curriculum.
Realising that most of her
students would never be able to afford expensive cut flowers or have gardens
large enough to grow their own, let alone employ a servant to “do the flowers”,
Constance taught the girls to gather the flowers, leaves and grasses that grew
in the hedgerows and on wasteland to create their own floral displays, even in
jars and dishes where formal vases were not available. It was this innovative
reaping of wild flora that was to make Constance Spry’s name.
In 1926, Constance met and fell in
love with Henry Spry. He was married when they first met and, although the pair
lived as man and wife, it is now believed that they never sought to legalise
their arrangement.
Constance’s early commercial
commissions came from several London businesses, among them Granada Cinemas.
But it was her spectacular window
arrangement for Atkinson’s Old Bond Street perfumery in London’s West End that
brought Constance’s work to the notice of the general public and, more
importantly, to fashionable society.
The huge display, made entirely
from flowers and plants found in the hedgerows, caused such a stir that, in
1929, Constance gave up teaching to open her own business: Flower Decorations,
(from 1940, simply “Constance Spry”) on Belgrave Road, on the edges of Victoria
and Pimlico.
Constance began to move in new,
bohemian, social circles. Among her new friends was lesbian cross-dressing
artist Hannah Gluckstein, better known as “Gluck”. The pair are believed to
have begun a four-year love affair, which ended only when Gluck took up with a
rich patron. At the same time, Henry is thought to have conducted a
long-running affair with one of Constance’s shop girls.
Romantic controversies aside,
Constance was commissioned to provide the flower arrangements for a host of
society occasions, including the royal weddings of the Duke of Gloucester and
Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott in 1936 and, in the following year, that of
the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Warfield, who by this time was no longer Mrs
Simpson, having reverted to her maiden name. The grateful new Duchess of
Windsor sent Constance a photograph inscribed: “To Mrs Spry, who made my
wedding so lovely, Wallis.”
During the Second World War,
Constance lectured to the women of Britain, encouraging them to grow and eat
their own food and produced a book to this end: Come Into The Garden, Cook.
She was as passionate about food
as she was decoration. “Cooking is an art”, she wrote. “The kitchen should be
raised to the status of a studio.”
After the war, with her friend
Rosemary Hume, later a director of London’s Cordon Bleu School, she opened a
domestic science school at Winkfield Place, near Ascot.
Perhaps remarkably, given her
commission for the abdicated king’s nuptials, Constance maintained her royal
patronage and provided flowers both for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and
for the coronation in June 1953.
On that occasion, she arranged
the flowers for both Westminster Abbey and for the processional route from
Buckingham Palace.
Spry and Hume, and their students
at Winkfield, were also requested to provide a banquet for foreign dignitaries
and, for this, Rosemary Hume invented the now classic buffet dish Poulet Reine,
more commonly known as Coronation Chicken.
In 1956, the business and
creative partners produced The Constance Spry Cookery Book. A bestseller
several times over, it remains a classic and is regarded as the modern
successor to Mrs Beeton’s books.
Constance’s other books proved
bestsellers too. One of the most popular, its title encapsulating her entire
ethos, was A Millionaire For A Few Pence , published in 1957. Writing in a
clear, uncompromising and pragmatic style, Constance demystified flower
arranging and, essentially, democratised it, encouraging her readers not to be
intimidated by their lack of experience or funds, but to express themselves.
“Do not be sparing or afraid,” she instructed.
Although she frequently liked to
dictate which flower should be used in a particular arrangement, Constance
urged her readers to experiment and improvise and, although she did commission
the Fulham Pottery to create a range of beautiful containers in her name, she
also advocated the use of tureens, baking dishes, jars and just about any
household item as a vase and was never afraid to use those ordinary items in
her own arrangements preferring to concentrate on contrasting shapes, teaming
cabbage roses with jasmine, for example, and complementary, yet often bold,
colour schemes.
She paired orange lilies with
fennel and produced entire displays of voluptuous lilac blooms. Among her more
innovative ideas were arrangements featuring iris with alder and dahlias with
strawberry leaves. Particular lauded was her inspired decoration for one
society wedding, using only the delicate and tiny white flowers and feathery
leaves of wild cow parsley to decorate the church.
In modern times, Constance Spry’s
influence has been compared to that of Martha Stewart, the United States’
favourite home-style guru, who readily acknowledges her forerunner as an
inspiration.
Perhaps because her works of art
were formed from materials that quickly withered away, Constance Spry seldom
receives the serious recognition she deserves. Even an exhibition in her honour
at London’s Design Museum caused controversial debate about the validity of
such an art form.
Constance died, quite suddenly
aged 74, in January 1960, just an hour after a fall on the stairs at Winkfield.
Appropriately, for someone who devoted so much of her life to flowers, and who
had passionately cultivated roses in her own garden, the life of the woman who
had started out in unremarkable circumstances in back-street Derby was marked,
the following year, by the naming after her of a beautiful English rose.
Her influence continues to this
day. In 2013, a play based on her life, Storm In A Flower Vase by Anton Burge,
opened in London’s West End.
Perhaps Constance’s own words,
ostensibly about flower arranging, provide the most fitting epitaph to her
life: “Do whatever you please, follow your own star; be original if you want to
be and don’t if you don’t want to be.”
https://www.pressreader.com/australia/harpers-bazaar-australia/20170601/281633895152921
Conclusion
What is so amazing about this
family history, is the background of the Sprye ancestors.
It is a well known research fact,
that it was essential within an aristocrat family, was to ensure that the
daughters "married well".
Sometimes the choice of husband did not sit well with the daughter in question,
but the "system" worked rather well.
Researching our ancestors and
their contribution to the world, at a time before Australia was even discovered
by Captain Cook, can be, at time, rather difficult. But when the family is of the "upper
echelon", there is usually a lot of material available either in
wikipedia, or old books and newspapers.
The contribution that these
family members made to the Royal Navy, for hundreds of years, then to India, is
so worthy of mention.
Personally, my 4th great
grandfather, Col Andrew Durnford, worked at the Royal Engineers, and he
designed the Barracks and Harbour Defences of Dunkirk and Plymouth, at the time
that the Kingdom and Sprye families were living there. He and his brother were also in Canada, and
the US.
He was later the Mayor of
Barbados, in the West Indies, so it is not difficult to imagine, that their
paths may have crossed.
By now, though, it is a fact that
not only were the Sprye and Kingdom families, joined together by the marriage
of William and Joan, but that also interwoven into the family landscape if the
Mudge family.
Not only did Thomas Mudge marry
Elizabeth Kingdom, but his father and grandfather were sailing the same ships,
exploring the same lands, preaching similar sermons, and inventing important
maritime pieces, in order that the captains of the ships could benefit from new
and modern technology.
When Captain Cook began his
journey from Plymouth to explore the Southern Waters, he had on board such
instruments.
The story of the Kingdom Sisters,
is in three parts. It is best called, a Compilation Narrative.
The Spry Lineage, the Kingdom
lineage, and the Mudge lineage.
Never, when beginning this
research, would I have imagined the impact that these early family had on world
history, nor did I ever think that my own family would be at the same place, at
the same time, as my in-laws family.
Given that it is my belief, that
as grandparents, we have a responsibility to ensure our grandchildren know
whose DNA is flowing through their veins, I have over the past few years,
created a series of family history e-books.
Some can be found online, depending on the area that they lived.
Information has been resourced
from many online sources, and material from wikipedia is used extensively
throughout, checked and double checked.
The stories then become, a collation of facts!
History is what it is, events
that occurred in the past. It cannot be
changed, however, what can be changed is people's perception of those events.
A cousin of mine once made a
statement, "it gives me great pleasure to ........" he was a military
man, and those have become my words as well.
It does give me pleasure to be able to unravel
family mysteries, and in particular those of my father-in-law, who was denied
knowing his ancestors, all due to his father changing his name and escaping to
Australia after the Boer War. Dad always
wanted to find him, but never did. That
was my motivation for beginning this new retirement venture.
This work is the copyright of
Kristine Margaret Herron and while all care has been taken any such family
history story is certain to contain some errors, where possible factual
evidence has been included in the form of articles from newspapers and
records.
No part can be used for
commercial purposes, and any information must be cited.
While every effort has been made to ensure
the correctness of the information, working with such old records no doubt
errors may arise.
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