Constance Spry

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Constance Spry (December 5, 1886 - January 3, 1960) was a famous British florist and author in the mid-20th century. She has been described as "the Martha Stewart of mid-century Britain."

Constance Spry was born in Derby in 1886, as the eldest child and only daughter of George Fletcher and his wife Henrietta Maria Fletcher. After studying hygiene, physiology and district nursing in Ireland, she lectured on first aid and home nursing 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.

After the beginning of World War I in 1914, Constance Spry was appointed secretary of the Dublin Red Cross. In 1916, she left both Ireland and her husband, and moved to Barrow-in-Furness with her son Anthony to work as a welfare supervisor. In 1917, she joined the civil service as the head of women's staff (welfare and medical treatment) at the Ministry of Aircraft Production. In 1921, Constance Spry was appointed head mistress of the Homerton and South Hackney Day Continuation School in east London, where she instructed teenage factory workers in cookery and dress making, and later flower arranging.

In 1926, Constance Spry married her second husband Henry Ernest Spry. 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 gave up teaching in 1928, to open her first shop, Flower Decoration, in 1929. When she opened a larger shop on South Audley Street in Mayfair in 1934, Constance 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.

In 1936, Flower Decorations created the flower arrangements for the royal weddings of the Duke of Gloucester to Lady Alice Christabel Montagu-Douglas-Scott and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. When World War II began in 1939, Constance 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, near Ascot in Berkshire. In 1953, Constance 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 invented a new dish — Coronation chicken.

At Winkfield Place, Constance devoted years to the cultivation of particular varieties, and one variety bred by David Austin in 1961 even bears her name. In 1956, she and Hume published the best-selling Constance Spry Cookery Book, thereby extending the Spry style from flowers to food. On January 3rd, 1960, she slipped on the stairs at Winkfield Place and died an hour later.

Constance Spry's books remained in print for many years after her death and her floristry business thrived. An exhibition entitled Constance Spry: A millionaire for a few pence at the Design Museum, London caused something of a controversy.