Constance Spry

Constance Spry (5 December 1886 – 3 January 1960) was a famous British educator, florist and author in the mid-20th century.

Constance Spry was born Constance Fletcher in Derby in 1886, 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 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.

After the beginning of World War I in 1914, Constance Marr 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, 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. According to the biographer Diana Souhami, the lesbian painter Gluck had a romantic relationship with Spry, whose work informed the artist's admired floral paintings. In 2012 English Heritage marked Spry's tenure at 64 South Audley Street with a blue plaque.

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