Ballroom: A People’s History of Dancing

321 Pages·2022·11.172 MB·English

by  Hilary French

BALLROOM

B A L L R O O M
A P E O P L E ’ S H I S T O R Y
O F D A N C I N G
H I L A RY F R E N C H
Reaktion Books
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2022
Copyright © Hilary French 2022
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78914 515 1
CONTENTS
Introduction 9
One
‘A Flood of Splendour’: Blackpool’s New Ballrooms 15
TwO
Jazz, Ragtime and Tangoitis 27
Three
The Democratization of Dancing 57
FOur
Basic Technique Takes Shape 75
Five
Dancing in Public 97
Six
Nightlife and Private Clubs 117
Seven
Hollywood Glamour 129
eighT
Everyday Glamour 145
nine
Togetherness: Holiday Camps and Sequence Dancing 161
Ten
Jitterbug, Rock’n’Roll and Jive 181
eleven
Latin, the 1960s and Change 195
Twelve
Television, Come Dancing and Peggy Spencer 213
ThirTeen
The End of an Era 239
FOurTeen
Twenty-First-Century Ballroom 263
appendix: The Ten inTernaTiOnal STyle
ballrOOm and laTin danceS 280
reFerenceS 283
SelecT bibliOgraphy 305
acknOwledgemenTS 308
illuSTraTiOn acknOwledgemenTS 309
index 311
‘ Dancing is marvellous – it’s our whole life. It isn’t just the physical
pleasure. It’s the dressing up, the competing and even the worries and
disappointments that drive us.’
Vicky Green and Michael Barr (World Champions 1981–5),
interviewed in the Daily Mirror, 12 May 1971
A typical mid-twentieth-century image of ballroom dancers Bob Burgess and Doreen
Freeman, May 1962, successful competitors, teachers and proprietors of the Grafton Dance
Centre, London.
Introduction
The bbc launched Strictly Come Dancing in 2004. Very quickly,
it became one of its most popular broadcasts, with spin-off
versions sold worldwide and growing audience figures. In 2022
Blackpool’s Showtown Museum is scheduled to open with a section
dedicated to ‘how Blackpool became the spiritual home of ballroom
dance and continues to host the biggest international dance festival
in the world’.1 Ballroom dancing, once the privilege of the wealthy
leisured classes in their private houses, became the most popular
working-class pastime during most of the twentieth century, rivalled
only by cinema until its demise in the face of other demands on
leisure time and a rapidly changing music scene. Dancesport, the
competitive version that has continued unabated, together with its
reinvented social form, share a stubborn refusal to give up their
relationship with a more glamorous past. Yet the history of ballroom,
from its early days at the beginning of the twentieth century to the
razzmatazz of Strictly, is a little-known subject. This book sets out to
tell the story – its places, its people and its dances.
Ballroom: A People’s History of Dancing focuses on what was orig-
inally termed modern dancing and became the ‘English style’ or
standard: the waltz, foxtrot, Viennese waltz, ballroom tango and
quickstep, and on the Latin American dances: the rumba, samba,
jive, paso doble and cha-cha-cha. These are a series of dances that
were codified in the mid-twentieth century; today they remain the
9