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