Dancing in the Blitz: How World War 2 Made British Ballet

The seven years of World War Two

were filled with constant threat and danger

but they would transform one British art form forever.

It's my belief that the Second World War

was the making of British ballet,

and in this film I want to find out

just how fundamental those years of hardship and adversity were

in getting the British public to embrace ballet.

It's the story of how one courageous woman

and her small company of dancers

took what was essentially a foreign art form and made it British,

despite the falling bombs, the rationing and the call-up.

And it's the story of how Britain as a nation

fell in love with ballet.

As a dancer and choreographer I've spent nearly 40 years

working with some of the great artists

who made British ballet a world-renowned success.

Now, as director of Birmingham Royal Ballet,

I can trace a direct line back from my company

to those early pioneering dancers and choreographers

that kept ballet going throughout the war years.

In this film I'll be following in the footsteps

of the key group of dancers

who would rise from the crucible of the Second World War

to become Britain's national ballet company.

Night after night we had full houses.

I mean, it was amazing.

Where they found flowers from, and things to give people,

I don't know.

Bouquets arrived. A lot of flowers from gardens, I suppose.

We had a 10 o'clock class every morning. It was like a roll call

to see if everyone was still alive. Who had been bombed out?

No, really. To see if anyone was dead and had to be replaced.

Someone had to stand on guard outside my room every night.

There were no naughty goings-on

with lovely officers coming back from the front for me!

We did so many new ballets.

Despite all the restrictions.

You know, you were rationed with materials and things.

It was extraordinary.

Before World War Two, ballet in Britain was dominated

by foreign, mainly Russian ballet,

with companies like Diaghilev's Ballets Russes

performing at the Royal Opera House

while Britain's home-grown companies struggled in small theatres.

There was no British national company or national style.

But when war broke out, it introduced

a brand-new set of challenges for Britain's ballet companies

and those challenges were to prove the testing ground

for one company in particular -

the Vic-Wells Ballet lead by Ninette de Valois.

Known as the godmother of British ballet,

de Valois would become one of the most influential figures in dance.

She was born into a military family in Ireland in 1898

and had a successful career as a dancer herself.

She was one of the very few English women

to dance with Diaghilev's great Ballets Russes company

and, of course, when she was in Diaghilev's company,

not only was she surrounded by these extraordinary teachers and traditions

but also great artists.

She could have stayed with the Ballets Russes

much longer than she did.

She was only 28 when she left and I think that she left when she did

because it had filled her so much with the absolute conviction

that we had to establish in this country a company,

a school modelled on the sort of school and company

which had given rise to the sort of artistry that she had encountered

and become a part of.

I first met Madam, as Dame Ninette de Valois came to be known,

as a 17-year-old student at The Royal Ballet School.

On one particular occasion,

we were learning a solo from one of her ballets

when her face appeared at the window and she duly marched in

and, ignoring the teacher, ignoring all of the other students,

took MY hand and proceeded to take ME through one of her solos.

Terrified? Exhilarated? It was like holding the hand of God.

She treated us as a lot of school children, I think.

She really did boss us around a bit.

I don't think today's dancers

would probably have accepted it so willingly.

No, I think we all had great, great respect for her

and I always felt that I felt great admiration for her but not adoration.

I don't think anyone could say that they loved de Valois,

but you had great admiration for her as a person.

There was an Australian dancer in the company, Gordon Hamilton,

and he was just a brash little... He didn't care about anything.

The story was that she corrected him on something,

corrected him again and again and he said, "All right, Madam."

You know, it just came out like that and that stuck from then on.

She wouldn't have "Madame", she wouldn't have anything. That's it.

So she was Madam

and she went on being Madam for the rest of her life -

without an E.

Frightening.

Yes, because when she lost her temper she could be really very frightening.

I think we were all in awe of her.

Everybody says how tough she was, how cruel she was. I don't agree.

I think she was just magnificent and inspirational

and I would have killed for her, really I would.

And she shouted at me the same as everyone.

With the aid of another formidable woman, Lilian Baylis,

the manager of both the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells theatres,

Ninette de Valois founded the Vic-Wells Ballet Company in 1931.

Her aim was quite simply

to create the best ballet company in the country

and by the mid-1930s she had a roster of dancers and choreographers

that included Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann and Frederick Ashton.

Her big ambition of course was to found a school and a company

that would synthesise the great traditions of the Russian ballet

with recent developments on the continent,

but to make it uniquely British.

But it was going to be an uphill struggle.

Although there were several fledgling British ballet companies

like the Vic-Wells Ballet and Ballet Rambert,

most critics in London believed the British

didn't have the right temperament for ballet

and only the visiting Russian companies deserved to perform

at Covent Garden's Opera House.

For anyone beyond the niche audience in London, ballet hardly existed.

I think for highbrow audiences, ballet was well established.

I think for the man in the street, it was still very much peripheral,

exotic, something they wouldn't consider going to themselves.

Quite happy to encounter it for five minutes in a music hall,

but that was about it, I think.

You know, it was for the tiara set,

not mass entertainment,

not understood as being part of national culture at all.

I think if you'd said a ballet dancer, somebody would have said,

"Oh, you know, the Russians. Them Russians."

I think the idea that it could be anybody home-grown

really hadn't sunk in.

But De Valois was determined,

and in eight years she had gathered a company of 30 young dancers,

a prodigiously talented music director and composer, Constant Lambert,

and had amassed a repertoire

of both traditional classics, as well as new British choreography,

like Frederick Ashton's Facade.

Nurturing the star quality of a 20-year-old Margot Fonteyn

and the growing choreographic talents of Ashton,

de Valois was beginning to woo sceptical critics

and her company were slowly beginning

to pull ahead of their rivals.

But on 3rd September 1939,

everything changed.

This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin

handed the German Government a final note stating that,

unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock

that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,

a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received

and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

I think, obviously,

with the outbreak of war things did change.

OK, so immediately the companies stop performing

but that's actually for only a very brief period.

It was quickly realised that people needed entertainment

even more during a war period than in peacetime.

So it was only a brief break

and dance companies in fact got going

and remained active through the war

as much, if not more, than any other art form.

I think it's very interesting. It really is a big moment for dance.

The first thing the Vic-Wells Ballet Company did

after the outbreak of war was embark on a short tour.

Madam gathered us all together

and they organised a tour

which I always think

was the beginning of making the company,

because then it was at least seven performances a week.

It wasn't like it was in London where you did two performances a week,

it was seven. Hard work. But that's where you learn.

The dancers were accompanied on tour

not by an orchestra but by two pianos.

At first the musicians were able to play, but very soon, of course,

the call-up had an effect. The musicians went off one by one.

This left Constant Lambert,

who was the company's music director,

to transpose the scores down to a two-piano version,

which he and the company rehearsal pianist, Hilda Gaunt,

apparently a great character, played from the orchestra pit.

Frederick Ashton used the two pianos to great effect

in his seminal choreography Dante Sonata.

Inspired by the beginning of the war,

this ballet explored the conflict between good and evil

in a way that no British choreographer had ever done before.

It shows Ashton pulling away from the grand spectacle

of the Russian and Continental classics

and developing a unique physical style of story-telling.

From its premiere in January 1940 at the Sadler's Wells Theatre,

Dante Sonata was a huge hit

and the company performed it regularly throughout the war.

It was a very good ballet.

I think, personally, in my opinion, it was his best one.

It was completely different

to anything that Fred or anybody else had done.

There were bare feet.

No pointe shoes. It was very moving.

It was a powerful work.

It's created at the beginning of the war, the Phoney War period,

so before the blitz has started,

and people didn't know what was going to happen.

Here was a sense of struggle being put on.

It was interesting

because it was very much more a free sort of style of movement

rather than the formal, academic ballet.

I think perhaps for some of the audiences

that was going to appeal more than perhaps a traditional ballet.

Ashton created Dante Sonata during a break from the RAF

after he had been conscripted.

But he had to return to national service after making the piece.

# This is the army, Mr Jones

# No private rooms or telephones

# You had your breakfast in bed before

# But you won't have it there any more... #

With all men between 18 and 41 being called up,

Ninette de Valois's company faced a shortage of male dancers,

but rather than ask for her men to be exempted,

de Valois insisted that they sign up.

I think it's important with de Valois to remember

that she came from a family where her father had been killed

in the First World War

and she felt that conscription was something that they had to accept.

She really felt that her men had to serve.

Having access to dancers from Europe and the Commonwealth

really enabled the company to survive.

If you were Australian or South African, or whatever you were,

Lithuanian, you could get a job at the company

because she needed male dancers.

Some of them weren't so good and some of them were very good.

Being Madam, she always coped.

She just cut out all the parts for the men

and we just did it as girls, you know.

She adapted everything. Very clever, brilliant woman.

Even with a rather fluid presence of men, the company still grew in size.

By 1940 it had 41 dancers and had outgrown the Old Vic stage,

so they changed their name to become the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company.

In May 1940, the British Council and the Foreign Office

decided to cement the wartime relationship

between Holland and Belgium

by sending the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company there on tour.

Ballet, British ballet, had become a valuable cultural export

and there are wonderful pictures of the company

striding down the railway platform arm in arm on their way to Holland.

It looks like it's going to be great fun!

# Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye

# Cheerio, here I go, on my way

# Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye

# Not a tear, but a cheer Make it gay. #

I'm on my way to see Julia Farron.

Julia is the last surviving member of the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company

that was on that tour to Holland in May 1940.

# Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye

# Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye

# Cheerio, here I go, on my way... #

Julia! How lovely to see you.

So when did you very first hear about the Holland tour?

I can't remember hearing about it.

It must have, I suppose, gone on the notice board that we were going to do it.

I think, with us, we were all young

and we probably were quite excited about it.

It was really only when we went home and told our parents

and they weren't very excited about it.

My father happened to be in the Air Ministry at the time

because he was put there for the war.

He was able to find... He was panic-stricken.

He said, "You can't go."

Then luckily there were about six of us all under 17

and suddenly they were told they couldn't take us

because then we must have a chaperone

and so my mother was chosen to be a chaperone.

So she went with you. So she went with us,

which upset my father even more!

The Hague is now home to the Nederlands Dans Theater,

one of the foremost dance companies in the world,

but back in 1940, dance in Holland was still in its infancy

and the arrival of the Sadler's Wells Ballet was a big event.

Jessica Voeten is an author and journalist

who has written about the company's tour to Holland.

She's brought me to the Hall Of Knights

where the company posed for photographs in 1940.

Wow.

And here are the greats.

De Valois, Ashton, Margot Fonteyn,

Robert Helpmann. It looks wonderful.

It looks joyous, the sun's shining, they're feeding the pigeons.

It's a very friendly atmosphere. They look so happy,

but, I mean, we were at war with Germany at that point,

but Holland was neutral.

What was the atmosphere like in Holland at that time?

It looks relaxed.

Yeah, but on the other hand of course there was anxiety

because of the situation since '39.

You know, there were talks of maybe an invasion of Holland.

So the company performed here in The Hague the opening night...

On the same day this picture was taken. The same day.

Controversially, de Valois had decided

to bring many of the company's new works,

including Dante Sonata, to Holland.

She wanted to bring the best and boldest of British ballet

to international attention,

and she got what she wanted, as critics from across the country

flocked to their first night at The Hague's Royal Theatre.

It was very exciting

because we had never been in a big opera house before, you know.

We'd only been at Sadler's Wells.

So this was very exciting.

Boxes, and the royal family were there, and so on.

Then at the end of the performance,

people in the gallery threw flowers on to the stage.

Being Holland, they were all the spring flowers, tulips and daffodils.

It was very beautiful.

First time I had ever seen that done.

It must have been a great start to the tour.

Yeah, it must have been. For the dancers, for the company,

and also for the public,

because of the good reviews.

All the critics from all over came to this performance

and everybody was blown away by it.

The following performances were all fully booked.

The company went on to perform

to packed houses in Hengelo, Eindhoven and Arnhem

and were set to go to Amsterdam and Haarlem,

but things didn't go as planned.

Four days into the tour

and circumstances began to catch up with the company.

When they returned to The Hague to check into the Hotel du Passage,

which used to be here,

they knew that the Germans were hot on their heels.

EXPLOSIONS

When the sun rose on that fateful day,

the Nazis invaded the Netherlands.

Without warning or the slightest provocation,

they unleashed upon their innocent neighbour

the full terror and fury of a devastating blitzkrieg.

We'd come back from the last place that we were at

and we arrived back late at night,

it must have been after two, I think,

and then everybody went to bed.

And then a couple of hours later, the planes started coming over.

Woke us all up.

But everybody went up on the roof.

I'm standing on the roof of what used to be the Hotel du Passage

in the exact spot

where the dancers of the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company were

on the morning of the 10th May 1940,

Margot Fonteyn reputedly in her lilac dressing gown.

From here, the company would have seen

countless thousands of airborne troops dropping.

They would have heard gunfire, bombing,

as the Germans attempted to take out strategic points

in and around the city.

And what we have to remember is that many of the company were teenagers,

others barely out of their teens.

It must have been a terrifying experience.

Thousands of leaflets were dropped on The Hague from the Nazi planes.

The leaflets assured Dutch residents

that Germany's war was with England and not Holland,

but threatened that any resistance to the invasion

would be met with lethal force.

We heard gunfire. It was quite frightening.

You know, we literally went down into the basement and stayed there

and we were frightened, very frightened.

With the invasion of Holland,

the situation in The Hague was becoming increasingly perilous.

There is a story that Lambert, and Ashton, De Valois, and Helpmann

were having coffee in a local cafe

when a bullet from a German aircraft whizzed past, narrowly missing them.

The Sadler's Wells Ballet Company

had to find a way out of the city - and fast.

Nobody wanted to be interned, which is what would have happened,

patently obviously.

The Germans, once they'd got in,

would have pushed us into prison probably,

and then found somewhere to put us for the war.

And that would have been the end of the company.

Thanks to tireless negotiations by John Beek,

the Dutch impresario who brought them to Holland,

as well as daily representations by de Valois and Lambert,

the British Embassy managed to get the company out of The Hague

and on to a cargo ship bound for Britain.

It was the penultimate boat out of the country

and was closely followed by another boat

carrying the Dutch Royal Family.

We literally went down into the bowels of the ship

and there we stayed.

And they shut us in, you know, they didn't leave that open.

We were there for, I think,

about 18 hours - no food, no drink.

When the company fled Holland in 1940

they left everything behind.

They'd brought with them six of their most important works

and everything was lost -

music, scenery, costumes.

They managed to revive some of those ballets later,

but one ballet, Horoscope,

was completely lost and never danced again.

Written by Constant Lambert,

it made Margot Fonteyn a star and was a great loss to British ballet.

But at least the company had escaped

with their lives and with their liberty.

A few days after the company had returned to Britain,

Holland surrendered to the Germans.

With most of the company's modern repertoire lost,

there was pressure for new work, both from audiences and dancers.

So De Valois organised a new season at the Sadler's Wells Theatre

and began to choreograph.

On the 4th July 1940,

de Valois' The Prospect Before Us

burst onto the Sadler's Wells stage.

A light-hearted romp based in 18th-century London's Theatreland,

it featured a grandstanding comic solo for Robert Helpmann.

The Prospect Before Us

was the perfect example of de Valois' mission

to create new ballets which were quintessentially British.

Prospect Before Us was a marvellous piece

of counterintuitive brilliance, really,

on Ninette de Valois's part.

She's looking to the past, she's giving a sense of continuity,

a sense of Englishness, a sense of eccentricity,

all the things that we know and love about ourselves.

So it's a wonderful feel-good thing about who we are, where we come from.

You would not have thought that at such a dark moment

she would come out with something so light and bubbling, really.

VIBRANT PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

AIR-RAID SIRENS WAIL

NEWSREEL: 'Now it's eight o'clock.'

'Jerry's a little bit late tonight.'

In September 1940, the Blitz began

and the Sadler's Wells Theatre was closed and turned into a rest centre

for people whose homes were bombed.

The Sadler's Wells Ballet Company was homeless.

NEWSREEL: 'But it won't be a quiet night.'

'The searchlights are in position.

'The guns are ready.

'The people's army of volunteers is ready.

'They are the ones who are really fighting this war.'

The company briefly moved to Burnley

but soon found themselves back in London

when the government realised that, despite the Blitz,

people still needed entertainment to lift their spirits.

And they found themselves here -

it's called the Noel Coward Theatre today,

but during the war it was known as the New Theatre.

Whilst the company were here, at the New Theatre,

the bombing of London intensified.

At the height of the Blitz,

the Germans were launching over 100 V1 flying bombs at London every day,

their distinctive buzzing noise terrorising the populous.

But the audiences kept coming and the dancers kept dancing.

We had watchers on the roof who had three whistles.

If there was one whistle it was, "Take care, the Doodlebug is coming."

Because you could see them.

Two - "Danger, get ready to go to the stairs."

Three - "Get onto the stairs."

And then you'd wait for this shattering crash,

and you'd usually swear as much as one dared swear at that age,

and then you'd rush back up to the dressing room

and get on with your make-up.

We had a lot of gunfire,

we could hear the guns going

when they were trying to shoot down the bombers going over.

That made an awful racket.

My only real experience of being quite close to it

was in Sylphides.

MELANCHOLY VIOLIN MUSIC

And they had the flying bombs, you know,

they used to grind and grind

and the thing was that when they stopped,

you heard them stop, you knew it was going to fall somewhere close to you.

There's a point in Sylphides

when the entire company has to turn upstage and hover,

just hover for about three to four seconds,

just bourree-ing on the spot,

and arms going up and down.

Well, that wretched thing

had got nearly on top of us it seemed,

when we got to that point.

And we suddenly heard this. "Eeeeeeee" going,

and we all kind of froze in our position.

And I think it would only have taken one person to have run

and everybody would have scattered,

the audience and everything and everybody else,

but we didn't, we just kind of froze.

We had been told, de Valois said, "Don't you dare move",

so we stood there and the music stopped,

everyone got down under their seats.

And we heard the great clunk and we knew that it had landed

and it wasn't us and we all kind of sighed a sigh of relief and went on.

It actually dropped two buildings away -

but it wasn't on us.

The bomb fell and it made an explosion... Everyone...

The orchestra came up and they started again!

Because the company had to share the theatre with drama and music hall,

they didn't get many performances.

So they went on tour,

both to make money and to keep the dancers performing.

And, boy, did they tour!

We used to give three matinees a week,

Wednesday, Thursdays, Saturday.

And then every evening, Monday to Saturday.

And very often if we were going from Edinburgh down to Bath or Bristol

or wherever it might have been,

we would be travelling in the train overnight.

You only got Sunday off if you weren't travelling.

If you were travelling it was... There went your Sunday

and no break at all. It was pretty tough.

We didn't really get enough rest, to be honest, we did not.

When we toured around it was awful,

because we used to spend the weekend on the train,

you know, we'd do one-week stints

and then we'd travel to another town next week.

And we'd be shunted into a siding when the military things were going,

we'd sit on the siding no heating, no food, nothing -

it was a miserable time.

It was really very hard on the dancers.

But a very good training,

it made everyone very strong, very resistant.

We went everywhere.

Where did we go? Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow,

Leeds, Manchester,

I loved the Opera House in Manchester.

We certainly went to Cardiff and Bristol,

Southampton, Brighton, Eastbourne.

I think there's a lot of factors that came into touring.

It was commercially successful for them to go

and perform in the regions.

And I think de Valois did want new audiences

to see the ballet and to enjoy the ballet.

When the company toured, they were paid up to ?4 a week

which translates to about ?100 nowadays,

so, not much, even back then,

but at least the company had the opportunity to perform

and to continue strengthening their technique.

But the reality of dancing across the country with food rationed

and at the height of wartime austerity

certainly wasn't easy.

I mean, it was hard, it really was hard.

But you could get what we called digs, you know,

on tour for about 30 shillings.

Some of the digs were absolutely dreadful,

some were quite good.

I mean, some had bedbugs and not enough clothes on the bed

and you put newspaper on the bed

to have a little extra something over the top of you.

We'd probably arrive at nine o'clock at night, in the blackout,

with a heavy suitcase.

We had to walk from the station and try looking for digs -

if you hadn't got them in advance you were out of luck.

Knocking, "Have you got any room?"

I mean, it was monstrous, monstrous, I don't know how we survived.

Then you had to give your food coupons to the landlady,

sometimes you got something back from them,

most of the time you didn't!

You would hand over your ration book

and pray that they didn't cheat you.

You had two ounces of butter a week and two ounces of margarine.

And, um, you never knew if they were really diddling you or not.

I remember one, asking us what we wanted to eat for our suppers,

and so we said, "What have you got?"

And she said she'd got cheese, cheese, toasted cheese...

baked cheese. We thought, "Ooh, what's that?"

You would find yourself getting a bit plump

and because it was bread, you know, and margarine

and not vegetables and protein like we think we have to have now.

Diet wasn't the only thing

the dancers had to compromise on during the war.

We had to buy our own make-up and our tights.

And we were only given one pair a fortnight of ballet shoes,

and you can imagine, that didn't go very far with...

what... Three and six is nine, nine performances a week -

so 18 performances, with one pair of shoes.

So that's why we used to

darn the pointes, always.

And so we all got raw toes, you know...

blisters and then they broke.

But we coped all right.

Got used to it.

I think one was so happy to be dancing, really.

As they toured around Britain,

the company continued to build a reputation for ballet

right across the country, turning an art form

which had hitherto been the preserve of London's elite

into a national treasure.

I mean, when I first joined in '41,

we didn't always have full houses,

and by the end of the war we had.

I think the very fact we were cut off from the rest of the world

meant that people had to focus on what there was.

I mean, we could see what it meant to people.

I mean, people had nothing and yet they paid the money

to come and see the ballet, and we were really moved by that.

You know, that they would give away a little bit of their money,

which they hardly had any of, to come and see us.

So it drove us on, you know? We were determined to be wonderful.

There were regular people that came, performance after performance,

and I think there were a lot of people,

it was like a club, really, especially further up in the gallery,

in the amphitheatre, they all went to performance after performance

and they made it their duty

to kind of see every performance they could see

and different people in different roles.

One of de Valois' strengths in building an audience

was the way she programmed the popular traditional Russian

and Continental classics

together with new British work.

WALTZ-STYLE VIOLIN MUSIC

Somebody who documented

the way the company's repertoire was developing during the war

was Lionel Bradley.

A dedicated follower of ballet,

he saw hundreds of performances every year

and would write detailed bulletins

to share with his closest friends.

Every now and again he'll give us these wonderful retrospectives

of the season that he's just seen

and talk about how many performances the company has given,

how many individual ballets they've performed.

So here we have 1941-42.

And he notes that, in fact, they're giving 208,

compared with 110 the year before -

that's an enormous increase in the amount of work.

We do about 130 a year. Yes.

208 - that's a lot of shows.

He'll then talk about how many works are presented,

and with Ashton there were 152 performances,

Helpmann, 90.

And de Valois' ballets, there were 67 of them,

and Mikael Fokine, so the old, traditional Russian element

coming through from the Ballets Russes, 47.

So that's mainly Les Sylphides.

It was largely mixed programmes that were being performed,

with some light-hearted works,

which was very useful for the escapism

that I'm sure people wanted.

Although many of the new works were light-hearted,

it was the traditional classics like Les Sylphides

which provided audiences with the beautiful fantasy worlds

they could escape into.

ETHEREAL VIOLIN MUSIC PLAYS

SHE ISSUES INSTRUCTIONS

Ballet teacher Ann Steedman was seven years old

when she saw the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company

in Nottingham during the war.

The thing that I remember most,

and stayed with me ever since,

was a very young Margot Fonteyn.

Must have been about 19 or 20 at the time... Yes, yes.

..in Sylphides.

Such a beautiful, understated, lyrical performance.

Quite beautiful.

And then I, as a seven-year-old,

I was very impressed with the ballet Les Sylphides.

I sat on the edge of my seat

and had shivers going up and down my spine,

and the music, and I loved it.

That was when I thought, "That's what I want to do.

"I want to be in a ballet company." And I did get my wish.

After winning the hearts of audiences outside London,

the Sadler's Wells Ballet had another challenge - the troops.

Like many other entertainers, the company were asked

to give performances for British soldiers,

both at home and overseas,

by the Entertainments National Service Association, or ENSA.

We occasionally gave shows in aircraft hangars, you know.

We did dance for the troops.

They started coming and enjoying the performances.

But the audiences,

I think they probably found ballet

as something beautiful

amidst all the awful things that were going on.

Half of these men would have laughed at the ballet

and said a lot of poofters, you know, cos that was the... Wasn't it?

I mean, fathers wouldn't let their children learn to dance,

cos they said, "No, I'm not having that."

On the ENSA tour, the boys got whistled everywhere,

when we got off the bus, they were...

Well, it was something which girls should be doing, not boys.

Well, I think a lot of them went

because there was nothing else to go to

and a lot of them got hooked on it

and I think we made a lot of fans, in that respect.

When they came, of course they fell in love with it,

they loved it, and all that nonsense about the men went out of the window

and they saw how hard... They saw them holding a girl above their head

and then they realised there was sex in it, of course,

because there were girls, beautiful girls with long legs

and tiny little tutus and things, so that cheered them up a lot.

And so I think a whole generation of people

who were interested in the ballet

was formed in those ENSA tours.

VIOLIN MUSIC PLAYS

By 1944 the company were ready to move into larger premises,

and they came here.

It's called the Shaftesbury Theatre now, but during the war years

it was called the Prince's Theatre

and it was here that Robert Helpmann

premiered his ground-breaking ballet Miracle In The Gorbals.

Taking inspiration from the infamous Glaswegian slum

which had been called the most dangerous place in the country,

the multi-talented Helpmann fused his flair for drama

with expressionistic movement

to create a British myth

that working-class audiences could relate to.

It was about a Christ figure coming back to save a suicide.

But the important thing about it

was that it took place in the thick of the Gorbals,

which then was a totally disreputable place.

It was most unballetic in a way,

but, er, thrilling nonetheless.

And it was important for us,

because I don't the company

had anything else that was modern in that way.

They didn't have anything really earthy.

Sir Robert Helpmann, Bobby as we called him, was so brilliant.

He said, "Get out to the streets,

"look and learn and become real people."

So that was thrilling for all of us.

It was a success in as much as people sort of said,

"That's not ballet," you know, it's something quite different,

but they enjoyed it. It was very dramatic.

With its roots in gritty real life,

Miracle In The Gorbals was a real cornerstone in British choreography

and proved another success for the company.

I'm hoping to restage this piece for the Birmingham Royal Ballet,

so I've asked original cast member Pauline Clayden

to teach the suicide solo to one of our dancers - Natasha Oughtred.

Pauline was amazing and was very particular

with the style and the thought,

right from the beginning,

as to what she felt when she was doing this piece.

And considering how long ago this was,

I think she's got incredible clarity on the ballet

and how Helpmann really wanted it to look.

DRAMATIC PIANO MUSIC

A lot was left to one's own kind of imagination.

I don't think he ever said to me, because I did the suicide,

why I committed suicide, he never gave me a reason for that.

By the steps of what he wanted me to do,

one kind of put two and two together

and made one's own story up as one went along.

On the 8th May 1945,

almost five years after the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company

had narrowly escaped the Nazis in Holland,

the German army surrendered and peace came to Europe.

# When the lights go on again

# All over the world

# And the boys are home again... #

We were doing Coppelia.

Bobby was playing Dr Coppelius.

We were at the New.

I think the applause at the end was an amazement

and I think Bobby, as far as I remember,

made an outrageous speech,

but basically what we all wanted to do was get out of our costumes,

get in to our clothes,

and run down St Martin's Lane to Trafalgar Square

and join in the crowds.

So, we were all there in Trafalgar Square.

I mean, like, talk about cheek to jowl, you know,

you could hardly move, but we were there.

# Then we'll have time

# For things like wedding rings

# And free hearts will sing

# When the lights go on again

# All over the world. #

By the end of the war, despite the lack of men

and the air raids and the wartime shortages,

de Valois' company had made great strides

both in terms of creativity and their popularity.

They were, in all but name, a national institution.

But it would take the most influential economist

of the 20th century

to propel them to the next level.

Apart from being an economist,

John Maynard Keynes was also the chairman

of the Council For The Encouragement Of Music And The Arts,

or CEMA, which was to become the Arts Council in 1946.

Maynard Keynes was also a keen balletomane

who had married a Russian ballerina.

He wanted the Sadler's Wells Ballet company

to move to the Royal Opera House,

which had been used throughout the war as a dance hall.

Maynard Keynes had wanted to bring them into the heart of Theatreland,

of course the Paris Opera had the Paris Opera Ballet,

the great Kirov Opera had the Kirov Ballet at the old Mariinsky Theatre,

but in England we only had visiting ballet companies

at the opera house.

He wanted to have one resident there.

Negotiations got under way

to bring the Sadler's Wells Ballet to Covent Garden.

De Valois' dream of leading a national ballet company

seemed within her grasp.

But, curiously, she didn't jump at the proposal.

She knew she had to come up with a very good cast.

That was hard to find,

because some of the boys were still in the forces.

She may have been frightened to think that that would shunt us up

into a realm of ballet companies that we had never been.

I mean, we were a small... We were the best, but we were still small.

And she may have been a little bit frightened, "Can we do it?"

"Am I, Madam, am I up to it?"

You know, maybe there were all sorts of fears like that.

But whatever they were, she overcame them.

In 1946 the Sadler's Wells Ballet

moved into the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden

to become the permanent company there.

# Something to dance about

# Someone to dance it with

# Something to dance it to

# To a foxtrot or a waltz... #

That was so exciting.

I mean, we couldn't believe it.

We'd heard rumours that we might be going and that.

And, I mean, we all felt it was such a privilege

to even go through the stage door

where all these great Russian dancers had been.

It was really rather like going into a wonderful cathedral.

I mean, it was such a hallowed place, you know,

where only the greatest had ever performed.

I think we felt we'd earned it,

I think we'd done our bit, you know.

Well, we'd worked damn hard, you know,

we'd toured the provinces, we'd propagated ballet, which people...

We went to towns where they'd never seen ballet before.

The company deserved to be there,

I mean, they deserved to be the national company.

It was the best-run company, maybe with the best dancers.

And a woman at the helm who really knew how to run a company.

On the 20th February 1946, the Royal Opera House reopened

with a performance of Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty

to an audience which included the Royal Family.

I mean, it was, you know, very exciting,

and the royal family coming for the opening night and everything,

it was marvellous.

It was terribly exciting...

and different, it was so huge.

You see, we'd always been in sort of small theatres.

I can remember the stage manager saying,

"Places, please, ladies and gentlemen,"

and we all went... We shook, absolutely shook.

Well, it was magical.

I mean, it's such a wonderful stage, that Covent Garden stage.

Ninette was always telling us we had to project,

we were on a much, much, much bigger stage

and the theatre was enormous

and we had to project to the back of the gallery.

We knew it was our theatre.

It was a magical moment, absolutely magical.

We knew we were good.

I mean, we'd been polished to within an inch of our lives,

so we knew we were in a better state than we'd ever been.

I think it was the most exciting thing I've ever seen.

And this was the first big production they'd had -

new costumes, new sets, everything.

And a full-size orchestra.

It was very good.

The success of that first performance of The Sleeping Beauty

was like an awakening, both for Britain

and the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company.

After the long, dark days of the war,

the country faced a bright new future

and Britain's love affair with ballet had been ignited.

The company were now supported by public funds

from the newly formed Arts Council,

a measure which John Maynard Keynes had put in place

before his death in 1946.

This gave de Valois' company a security they'd never had before.

In their new home at Covent Garden

the Sadler's Wells Ballet went from strength to strength,

dancing the full-length classics alongside new works

like Frederick Ashton's Symphonic Variations,

which also premiered in 1946

and remains one of his most potent and influential pieces.

In fact, if The Sleeping Beauty can be viewed

as the awakening of British ballet,

then Symphonic Variations is surely it's apotheosis.

This is footage taken from the dress rehearsal of Symphonic Variations

back in 1946.

It's never been seen publicly before

and features the original cast of six dancers,

out of whom only Henry Danton still remains alive.

It was Ashton's first ballet after he'd been conscripted.

So I think he put a lot into it.

It was like a great sigh of relief

and, oh, thank goodness we can relax.

It was beautiful music.

In a way, The Sleeping Beauty is saying,

"Here we are, we are a major international company,

"we can hold our own against anybody."

But when you look at Symphonic Variations, it was saying,

"We are an individual company and we can show what WE can do."

Symphonic Variations is a sort of minimalist,

but supremely clever way of saying,

"This is how this little company can fill this space.

"I can reduce it right back to six dancers

"and look how this works."

Symphonic Variations completes a creative arc

that started with Dante Sonata

and continued with The Prospect Before Us

and Miracle In The Gorbals.

These works show just how creative and innovative British ballet became

during the war years,

and you can see how Ashton, De Valois and Helpmann

would go on to influence generations of British choreographers.

The war had provided the nurturing ground

for a world-standard national ballet company,

with both a strong repertoire and a loyal audience.

De Valois' dream had been fulfilled.

She envisioned a British ballet and she did it,

I mean, give her credit, against incredible difficulties.

One always hates to say that war is a lucky thing,

but I think in the case of the development of ballet in Britain

it was very, very significant.

I think it really pushed it up a notch.

Before the war, de Valois' little company

was possibly turning into a little bit of a precious institution,

and the war absolutely broke all of that down.

So they come out the other side

an absolutely seasoned company

of very strong dancers, strong individuals...

troupers, a really strong sense of company repertoire.

They know that if they can win over an audience of reluctant squaddies,

they can win over anybody.

It made us. I think without the war

it would have taken probably another ten years

to get to where we got.

Might say one was thrown in the deep end

and that's how you learn to swim

and survive and get to the top.

It made people who had never thought about that sort of thing,

made them think about it and want to bother to go and see it.

And then want to support it, which has blown it out.

And so, yeah, I think the war did a great deal for ballet.

It wasn't until 1956

that de Valois' company officially became The Royal Ballet

but, in the meantime, a sister company was formed

to keep touring ballet around the country,

in much the same way

that the Sadler's Wells Ballet had done during the war.

That touring company would eventually become

the Birmingham Royal Ballet.

I've been the Director of Birmingham Royal Ballet now for 18 years

and, although I've worked with some wonderful companies

right around the world,

this is still the company which is closest to my heart.

And as we tour around the country, and internationally,

I like to think of de Valois' courageous little company

and the extraordinary work that it did

during those dark days of the war.

And I like to believe that something of their pioneering spirit

still resides in us.

# Now I know you

# I walked with you

# Once upon a dream

# I know you

# The gleam in your eyes

# Is so familiar a gleam... #