Royal Dance Traditions in the Spotlight

In July last year, during a visit to St Peter Port in Guernsey, HM The King bumped into an old acquaintance, Caroline Freeman. More than 70 years earlier, both had been pupils at the Vacani School of Dance where Caroline, being a little older, had often been asked to guide the four-year-old Prince Charles through the steps. Founded by Marguerite Vacani in 1915, the school was the destination of choice for generations of upper-class children needing to be schooled in dance and deportment. As The King pointed out to Ms Freeman, “What was so marvellous is I had the same dance teacher as my mama.” He did indeed.

Each week through the 1930s, usually on Monday afternoons, Madame Vacani, as she styled herself, would come to the royal residences with her niece Betty, to teach Princess Elizabeth and her sister, Princess Margaret, Scottish reels, polkas and foxtrots, an ideal grounding for the many balls and dances they would be obliged to attend as they grew up. It was an essential skill in those days, especially for members of the Royal Family, who then,  as now, never had a photographer far away when they took to the dancefloor. 

Queen Victoria, whose dancing days were before the existence of press photographers, found much joy in music and dance. Her dancing master thought her very accomplished, and one maid of honour, after teaching The Queen the steps to a new Scottish reel, described how Victoria, “danced and skipped gloriously”. One of the reasons Victoria lost her heart to Prince Albert was because he was, in her words, “a splendid dancer”. The Queen’s annual schedule was punctuated by balls, where she would generally lead the first dance, and join in with others throughout the night. In 1843, she opened the state ball at Buckingham Palace by dancing a quadrille with her cousin, Prince George, while Prince Albert partnered Princess August of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In November that year, she once again opened dancing during a visit to Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire, dancing with the Earl of Hardwicke. 
 

A new, larger ballroom at Buckingham Palace, completed in 1855 (the largest of the state rooms today), allowed Victoria to indulge her love of dancing on an even grander scale. Even in her widowhood, she would occasionally indulge. At Balmoral in 1875, at a ball held for the Royal Household, it was reported that The Queen danced one reel. Her great-grandson, the future Edward VIII, was very fond of dancing, recounting in his memoirs how, “Like most young men, I loved to dance, and almost every year brought forth some new step or rhythm; for a brief period I counted the music of the ‘Charleston’ and the ‘Black Bottom’ among the foremost American exports to Britain”. He frequented the smart nightspots of London and was much in demand as a dance partner, with girls who danced with the Prince enjoying brief celebrity. Once, at the Ascot Cabaret Ball, he asked ballroom champion Edna Deane to dance with him nine times, inspiring a popular 1927 song written by Herbert Farjeon and Harold Scott: “I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales.” 

King Charles’s lessons at Vacani’s meant he has been able to reasonably negotiate a dancefloor over the years, and he has, if nothing else, been willing to ‘have a go’ on numerous occasions, much to the delight of his hosts and the gathered press. The Vacani School once reported that he particularly excelled at the Highland Fling. Diana, Princess of Wales, was hugely passionate about dance, and to a certain extent moved the spotlight away from her husband when it came to dancing in public.

The memoir of dancer and choreographer Anne Allan, published last year, revealed that The Princess secretly had dance lessons with Allan for nine years, during which time she polished enough to dance on stage with Wayne Sleep at the Royal Opera House in 1985. In November that year, she had tripped the light fantastic with American actor and dancer John Travolta during a gala dinner held at the White House by President Ronald Reagan. The dance, which saw Diana in an elegant, Edwardian-style Victor Edelstein dress of midnight blue velvet, twirling across the chequerboard floor to the tunes of Saturday Night Fever, with the movie’s own snake-hipped star, has become an iconic moment, and cemented her status as not only a royal princess, but a global celebrity.

Has Diana’s talent been passed down to her sons? Prince William’s carefree ‘dad dancing’ when he took George and Charlotte to see Taylor Swift at Wembley last year may not gain him a ‘Fab-u-lous’ verdict on Strictly Come Dancing, but his sheer enthusiasm won the hearts of many as the video went viral. And those who follow The Duchess of Sussex 
on Instagram were recently treated to a video of Harry and Meghan strutting their moves to The Baby Mama Dance by Starrkeisha in the delivery suite as they tried to kick-start the arrival of baby Lilibet in June 2021. It’s a far cry from the polite quadrilles and elegant waltzes of Queen Victoria’s time, but every dance has its day. And, it seems, every generation of royals has its movers and groovers.