TCBH Postgraduate Essay Prize Winner for 2008
Doing The Lambeth Walk: Novelty Dances and the British Nation1
University of Michigan
*aabra{at}umich.edu. The author would like to thank the Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex (M-O A), for their permission to cite from the collection, as well as the Archive's staff for their assistance in researching this article. She would also like to thank Sonya Rose, Kali Israel, James Cook, Angela Dowdell, Sara Babcox First, and the editors and reviewers at TCBH for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Abstract |
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In the late 1930s, the Mecca organization, the company which controlled Britain's largest chain of dance halls, released five novelty dances that were explicitly promoted for being British, both in terms of their origin and character. Through song lyrics and thematic content, the Lambeth Walk, Chestnut Tree, Park Parade, Handsome Territorial and Knees Up, Mother Brown celebrated Britain's heritage and folk tradition, ‘ordinary’ people and democratic spirit, and landscape and natural beauty. However, sitting at the centre of the commercial dance hall industry, Mecca's profit-driven motives in creating and promoting its novelty dances must be considered, and this article will argue that the company effectively ‘produced the nation’ for mass consumption. The discussion will further show that in performing the dances, the British public had considerable agency in determining which, if any, of Mecca's ideas about the nation they would accept and embody. The dances thus became a site in which Mecca and the public negotiated and expressed ideas about national identity that were consonant with the inter-war period, but which also anticipated the transition to wartime understandings of the nation.