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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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.
‘The "Lambeth Walk" has not only been the dance success of the year—it promises to continue indefinitely as one of our national dances. It is more than a craze, because it expresses the London spirit, and this Christmas it will be danced in homes all over Britain.’2One evening in March 1938, C.L. Heimann, the managing director of the Mecca organization, the company which controlled Britain's largest chain of dance halls, attended a performance of the popular stage musical Me and My Girl at the Palace Theatre in London. The show centred around the character of Bill Snibson, a cockney from Lambeth in south London, who inherited an earldom but found it difficult to adapt to life among the social elite.3 At the high point in the show, Bill, as played by Lupino Lane, led a grand dinner party in a dance number called the Lambeth Walk, complete with a swagger and shoulder rolls which purported to represent the ‘typical Cockney walk’.4 For months Heimann had been seeking out a new dance that could be performed by Britons of all ages, with or without dancing experience, and sitting in the audience watching Lupino Lane strut about the stage, he believed he had found just the dance.5 Quickly securing Lane's permission to adapt the stage number for the dance hall, Heimann turned to Adele England, his leading dance instructor, to develop a ballroom version. What England went on to create was a very simple sequence dance, in which partners circled the floor singing the Lambeth Walk song and strutting with the supposed cockney swagger; at requisite intervals in the song they would slap their knees and hoist their thumbs in the air, yelling ‘Oi!’ Simple, silly and infectious, the Lambeth Walk was destined to become the greatest dance phenomenon that Britain had seen in many years.Lupino Lane
10 December 1938
Mass-Observation's oft-cited pronouncement that ‘you could find them doing the Lambeth Walk in Mayfair ball-rooms, suburban dance-halls, Cockney parties and village hops’,6 goes only some distance towards articulating the profound impact of this dance. Indeed, the social research organization's inclusion of an entire chapter about the dance in its 1939 book Britain by Mass-Observation, a work ostensibly about the national reaction to the Munich Crisis, is telling about the cultural valence of the Lambeth Walk, which in multiple ways represented more than a simple dance craze.7 Unlike the fervours that surrounded the foxtrot or the Charleston in the 1920s, which were both dances that came to Britain from the United States, now the public evinced unprecedented enthusiasm for a dance that was British in origin. The Lambeth Walk was developed by a British dance professional, and performed to a song written by a British composer; it was produced and promoted by a British company, and first introduced in British ballrooms. The dance was also viewed, largely erroneously, to be authentically British in its content, a traditional cockney cultural form with a long and established history. Therefore, a major element of the craze that surrounded the Lambeth Walk concerned its promotion and public reception as a quintessentially national dance.
The role played by popular culture in articulating ideas about national identity is a question of growing concern for scholars of British history.8 This article will use the Lambeth Walk and four other Mecca-produced novelty dances in order to demonstrate the way in which the production and consumption of popular dancing provided space for a cultural negotiation over what it meant to be British. The stunning success of the Lambeth Walk meant that it inspired many imitations, most notably by its own creator, C.L. Heimann, who sought to duplicate his first triumph with a series of follow-up dances. During the final years of the 1930s Mecca introduced four more novelty dances, the Chestnut Tree, the Park Parade, the Handsome Territorial and Knees Up, Mother Brown, all of which followed the Lambeth Walk's formula of simplicity and specifically ‘British’ content. Through song lyrics and thematic associations, the Mecca dances glorified the nation's history and heritage, landscape and natural beauty, as well as reflecting a more inward turn towards ‘England’ rather than ‘Britain’, all idioms that previous work on national identity has identified as being prevalent in the inter-war period.9 The dances also highlighted class harmony and celebrated the ‘ordinary’ Briton, arguably anticipating and facilitating the vision of the British nation which would emerge with the outbreak of the Second World War.10
However, there was more to the story of the Mecca novelty dances than merely their creation or reinforcement of prominent idioms about Britishness. The Mecca organization was the leading force in the commercialization of popular dancing that occurred throughout the inter-war period, so much so that Mass-Observation called C.L. Heimann one of the ‘cultural directors’ of the nation.11 In promoting its novelty dances, Mecca launched large-scale publicity campaigns, throwing the full weight of its commercial might into disseminating the ideas about the nation represented in its dances. In this way, the discussion that follows will argue, Heimann and Mecca attempted to effectively produce the nation for consumption by British dancers.12 While commercial cultural moves of this sort are often associated with attempts at cultural appropriation and social control, this article will further demonstrate that in their consumption of the Mecca novelty dances, the British dancing public was always capable of, in the words of T.J. Clarke, ‘recapturing the apparatus of production’.13 In the case of the Lambeth Walk, the public embraced Mecca's suggestion that the dance represented an authentic British dance form; yet in their performance of the dance, Britons constructed their own meanings, transforming and reinterpreting the Lambeth Walk to embody a vision of the nation that was forged through a cultural negotiation with Mecca. Moreover, while the British people accepted, and even helped to reify, the Britishness of the Lambeth Walk, they remained oblivious to, or entirely dismissed, Mecca's attempts to sell its other novelty dances as national cultural forms. Instead, it was rather their quality as dances, and the level of enjoyment that they provided, that determined the reception of the Lambeth Walk follow-ups. This discussion will therefore show that ideas about national identity promulgated by the commercial producers of dancing could be reinforced, transformed and embodied by consumers—but they could also be ignored or outright rejected.
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Soon after Adele England had fulfilled C.L. Heimann's request for a ballroom version of Lupino Lane's Lambeth Walk, the two staged an exhibition of the dance at Mecca's Streatham Locarno dance hall. Mecca also launched an active publicity campaign, working with music publishers and the BBC to promote both the song and the dance. It did not take long for the Lambeth Walk to catch on, and dance venues all over the country—from North to South, Scotland to Wales, to ‘all sorts of out-of-the-way places’14—began complying with the public demand for the new dance, which also soon spread beyond the British Isles, to the Continent, throughout the Empire and to America. As additional evidence of its popularity, the dance quickly inspired a flurry of copycats, such as the Blackpool Walk, the Southend Walk and the Margate Walk. Over the next months and years, even while Mecca released its own Lambeth Walk follow-ups, there appeared dozens of other new party dances, including the Boomps-a-Daisy, the Exhibition Swing, the Gazook, the Trek, the Cherry Hop and the Palais Stroll, as well as regionally specific favourites such as the Highland Swing, the Scottswood Shuffle, the Clapham Prom and the Deptford Dip. Regarding this vast array of copycat dances the Daily Mail observed that ‘the Lambeth Walk has a lot to answer for’.15
However, the enthusiasm displayed by the public in performing the dance goes only some distance towards understanding the Lambeth Walk phenomenon, which in many ways transcended the ballroom. The King and Queen were reported to have performed the dance at Balmoral and many of Britain's leading stars of stage and screen participated in a celebrity performance at the Coliseum. The dance was a staple number in 1938's Christmas pantomimes, to the point that Lupino Lane's production company had to threaten lawsuits for copyright infringement.16 In May 1939, Me and My Girl became one of the first musicals ever to be broadcast over the new medium of television, and the following year Lane produced a film version, re-titling it The Lambeth Walk. The song and dance were so ubiquitous that they developed a cultural currency that could be drawn upon in many different contexts. The Labour Party composed a campaign song to the tune of the Lambeth Walk, and a number of other companies and organizations followed suit, producing such dances as ‘The Printers’ Walk’, created for a meeting of printers in Brighton.17 Apocryphal stories recounted Neville Chamberlain being greeted with the Lambeth Walk when he arrived to meet with Hitler at the height of the Munich Crisis, and of the Prime Minister later being toasted with the song in Parisian cafés following the conclusion of the Agreement.18 When the Second World War broke out a year later, the Lambeth Walk took on added symbolic resonance and became a significant propaganda tool, in ways that will be discussed further below. Thus, the question that inevitably emerges is: what was it about this dance that caused it to have such a tremendous cultural and social impact?
By the late 1930s popular dancing in Britain had reached something of a stagnant point. The end of the First World War had seen the start of a dancing boom, spurred on by factors such as euphoria over the end of the devastating conflict, the opening of hundreds of new affordable spaces for public dancing and most of all, the evolution of a new popular dance form known as modern ballroom dancing. Chiefly emblemized in dances such as the foxtrot, modern ballroom dancing was taken up by a professionalizing dance community and developed into what became known as the ‘English style’. But as the years passed, this national dance form, once considered to be innovative and provocative, had become mainstream and rigidly standardized. The standard four dances of the English style—the foxtrot, quickstep, tango and modern waltz—had evolved to a point of such fixity and complexity that dancing lessons became a virtual necessity for anyone wishing to take to the floor, the opportunity for which was limited to those who had the time, inclination and money for instruction. Even for those who were adequately trained in ballroom dancing, the standard four were growing somewhat tiresome; nothing truly new had appeared in British dancing since the Charleston in the mid-1920s, and for years observers had been speculating that something was needed to shake things up in the ballroom. Into this void entered the Lambeth Walk—simple, fun and totally different. As one commentator noted, the Lambeth Walk freed the British dancing public from ‘every law of "rise and fall", "contrary movement", "sway", etc., and up rise these non-dancers, these wallflowers, these nobodies, and take the floor, the band puts on paper hats and lets itself go, and the party spirit is amongst us’.19
Of course, throughout the years of dancing stagnation hundreds of new dances had come and gone without having nearly the impact of the Lambeth Walk. And while part of the dance's appeal was certainly its fun and simplicity, it was also not the only, nor even the first, novelty dance: both the Palais Glide and the American-made Big Apple had been floating about the dance halls for some time before the emergence of the Lambeth Walk, but only enjoyed real success once the latter had spurred enthusiasm for this type of dance. Mecca's promotional campaign also only partly explains why it was this, and not another party dance, that caught on with such tenacity. Rather, what set the Lambeth Walk apart from all of the other new dances that had failed to enjoy even a fraction of its success, was the promotion and public acceptance of the Lambeth Walk as something authentically British, and symbolic of the national spirit.
In the summer of 1938 C.L. Heimann told The Star newspaper, ‘there has never been anything quite like "The Lambeth Walk" in English dancing. Practically everything popular here came from America. "The Lambeth Walk" has changed all that. It has the happy spirit of the old English round dances’.20 Heimann's comment reflected the two main features of the public commentary that circulated around the Lambeth Walk—that it was English/British-made, in a time when most British popular culture originated in the USA, and that it was authentically British in its content, perhaps even harkening back to older national dance forms.21 Regarding the first issue, in a time of increasing concerns about Americanization, particularly within the realm of popular culture, the success of the Lambeth Walk was perceived to mark an important reassertion of British cultural autonomy.22 Adele England told Mass-Observation that it was the greatest English dance success the world had ever seen.23 Mass-Observation's Tom Harrisson suggested in Picture Post that British music and dancing were at last making a stand against the sea of American imports, referring to the Lambeth Walk as ‘the biggest blow to American influence’.24 When the Lambeth Walk was exported to the United States, Jack Payne, one of Britain's leading bandleaders, commented in the Evening News, ‘ever since Irving Berlin tickled our feet with his little masterpiece "Alexander's Ragtime Band", American composers ... have been giving us foxtrots and quicksteps lauding the panoramic delights of every State within the Union ... it is pleasing to find at long last that the compliment can be whole-heartedly reciprocated’.25
In addition, the Lambeth Walk was celebrated for more than being a dance made in Britain, but for being authentically British in its content as well. Despite the fact that the modern genesis of Mecca's Lambeth Walk was not concealed, attempts were made by its creators to establish a longer tradition for the dance form. Lupino Lane confirmed the authenticity of the dance in an interview with Mass-Observation, stating, ‘I got the idea from my personal experience and from having worked among cockneys. I’m a cockney born and bred myself. The Lambeth Walk is just an exaggerated idea of how the cockney struts.’26 At the same time, multiple newspapers began reminding readers that there had been a music hall song called the Lambeth Walk back around the turn of the century, popularized by Marie Lloyd's husband Alec Hurley. While there was no direct connection between Hurley and Lupino Lane's versions of the Lambeth Walk, Mecca latched on to this longer history, mentioning Hurley in a short book the company released about all its novelty dances in 1942.27 Adele England also referenced the Hurley connection in the Dancing Times, further noting that cockney movements ‘set the foundation stone, as it were, for the "Lambeth Walk" making a truly English dance’.28 Yet England also contradicted these statements in an interview with Mass-Observation, revealing that she had not drawn inspiration from, nor even investigated, cockney culture before developing the steps of the Lambeth Walk. Rather, she designed the dance based on her knowledge and experience of what proved popular in the dance halls.29
England's comments suggest that Mecca's primary motive in creating the Lambeth Walk was not to celebrate or restore an authentic working-class cultural tradition, but rather to create a popular dance that would bring people into the company's dance halls. This is not surprising, since Mecca was first and foremost a business, and commercial concerns were doubtless central to the company's production of the Lambeth Walk. As the history of the dance makes clear, Mecca, the dominant force in British commercial dance culture, had considerable power in shaping what would be danced not only in its own halls, but all over the nation. The British public embraced the manufactured vision of popular tradition represented in Mecca's Lambeth Walk, validating and confirming it in their own acceptance and performance of the dance. However, the Lambeth Walk phenomenon was more complex than a simple case of manipulation and social control on the part of a dominant culture. Rather, in the production and consumption of the dance, Mecca and the public negotiated the content and performance of the Lambeth Walk in ways that made the dance, whatever its real origins, a recognized part of the national culture and a site for the construction and embodiment of national identity.
Significantly, the Lambeth Walk's producers were not the only ones to perpetuate the notion that it represented an authentic British cultural tradition. The British public—in which I include not only performers and observers of the Lambeth Walk, but also the popular press, dance professionals, organizations like Mass-Observation and all those implicated in the manifold social and textual interactions that surrounded the dance—was also a potent force in validating the Lambeth Walk's legitimacy. Seeking a history of the dance, the Manchester Guardian turned to Major Cecil Taylor, president of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, who duly reported that ‘costers on Hampstead Heath danced like this sixty years ago’.30 Editors at the Modern Dance and Dancer wrote that they had conducted their own study of the dance's history and evolution, confirming that ‘[it] originated at the fairgrounds of London, when the costers took their concertinas, combs and paper, and danced with their donahs’.31 Philip Richardson, the editor of the Dancing Times and one of the foremost figures in British dance culture during this period, similarly affirmed the Lambeth Walk as ‘a dance of the costers of London’.32
Real-life Lambethians were also eager to lay claim to the dance. In interviews conducted by Mass-Observation in the actual Lambeth Walk, many local people willingly confirmed that the song and dance had a long history, dating back perhaps as far as half a century, and that the latest incarnation was merely a revival. This belief is not surprising given the existence of the old Alec Hurley music hall song, though most Lambethians suggested that the earlier version of the dance that they knew often went by a different name. One woman recalled that she performed the Lambeth Walk, ‘oh years ago when we were little shirt buttons. Fifty years ago. We called it the jig.’33 Another man remembered that prior to Lupino Lane's version, ‘we had our own show. It hadn’t any name. But we always used to say "Oi!" ’34
The belief that the Lambeth Walk represented an authentic cockney cultural form was expressed by many participants and spectators of the dance outside Lambeth as well. In a list establishing the origins of Mecca's Lambeth Walk, Mass-Observation's Madge and Harrisson put in the number one position, ‘the cockneys of Lambeth and elsewhere whose walk [Lupino] Lane imitated’.35 Research conducted by the social research organization also showed that approximately a quarter of British people surveyed believed that the dance had originated with ‘Lambeth, costers or Cockneys’.36 One observer told Mass-Observation, ‘I understand the Lambeth Walk is a coster dance, and I imagine it originated with the costers and girls promenading.’37 As Raphael Samuel and Alison Light have noted, Mass-Observation's socialist founders were likely somewhat interested in establishing the Lambeth Walk's legitimacy, and in the notion that its success marked a sort of working-class ascendency.38 Yet it should be noted that in their published work on the dance, Madge and Harrisson also included comments by some critics of the dance, including displays of class prejudice, and other statements that did not necessarily comply with the mythology that was growing up around the Lambeth Walk. It therefore remains suggestive that the bulk of Mass-Observation's evidence, as well as contemporary press accounts, demonstrated that large numbers of Britons identified something historically British in Mecca's Lambeth Walk, and reinforced the dance's authenticity as much as its creators did. As another observer of the dance remarked, ‘[the] thing that struck me was the way the dancers seemed to throw themselves into the part, as though they were play-acting, especially the men, who seemed to fancy they were costers, imitating their mannerisms’.39
This comment is suggestive about the extent to which it was in the physical performance of the Lambeth Walk that much of its meaning was created. Many dance scholars have considered the relationship between dancing and the construction of cultural identity, showing that popular and theatrical dance provides a means for race, class, gender or nation to be physically enacted.40 As Jane Desmond has noted, ‘dance, as an embodied social practice and highly visual aesthetic form, powerfully melds considerations of materiality and representation together’.41 Thus, while there were certainly those who performed or observed the dance with little to no reflection upon its supposed meaning, even ambivalent or oblivious Britons helped to construct that meaning with their dancing bodies. It was not merely rhetoric, whether it was produced by Mecca, the press or consumers of the dance, which connected the Lambeth Walk to British cultural tradition and national identity; rather, the dance also allowed ideas about the nation to be embodied and performed. More specifically, through their physical performance of the Lambeth Walk, many Britons transformed it according to individual and regional preferences, and produced a dancing experience that highlighted community and social unity.
With its London theme, and its creators’ frequent references to the remarkable local and international success of an ‘English’ dance, there can be little question that in its original form the Lambeth Walk fell short of being a truly ‘national’ cultural form. So though Britons throughout the country acknowledged the cockney origins of the Lambeth Walk, they also sought to extend its geographic range through their performance of the dance, modifying and adapting it to be more national in scope. As mentioned above, there were a number of regional variations of the Lambeth Walk, focused on places like Margate and Blackpool. In Scotland, according to Mass-Observation, dancers changed the customary ‘Oi’ at the end of the dance to an ‘Och Aye’.42 At the same time, the British dancing public constantly altered the steps of the dance, reflecting local preferences and customs. As Adele England noted, ‘people will do it in their own way’, while another woman remarked, ‘nobody seems to do it the same’.43 In their physical performance of the dance, Britons played a vital part in shaping its content and meaning well beyond the visions espoused by Lupino Lane or the Mecca organization. Rather than merely highlighting cockneys, or London, or even England, the dance came to embody a diverse, plural image of the nation, and yet one also marked by community and social harmony.44
Samuel and Light have suggested that the musical Me and My Girl, which first introduced Lupino Lane's Lambeth Walk, was like a modern enthronement of the Lords of Misrule, a fun reversal of the traditional social hierarchy that allowed the working class, as embodied in Bill Snibson, to ascend and dominate. They further argue that ‘the comedy as a whole offered a fantastic easing of class differences in which the claims of common humanity reigned supreme ... [T]he working class, however rough their ways, are basically harmless; the aristocracy, however stuck-up, benevolent; the English a race of lovable eccentrics’.45 Stephen Guy has similarly noted with respect to the film version of the show that it was in the Lambeth Walk that ‘the meeting of the classes is symbolized’.46 The dance retained this spirit in its transition to the public ballroom, and there was widespread affirmation and celebration of the working-class origins of the Lambeth Walk. One woman stated that the dance was ‘common, particularly the "Oi" bit at the end, and I think it is lovely to be common and let yourself go in these days of refinement’.47 Many Britons appear to have believed that in their performance of the dance they were paying tribute to the working classes, and to social harmony in general. As another dancer noted, ‘I always feel that it draws all classes of society together ... The whole thing gives out friendliness and makes me like the costers better’.48
This evocation and celebration of class unity and of the ‘ordinary’ Briton suggest a vision of national identity we tend primarily to associate with the Second World War. As Gareth Stedman Jones has argued, certain of these wartime ideals, particularly the vital role played by the average person in winning the war, were often personified in the figure of the cockney.49 The success of the Lambeth Walk suggests that this, as well as other ideas associated with the so-called ‘people's war’, such as class breakdown and national unity, began to circulate even before the outbreak of hostilities. Indeed, they were physically embodied in the Lambeth Walk. The dance allowed all Britons to participate, whether or not they could afford instruction in ballroom dancing. As Lupino Lane remarked, ‘rich and poor alike—there is no class distinction about dancing. Anyone can do the "Lambeth Walk" and nearly everyone does.’50 The communal performance of the dance also inspired feelings of camaraderie and community, allowing Britons of different classes and regions to imagine that they were one happy dancing unit. While classes would rarely have mingled in their performance of the Lambeth Walk, the widespread success and ubiquity of the dance further reinforced the idea that it was a shared national experience. As Philip Richardson remarked in the Dancing Times, ‘it is the community spirit, the idea of many folk doing the same movement in unison that grips [the dancers]’.51
Moreover, this general accessibility, as well as the physical enactment of class harmony represented in the Lambeth Walk, served to cultivate the notion that the dance reflected Britain's long history of democracy. C.L. Heimann often expressed the belief that his novelty dances showcased the nation's democratic spirit, and Lupino Lane also proffered this suggestion, stating in Answers, ‘ours is a truly great democratic nation, and such institutions as the "Lambeth Walk" make it more so’.52 In January 1939, Picture Post featured an article entitled ‘The birth of a dance’, which was written by Mass-Observation's Tom Harrisson, and charted the creation and dissemination of Mecca's first follow-up to the Lambeth Walk, the Chestnut Tree. The article also featured an interview with C.L. Heimann, who had this to say about the appeal and importance of the Mecca novelty dances:
I claim, rightly or wrongly, that the Lambeth Walk and Chestnut Tree are typically English. The difference between the English people and those who follow Hitler and Mussolini as I see it, is between the arms of Hitler and Musso, and the arms of the King. Musso puts his hand over his head and everyone else does and that means the rule of iron. The King puts his hand above his head and everyone else does when they sing The Chestnut Tree, and that means democracy.53Heimann suggested that it was their very ability to follow a leader in dance rather than in marching that separated the British from their future military enemies in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. When the Lambeth Walk was later banned in these countries, Heimann further declared to Mass-Observation that the dances were simply ‘too peace making’ for the likes of Hitler and Mussolini.54
Peter Bailey has noted that a parallel discourse existed around music hall in the late 1930s, in which humour and the ‘pleasures of the people’ became symbolic of democracy and national solidarity, and also stood in contrast to militant and coercive uses of leisure by the Nazis.55 Popular culture was thus an important site in which the British articulated what distinguished their nation from those they were fighting, an idea particularly reinforced through the production and consumption of the Lambeth Walk. Initially promulgated by the dance's producers like Heimann and Lane, the cultural meanings attached to the dance came to be used by a number of different segments of the British public. Mass-Observation's Madge and Harrisson justified their inclusion of an entire chapter about the dance in Britain by noting, ‘we may learn something about the future of democracy if we take a closer look at the Lambeth Walk’.56 When war actually erupted, the social and cultural ubiquity of the Lambeth Walk made it an ideal tool for practices ranging from measuring the impact of the conflict, to propaganda. In September 1939, the Evening Standard followed a group of children from the actual Lambeth Walk, a short road in south London, to Surrey as a means of examining the impact of the evacuation.57 Around the same time, a parody entitled ‘Hitler's Lambeth Walk’ began to circulate in penny pamphlet form, with the lyrics changed to mock Nazi leaders and describe an easy Allied victory.58 At the height of the Blitz, the Daily Sketch photographed a group of Londoners performing the Lambeth Walk amidst the ruins resulting from a recent German air-raid. A caption beneath the image read, ‘the gallant Cockneys of Lambeth Walk refuse to be downhearted. They still keep up their famous dance, and they can smile.’59 This notion that the British public would ‘keep smiling through’ wartime adversity was also intrinsic to the notion of a people's war, and contemporary understandings of national identity.60 In the Lambeth Walk, wartime propagandists found a potent means of expressing and performing these ideals.
The Lambeth Walk thus demonstrated the power held by a commercial producer like the Mecca organization to shape popular cultural consumption, and the meanings attached to a cultural form. Mecca's suggestion that the dance represented a longstanding national cultural tradition, and expressed a vision of a British national identity that evoked democracy, the common working man and the wartime spirit, was largely accepted and perpetuated by the British public. Yet the history of the dance also makes clear that in their consumption of the dance, Britons were able to transform some of its meanings, such as with respect to the regional diversity of the nation, as well as to put those meanings to work for their own purposes, particularly as the nation went to war. Moreover, Mecca's attempt to produce the nation, and the ability of the dancers to influence and control the cultural meanings attached to a dance they were performing, became even more apparent in the production and consumption of Mecca's Lambeth Walk follow-ups.
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The craze for the Lambeth Walk had in no way abated when Mecca premiered its second novelty dance, the Chestnut Tree, in November 1938. With this dance, and the three that followed it, Mecca maintained the formula that had been so successful with the Lambeth Walk; all of the dances were designed to be relatively simple to learn, and were based around a British theme. However, the public reception of the Chestnut Tree, the Park Parade, the Handsome Territorial and Knees Up, Mother Brown proved to be quite different. Rather than embracing, much less propagating, the notion that these dances were authentic national cultural forms, the British public largely ignored the dances’ origins or thematic content in its evaluation of them. Novelty dances, even the Lambeth Walk, were not without their critics, particularly among dance professionals who argued that party dances were silly and ridiculous, and denigrated the integrity of ballroom dancing, but there were equally those Britons who loved this type of dance, suggesting that they were friendly, happy, and had made dancing fun again. Therefore, in their consumption of the Lambeth Walk follow-ups, proponents and critics alike focused on their value merely as dances, not British dances. This was despite the fact that in its quest to launch four more ‘national’ dances, Mecca's promotional campaign was even more organized, and on a much grander scale than the one the company had developed for the Lambeth Walk.
The Mecca organization made every effort to establish that all of its novelty dances were, like the Lambeth Walk, British in origin and character. While still in the planning stages for the Lambeth Walk follow-ups, Adele England told Mass-Observation, ‘we want to keep them all English now’.61 The dances were each developed by British musicians and dancers, and were explicitly promoted for being bulwarks against encroaching Americanization. Moreover, given that so much American music and dancing of this era originated in African-American communities, there was a distinct racial element to these assertions. In articulating what he believed to be the appeal of the Chestnut Tree, composer Tommie Connor told Mass-Observation, ‘English dances should be for the English—[people are] getting tired of what I call Harlemesque’.62 Meanwhile, Mecca's press release for the Chestnut Tree noted, ‘the dance itself is severely ENGLISH. So many of the new and short-lived dances that have been introduced in recent years have been American, and based on negro rhythms not suited to the English temperament.’63 The vision of the national identity produced by Mecca, so inclusionary in terms of class, still advanced internal boundaries for the nation in terms of race.
Each Lambeth Walk follow-up also contained what was purported to be British thematic content. The Chestnut Tree was inspired by a newsreel image of King George VI joining in a camp sing-along of the old folk song ‘The Village Blacksmith’ taken sometime in the summer of 1938. The widely seen image of the King tapping his head in the tradition of the folk song purportedly provided inspiration to composer Jimmy Kennedy, charged with coming up with Mecca's next novelty dance tune.64 Kennedy recreated ‘The Village Blacksmith’ as the ’Chestnut Tree’, and once again Adele England developed the dance. In the same simple style as the Lambeth Walk, dancers circled the floor mimicking the growth of a tree, and concluded by boisterously exclaiming ‘CHESTNUTS!’ Similarly, Mecca's third novelty dance, the Park Parade, also contained an outdoor theme, based around a couple taking a romantic stroll in the park on a summer's day. The dance also had a nostalgic tone, which according to Byron Davies, Mecca's head of publicity, ‘creates an atmosphere reminiscent of the good old days when the only Sunday amusement was to listen to the band in the park’.65 The dance's big finish, along the lines of ‘Oi’ or ‘Chestnuts’, required dancers to shout ‘Yippee, ain’t love grand!’ Introduced in March 1939, the Park Parade was also considered to be more like a ‘real’ dance than its predecessors, with a change from foxtrot (four/four) to waltz (three/four) time halfway through. The steps were once again designed by Adele England, to go along with a song composed by Arthur Young, Tommy Duggan and Anthony Page.
Mecca's fourth novelty dance, the Handsome Territorial, premiered in June 1939 and was described by many as more of a march than a dance. With a song composed by Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr, and dance movements by Adele England, the climax of the Handsome Territorial required the dancers to shout ‘BOOM!’ while performing a military salute. With its martial theme, and introduced on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, Mecca promoted the dance as being particularly topical, and ‘astoundingly appropriate to current events’.66 However, the advent of war did not alter Mecca's plans for additional novelty dances. Rather, the war became part of the company's marketing strategy, with the promotional materials for its fifth novelty dance, Knees Up, Mother Brown, advising the press and other dance hall proprietors that Mecca was ‘at your service to make dancing prosperous in war time’.67 Released in December 1939, Knees Up, Mother Brown was based on an old music hall song, and represented to be, much like the Lambeth Walk, an authentic cockney song and dance.
Many of the themes that were prominent in Mecca's novelty dances were common in inter-war popular culture, and inextricably connected to national identity. These included nostalgic references to Britain's past and heritage, and espousals of the nation's natural beauty, as well as more inward-focus on ‘Little England’, rather than Britain and the Empire as a whole. At the same time, the lyrics to the Handsome Territorial song celebrated the lower ranks of the military, which, like the Lambeth Walk's evocation of the everyday working man, anticipated important aspects of wartime national identity with its strong focus on the important role played by the average person in winning the war. The Mecca novelty dances were therefore an important site in which these ideals were produced within British society, all the more so because of the extensive publicity campaigns that the company undertook.
Starting with the Chestnut Tree, Heimann and his public relations manager, Byron Davies, conceived the idea of giving each novelty dance a national launch, wherein the new dance would premiere simultaneously at every Mecca hall around the country so that the whole of the nation could share in the latest craze at the same moment. On-staff professional dancers first demonstrated the dance, and then invited patrons to join in, with the words to the relevant song displayed prominently on large banners around the halls so that people could sing along. Adele England herself typically introduced a new dance at the Streatham Locarno, and later went on a promotional tour around the nation. Meanwhile, Mecca sent advance notice about each of its new dances (instructions on steps, images, music, lyrics banners, etc.) to both the press and non-Mecca dance halls free of charge, in the hope that these forums would further spread word of its newest novelty. The company also joined forces with facets of the popular music industry, so that on the same day that a new dance debuted in Mecca halls, sheet music and gramophone records of the accompanying song would also go up for sale, each containing written or recorded instruction on how to perform the dance. In addition, Mecca experimented with slightly different promotional strategies for each individual dance. On the day of the Chestnut Tree's national launch, for example, Jack Payne's band launched the song on the BBC. The same evening of the Park Parade's national debut, the dance was made the grand finale of a variety show at the London Hippodrome. The Park Parade was also advertised on the sides of buses and in the Underground, and as another promotional tool Mecca introduced a free gift element to the dance's launch, distributing real straw hats, which were meant to complement the outdoor theme of the dance, to dancers and spectators.68
Of all the Mecca novelty dances, the Park Parade had the most expensive and widespread publicity campaign. The outbreak of war was likely a factor in the toned-down promotion of the final two dances, though with respect to the Handsome Territorial, Adele England told Mass-Observation that Mecca wanted to see if another dance could be successful without a large campaign, as the Lambeth Walk had been.69 Mecca may also have sensed increasing reluctance on the part of the press and other dance venues to continue promoting its dances. Regarding Mecca's last novelty dance, the manager of a dance hall in Bolton told Mass-Observation, ‘I’ve not bothered with the last one—Knees Up, Mother Brown. [Mecca has] written to me about it ... but I reckon it isn’t worth bothering about. Why take all the trouble to get the stuff to learn it and then put it across for it to die out in about a week? It's not worth it.’70 As this comment suggests, the Mecca dances were prone to a sort of fly-by-night popularity. Despite the fact that with the Chestnut Tree, the Park Parade, the Handsome Territorial and Knees Up, Mother Brown, Mecca strove to exactly replicate the combination of factors that had created the success of the Lambeth Walk—simplicity and British content—each was arguably less successful than the last.
No doubt part of the reason for this was simply that some of the ‘novelty’ in novelty dances had gradually worn off. The public was overwhelmed with five of these dances in less than two years, not to mention all of the other non-Mecca party dances that came and went in the same time period, and grew weary of the repetition. Yet mere boredom on the part of the public does not adequately explain the complex popular reception of Mecca's Lambeth Walk follow-ups, particularly when one considers that the start of the war, coming three months before Mecca debuted Knees Up, Mother Brown, saw something of a resurgence of interest in novelty dances. Rather, in articulating their feelings about the four dances, the British dancing public drew upon the first element of Mecca's rhetoric about its dances, namely that they were fun, simple and accessible, but rarely the second, that the dances were British in origin and character. If a person liked novelty dances, they tended to like the new ones produced by Mecca; if they did not like novelty dances, they disliked Mecca's dances as much as any others. Despite Mecca's best efforts to sell its dances as national cultural forms as they had so successfully done with the Lambeth Walk, this did not appear to factor into their reception.
All of the Mecca novelty dances were designed with a specific goal of being universally appealing. As with the Lambeth Walk, Mecca pushed the idea that its other four dances were simple and accessible, even to the point of suggesting that they were appropriate for children. Special morning sessions were held at some Mecca halls to teach children the new dances free of charge, and images of young children were also common in promotional materials for the dances.71 However, Mecca's formula for broad-based interest in its dances was even more complex then simply creating easy-to-perform dances. Mecca wanted its dances to appeal to everyone and subtle differences between the dances were targeted at separate consumers. Since dancing was often perceived to be a leisure pursuit dominated by the young, Adele England deliberately inserted elements of the polka, an old-time dance, into the Chestnut Tree, thinking that this would make it more appealing to older dancers.72 With the Park Parade, Mecca sought to appease the critics of novelty dances who argued that they were not really ballroom dances at all, by introducing more complexity, and a mid-dance switch from foxtrot to waltz time. Mecca attempted to ensure that there was something for everyone in their dances, a notion that was also reflected in how the novelties were performed in the dance halls. The dances were often played together in a sequence known as the ‘Heimann Medley’, and patrons therefore knew that if they liked the Park Parade more than the Chestnut Tree, they did not have to wait long for their favourite dance to be played.
The distinctions between the various Mecca novelty dances did figure in their reception to a considerable degree, and some dancers preferred the Chestnut Tree or the Park Parade for the very reasons that Mecca had predicted. In a survey conducted jointly by Mass-Observation and the dance periodical published by Mecca, Danceland, many respondents noted that they preferred the Park Parade to the Chestnut Tree because there was ‘more to it’, and because it was a ‘real’ dance.73 As one man wrote, ‘the Park Parade has more charm and style than the Chestnut Tree, it has variety and more opportunity for real dancing as compared with the rather miming actions of the Chestnut Tree’.74 Most patrons therefore had their personal favourite among the novelty dances; there was also some variation from hall to hall, town to town, in terms of whether it was the Chestnut Tree, the Park Parade or the Handsome Territorial that was most popular. How a dance would ‘go over’ often depended on the location or simply the night in question. Novelty dances tended to be very successful at private dances, since everyone generally knew one another and were less inhibited and concerned about looking foolish. Mass-Observation also noted that all of the Mecca dances were enthusiastically performed at a New Year's Eve dance in Bolton; something about the festive atmosphere of the holiday was conducive to the communal merriment of novelty dances. The observer noted, ‘the effect produced [by the dances] was one of terrific excitement. The band was playing full blast, everyone was singing the words ... and the floor was vibrating [and] sinking a good 4–6 inches in the centre of the room.’75 But though there was considerable diversity in when, where and why people enjoyed novelty dances, there were some common sentiments put forth by enthusiasts of the dances, often directly corresponding to Mecca's intentions. Proponents suggested that novelty dances had restored fun to the ballroom; that they were simple and enabled even the most inexperienced dancers to participate; that they were a welcome change from twenty years of foxtrot variations. Many of those responding to the Danceland questionnaire also simply expressed that the dances were ‘happy’.76
Yet there is no question that the Mecca novelty dances were not universally beloved. Members of the ballroom dance profession frequently complained that the novelties were not real dances, while some people worried that taking part in the silly dances would make them appear foolish. As a dance hall manager in Bolton noted, ‘whilst the crowd are quite prepared to laugh at the staff doing them they do not take them up well themselves. They feel conspicuous doing them.’77 Another hall manager suggested that rather than being worried about looking silly, the patrons at his establishment simply took dancing too seriously to engage in novelties, commenting, ‘it wouldn’t go here ... I don’t think that sort of dance catches on. The public dancers are dancers here.’78 The feelings of many novelty dance critics are perhaps best summed up in one man's response to the Chestnut Tree, who deemed it the ‘silliest damn thing I’ve ever seen’.79
It was therefore their quality as dances more than anything else that drew fire from the critics of the Lambeth Walk follow-ups. This fact was most clearly brought to light by the national premiere of the Handsome Territorial, generally viewed by contemporaries to be the most inferior of the Mecca dances. Mass-Observation's Alec Hughes suggested that even some of its creators and promoters seemed dubious about the quality of the dance. Adele England herself felt that Heimann's determination to release a new novelty every few months was diminishing the quality of what was being created, telling Mass-Observation, ‘it is mad to bring out so many dances, though I am the last who should say it ... These things just come to you. You might just think of a good idea, like Lambeth Walk, and make a success of it. But you can’t do that when you have to turn them out on a certain date.’80 She later admitted to being nervous about touring the country with the Handsome Territorial, and apparently with good reason. At the dance's Locarno debut, once the hall's professional dancers had completed their exhibition, no patrons joined in at all. When the dance was demonstrated at the Paramount the next day, the reception was little better. Patrons at both premieres described the dance as ‘daft’, ‘crazy’, ‘awful’. Hughes overheard one woman remark to her friend about Adele England and her new dance, ‘I think I could write better than that myself’.81 Another woman stated, ‘of course I’m not going to dance a thing like that. They’d have to drag me on the floor first.’82 Hughes himself concluded that the dance was ‘still born’.83
Public reaction to the Mecca novelties was therefore significantly divided, but what is most striking about the diverse views on the dances is that, unlike the response to the Lambeth Walk, there was little or no discussion of their British origin or thematic content. Acknowledgement of the dances’ Britishness was conspicuously absent in popular press coverage, the Danceland survey and Mass-Observation's interviews in dance halls. Indeed, on the rare occasions when the public did recognize any national element to the dances, it was often in derisive terms. An American visitor to the Streatham Locarno, upon observing an exhibition of the Handsome Territorial, remarked to Mass-Observation, ‘it's screwy. That's what you call an English dance, isn’t it’?84 A sixteen year old girl said about the Park Parade, ‘Oh it's like the Lambeth Walk—daft. That's the trouble with this country. When they have a thing they keep imitating it, till you get fed up with it.’85 In addition, some dancers actually viewed the novelty dances as a threat to a true national dance form, the English style of ballroom dancing. One letter to the editor of the Modern Dance and Dancer observed, ‘it is conceivable that in 1938, when the whole world is looking to the British style of dancing as the best in the world ... that we should lower the dignity of the ballroom by introducing such dances.’86 Two other letter writers expressed similar concerns, lamenting that ‘for years style and grace have been the main features of British dancing. Now, with [novelty dances] all has been forgotten.’87
So despite the fact that most of the Mecca novelty dances, particularly the Chestnut Tree and Knees Up, Mother Brown, had at least as much claim to being genuine national cultural traditions as the Lambeth Walk, the British public proved reluctant to identify anything authentic in them.88 Part of the reason for this was certainly that while national commercial industries like Mecca were interested in curbing the growing influence of American popular culture, much of the British public remained besotted with jazz, American celebrities and Hollywood movies.89 The anti-Americanism present in Mecca's rhetoric about its novelty dances may therefore have fallen flat, particularly since it occurred in the same moment that a new American dance form emerged on the dancing scene. In 1939, the same year that dancers were introduced to the Park Parade, the Handsome Territorial and Knees Up, Mother Brown, they were also introduced to the jitterbug, which would dominate many British dance floors throughout the war years. The success of the jitterbug was such that even Mecca eventually embraced it, releasing its own version known as ‘C.L. Heimann's Refined Jitterbug’ in 1940.90 Moreover, as the nation went to war, and ideas about national identity transitioned accordingly, it seems likely that if any of the Mecca novelty dances was to have been accepted as truly national, it would have been the Handsome Territorial. Not only was it ‘topical’ in a time when war-themed novelty dances such as the Blackout Stroll enjoyed legitimate success, the dance, like the Lambeth Walk, celebrated the ordinary Briton, which was commensurate with wartime understandings of national identity. However, unlike the Lambeth Walk, it was not admired as a dance, and quality clearly played as much, if not more, of a part than thematic content in determining whether a dance would be admitted into the national culture.
The failure of the Handsome Territorial also suggests that there may well have been one more issue at work in the public's failure to accept the Mecca novelty dances as something authentically British. Some people seemed to have seen through the commercialization of the nation represented in the dance, and to have viewed the content as exploitative. Alec Hughes speculated in his report for Mass-Observation that the timing of the dance was designed to coincide with the institution of conscription in the summer of 1939,91 and he was not the only one to express this belief or that it might be inappropriate or insensitive. A Locarno band member told Mass-Observation, ‘[the Handsome Territorial] is a fuckin’ marching tune. I think [Mecca is] trying to cash in on the conscription business. They may get away with it.’92 These comments suggest that many Britons were likely aware of Mecca's efforts to produce the nation as a commercial commodity. I want to propose that this awareness was connected to what Peter Bailey has identified as ‘knowingness’ within the context of the Victorian music hall,93 or what James Cook, drawing on some of the later writings of Theodor Adorno, has termed ‘ "split" consumer consciousness’,94 in which consumers can perceive and critically evaluate cultural products disseminated by a culture industry. In this way, the inter-war dancing public was conscious, probably even with the Lambeth Walk, of the commercial processes at work in Mecca's production of its novelty dances, even while receiving and performing them. While the case of the Lambeth Walk clearly shows the degree to which the popular dance industry could shape ideas about national identity, a closer look at the reception of all five Mecca novelty dances demonstrates that the public equally had agency in determining what vision of the nation they would accept, transform or simply reject. This brief history also reveals that much of this consumer power resided in the nature of dance as a cultural form. Once Britons stepped onto the dance floor, Mecca effectively lost control of how they would perform its dances, and what meanings would be constructed. In this sense, the consumers of commercial dancing became cultural producers in their own right.
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1 The Editors and Editorial Boards of Twentieth Century British History would like to extend their congratulations to Allison Abra, winner with this article of the TCBH Postgraduate Essay Prize for 2008. For details of the 2009 Essay Prize, see http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/tweceb/essay_prize08.html.
2 Lupino Lane, ‘About this (You Know) Walk’, Answers, 10 Dec 1938, 9. Clipping found in M-O A: TC 38/2/E, Lambeth Walk Cuttings, 1938.
3 For more on the stage production Me and My Girl, see Raphael Samuel and Alison Light, ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Vol. III (New York, 1989), 263–71.
4 Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson, Britain by Mass-Observation (London, 1939), 141.
5 Roma Fairley, Come Dancing Miss World (London, 1966), 60.
6 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 139.
7 Founded in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, Mass-Observation was a left leaning social research organization concerned with studying everyday life in Britain. Jazz and dancing were subjects of considerable interest to M-O in the late 1930s, and much of this article draws on the Lambeth Walk chapter in Britain by Mass-Observation, as well as the dance hall observer reports, surveys and correspondence with key figures in the dancing world that continue to be held by the Mass-Observation Archive.
8 See Alun Howkins, ‘Greensleeves and the idea of national music’, in Samuel, Patriotism, Vol. III; Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad's Army (Manchester, 1997); Jeffrey Richards, ‘Football and the crisis of British identity’, in Stephen Caunce, Ewa Mazierska, Susan Sydney-Smith and John K. Walton (eds), Relocating Britishness (Manchester, 2004); Siân Nicholas, ‘From John Bull to John Citizen: images of national identity and citizenship on the wartime BBC’, in Richard Weight and Abigail Beach (eds), The Right to Belong: Citizenship and National Identity in Britain, 1930–1960 (London, 1998), 36–58; James Chapman, Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (London, 2005); Peter Bailey, ‘Fats Waller meets Harry Champion: Americanization, national identity, and sexual politics in inter-war British music hall’, Cultural and Social History, 4 (2007), 495–509.
9 See Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London, 1991); Alex Potts, ‘ "Constable country" between the wars’, in Samuel, Patriotism, Vol. III (New York, 1989), 160–86; Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, 2006); Matthew Grimley, ‘The religion of Englishness: puritanism, providentialism, and "national character", 1918–1940’, Journal of British Studies 46, 884–906; Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003).
10 See Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London, 1991); Sonya Rose, Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford, 2003).
11 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 141. For more on the development of the Mecca organization, see James Nott, Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford, 2002).
12 In making this argument I am drawing on a multi-disciplinary scholarship that has pointed to the dialectic and reciprocal relationship between producers and consumers of popular culture. Much of this literature has shown how the commercial creators of popular culture have historically expropriated cultural forms from the lower levels of social hierarchies in order to produce, or reproduce, ‘the popular’, for mass consumption, but that this process also leaves room for resistance. I am adapting this notion of the ‘production of the popular’ for my own argument about the production of the nation. For an excellent survey of the existing literature in this area, see James Cook, ‘The Return of the culture industry’, in James Cook, Lawrence Glickman and Michael O’Malley (eds), The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future (Chicago, 2008), 291–317.
13 T.J. Clarke, The Painting of Modern Life (Princeton, 1984), 236.
14 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 139.
15 Charles Graves, ‘I See Life, by Charles Graves’, Daily Mail, 2 Mar 1939, 8.
16 Jonah Barrington, ‘Oi! No Doin’ the Lambeth Walk in the Pantos’, Daily Express, 11 Nov 1938, 3.
17 For Labour Party lyrics, see M-O A: TC 38/2/D, Lambeth Walk Cont’d, 1939; on the Printer's Walk, see Sussex Daily News, 6 Feb 1939. Clipping found in M-O A: TC 38/1, Additional Material, 6 Feb 1939.
18 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 139.
19 Eric Y. Tilley, ‘Slow Foxtrot or Lambeth Walk’, Modern Dance and Dancer, May 1939, 18.
20 J. Mackenzie King, ‘This man made the world shout "Oi!" ’, The Star, 16 Aug 1938. Clipping found in M-O A: TC 38/2/G.
21 In much of the discussion of the Mecca novelty dances’ origins, ‘English’ and ‘British’ are used interchangeably. The references to the Englishness of the dances must be partly attributed to the historic dominance of England in discussions of the whole of the British Isles, and unconscious slips of the tongue. However, the dances were also often thematically linked to England, rather than Britain, and the significance of this will be discussed further below. But since the Mecca dances were heavily promoted and participated in throughout the nation, I am examining them as British, rather than English, cultural forms.
22 The dance hall industry was only one among many inter-war popular cultural producers and commercial entertainment industries that implemented policies and practices designed to curb Americanization. As Peter Bailey has noted, in the 1920s the Variety Artists Federation became ‘fiercely protectionist and racist’ in the face of an ever-increasing presence of American performers on the music hall stage. See Bailey, ‘Fats Waller meets Harry Champion’, 497. The British film industry also feared the predominant popularity of Hollywood movies, resulting in the implementation of the notorious quota system in which a certain percentage of films shown in Britain had to be British-made, and concerns about the large presence of American bands operating in Britain caused the Musicians Union to impose a ban on ‘aliens’, which was clearly directed primarily towards acts from the USA.
23 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 161.
24 Tom Harrisson, ‘The birth of a dance’, Picture Post, 7 Jan 1939, 46.
25 Jack Payne, ‘About this Lambeth frolic’, Evening News, 15 Dec 1938, 11. Clipping in M-O A: TC 38/2/E.
26 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 159.
27 Adele England, How to Dance C.L. Heimann's Novelty Dances (London, 1942), 16.
28 Adele England, ‘The Lambeth Walk’, Dancing Times, May 1938, 170.
29 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 159.
30 ‘The birth of a dance’, Manchester Guardian, 26 Jul 1938, 10. Clipping found in M-O A: TC 38/2/G.
31 ‘Oi!’, Modern Dance and Dancer, Jul 1938, 11–2.
32 Philip Richardson ‘What will follow the Lambeth Walk?’, Dancing Times, Oct 1938, 33.
33 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 144.
34 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 147.
35 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 141.
36 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 166.
37 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 166.
38 Samuel and Light, ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’, 262.
39 M-O A: TC 38/2/C, Material used for Lambeth Walk chapter in Britain.
40 See for example Ann Cooper Albright, Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (Hanover, 1997); Jane C. Desmond (ed.), Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance (Durham, 1997); Susan Leigh Foster, ‘Choreographing history’, in Alexandra Carter (ed.), The Routledge Dance Studies Reader (London, 1998), 180–91; Beth Genné, ‘ "Freedom Incarnate": Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and the dancing sailor as an icon of American values in World War II’, Dance Chronicle 24 (2001), 83–103; Danielle Robinson, ‘Race in motion: reconstructing the practice, profession, and politics of social dancing, New York City, 1900–1930’, DPhil Dissertation, University of California, Riverside, 2004.
41 Desmond, introduction to Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, 3.
42 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 163.
43 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 161, 167.
44 Andrew Higson has noted that a similar notion of Britishness was present in British films of this period, in which ‘the nation becomes a body of people marked in their diversity, but even more marked in their interconnectedness’. See Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford, 1995), 274.
45 Samuel and Light, ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’, 267.
46 Stephen Guy, ‘Calling all stars: musical films in a musical decade’, in Jeffrey Richards (ed.), The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 (London, 1998), 112.
47 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 173.
48 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 171.
49 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The "Cockney" and the nation, 1780–1988’, in David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds), Metropolis-London: Histories and Representations Since 1800 (London, 1989), 272–324.
50 Lane, ‘About This (You know) Walk’. Clipping found in M-O A: TC 38/2/E.
51 Richardson, ‘What will follow the Lambeth Walk?’, 33–4.
52 Lane, ‘About This (You know) Walk’. Clipping found in M-O A: TC38/2/E.
53 Harrisson, ‘birth of a dance’, 48–9.
54 M-O A: TC 38/3/A, C.L. Heimann, 12 Mar 1938.
55 Bailey, ‘Fats Waller meets Harry Champion’, 506.
56 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 140.
57 ‘Lambeth has "Gone To Pick Flowers" ’, Evening Standard, 1 Sep 1939, 8.
58 M-O A: TC 38/6/A, Jazz Literature, 12 Apr 1939.
59 ‘Dancing amid the ruins down Lambeth way’, Daily Sketch, 19 Sep 1940. Clipping found in M-O A: TC 38/2/G.
60 See Rose, Which Peoples War?; Calder, The Myth of the Blitz.
61 Madge and Harrisson, Britain, 161.
62 M-O A: TC 38/3/A, The Chestnut Tree, 15 Nov 1938.
63 M-O A: TC 38/3/A, Chestnut Tree Press Bulletin.
64 Harrisson, ‘Birth of a dance’, 45.
65 M-O A: TC 38/3/D, Park Parade Literature, ‘dance that revives a fashion’, Entertainment Organizer and Club Secretary, 1939, 63.
66 M-O A: TC 38/3/E, Handsome Territorial Press Bulletin, 1939.
67 MO-A, TC 38/7/B, Knees Up Mother Brown leaflet, 1939.
68 M-O A: TC 38/3/D, Park Parade Press Bulletin.
69 M-O A: TC 38/1/A, Handsome Territorial Premiere, 13 Jun 1939.
70 M-O A: Worktown 48/D, Aspin Hall, 8 Jan 1940.
71 See promotional materials for the various dances in M-O A: TC 38/3.
72 M-O A: TC 38/3/A, The Chestnut Tree, 7 Dec 1938.
73 M-O A: TC 38/6/F, Danceland Questionnaire, Apr 1939.
74 M-O A: TC 38/6/F, Danceland Questionnaire, Apr 1939.
75 M-O A: Worktown 48/D, Bolton Palais, 1 Jan 1940.
76 M-O A: TC 38/6/F, Danceland Questionnaire, Apr 1939.
77 M-O A: Worktown 48/D, Aspin Hall, 8 Jan 1940.
78 M-O A: Worktown 48/C, Astoria Palais de Danse, 18 Dec 1939.
79 M-O A: TC 38/3/A, The Chestnut Tree, 15 Nov 1938.
80 M-O A: TC 38/5/G, Interview with Adele England, Dancing Teachers, 5 Jun 1939.
81 M-O A: TC 38/1/B, The Handsome Territorial, Paramount, 14 Jun 1939.
82 M-O A: TC 38/1/A, Handsome Territorial, 13 Jun 1939.
83 M-O A: TC 38/1/A, Handsome Territorial, 13 Jun 1939.
84 M-O A: TC 38/1/A, Handsome Territorial, 13 Jun 1939.
85 M-O A: TC 38/1/A, Locarno, 29 Apr 1939.
86 Letter from Robert Gledhill, Modern Dance and Dancer, Dec 1938, 21.
87 Letter from A. Calloway and C. Smith, Modern Dance and Dancer, Jan 1938, 20.
88 It should be noted that both ‘Neath the Spreading Chestnut Tree’, and ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ had existed as popular songs prior to being adopted by Mecca, and proved to have enduring popularity as songs if not as dances beyond the 1930s.
89 For more on the British interest in America, see Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz (New York, 1998); Bailey, ‘Fats Waller meets Harry Champion’; Mica Nava, Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture, and the Normalisation of Difference (Oxford, 2007).
90 M-O A: TC 38/1/A, Press Bulletin for All-Britain Jitterbug Championship, 1940.
91 M-O A: TC 38/1A, Handsome Territorial, 13 Jun 1939.
92 M-O A: TC 38/4/A, Mecca Bands, 27 May 1939.
93 Peter Bailey, ‘Music hall and the knowingness of popular culture’, in Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge, 1998).
94 James Cook, ‘The return of the culture industry’, 307.
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