Every day in the week leading up to the release of my brand-new book The Lost English Girl on March 7, I’m revealing a story, fun fact, or other tidbit about the book. Follow along each day to learn more about the book!
The Lost English Girl features one of Liverpool’s legendary ballrooms.
Somewhere, with someone in my family, there exists a photograph of several of my aunts and uncles and their friends at a ballroom. It’s the 1950s, and the girls are all sitting on the stage, their voluminous circle skirts billowing out around them, and their suited dates standing at attention next to them. They are all perfectly coiffed and nostalgically beautiful.
I’ve always loved this photograph just as much as I loved hearing the family stories of getting dressed up and begging bus fare off of each other so that they could go dancing. In this era, Liverpool’s legendary ballrooms were the place to go, be seen, and dance long into the night.
While writing The Lost English Girl, I wanted to incorporate something of Liverpool’s ballroom history into the narrative. Although I was writing a book that spans 1934 to 1945, the city’s ballroom culture was very much alive and well, and I chose to set the first meeting between Viv and Joshua, my main characters, in the Locarno, a real ballroom that is now known as the Liverpool Olympia.
In “Let’s Go Dancing:” Dance Band Memories of 1930s Liverpool, Trisha Jenkins writes about the Grafton (built next to the Locarno), the Rialto, and the State Ballroom, which were all grand ballrooms in operation during that era.
To choose your dance and your ballroom, you might pick up the Liverpool Echo on a Wednesday to read the column “Dancing on Merseyside,” written by Quickstep,” which listed the upcoming week’s bands and dances. Saturdays were the popular day to dance, although Fridays also drew a crowd. If you weren’t old enough to attend an evening dance, you might go to a tea dance instead.
Once you choose your venue, date, and time, there was the question of paying. Admission to the Rialto at the time was between one shilling and one and six during a time when the average working man’s wage was between two and three pounds a week. The Grafton, which had capacity for 1,600 people, charged two shillings for a Saturday evening dance.
Once you were through the door, you could expect to see men in suits and women in dresses—the band usually were the ones in evening wear unless it was Friday night at the Rialto when everyone in attendance would be dressed to the nines.
Jenkins writes that one woman remembers, “There was a shop at the top of London Road where the ‘well to do’ used to put the clothes, dresses, coats, and underclothes. You mention it, we all used to go there. I bought a coat there, one of those with a tail on. There was all sorts of lovely frocks—beautiful material. You used to get a frock for a few shillings, take it home, wash it if it had gone a bit under the arm say, you’d fix it up. Well I bought this beautiful cream silk frock with embroidered front, with beads all over it and a full skirt.”
After you were inside, the ballroom’s MC might announce, “Take your partners,” and the band would begin to play. This being an era where people generally learned to dance at an early age as a matter of course, dancers could expect to hear the waltz, foxtrot, or tango in rotation. Jenkins writes that the rhumba and the moochi might be played but weren’t as popular.
If you didn’t have a partner, the larger ballrooms often had a pen of professional dancers who would give you a dance if you purchased a ticket with cash.
If you were in need of the refreshment and you were lucky, the bar might be open. However, drinking was not allowed at all ballrooms, and at others the bar might only operate on certain nights or on very special occasions.
At the end of the night, depending upon the strictness of their families, you might see girls wiping their makeup off on handkerchiefs while disappearing into the night.
If one night of dancing at one of the grand ballrooms a week wasn’t enough for you, Liverpool hosted a number of smaller venues like the Edinburgh Cafe Ballroom, the Acacia House in Shaw Street, Blair Hall on Walton Road, and Burton Chambers in Spellow Lane. However, not every ballroom had a sterling reputation. One dancer Jenkins’ interviewed recalls that Daulby Hall had a bad reputation: “There were girls up to no good there, you could tell by the way they dressed their hair”
Want to learn more about The Lost English Girl? Check back tomorrow or follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and don’t forget that there is still time to preorder your copy of The Lost English Girl in print, ebook, or audiobook!