On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 12th, 1920, Philip J. S. Richardson, editor of The Dancing Times, convened approximately two hundred dance teachers, plus press, in the Lower Hall of the Grafton Galleries in London.

The best dancers and teachers of England had been experimenting in the 1910s with new music and new approaches to dancing, especially the foxtrot — which “crept in” from New York mere weeks before the outbreak of the First World War — and especially since the Armistice. The gathering on May 12th, 1920, was the initial attempt to get on the same page and, as it was described, create “order out of chaos” — in Richardson’s words, to “eliminate what is bad” and “put what is good on a firm basis.”

This would be the first of several such conferences over the ensuing decade. This decade would also witness the introduction of competitions, the rise of champions, the establishment of the Ballroom Branch of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, the standardization of dances and figures, the codification of technique, the formation of additional professional and amateur associations and boards, the growth of dance halls and dance bands, and the beginnings of a proliferation of printed material and film.

The result was the development, spread, and supremacy of the English Style of ballroom dancing.

In the 1930s, the English Style had been perfected into an art form that was admired and studied around the world. Its principle themes were ease, grace, simplicity, comfort, good form, good taste, glamour, elegance, and, above all, movement — natural movement, beauty of movement, quality of movement.

In the subsequent decades, the story and legacy of these pioneers and first champions of ballroom dancing has been largely supplanted by trends in competition ballroom dancing from the later twentieth century to the present.

However, over the past couple of years, a small group of passionate dancers, under the guidance of a three-time national champion and renowned teacher, have rediscovered and begun the endeavor of recovering what Phyllis Haylor called the “original conception of the English Style.” The impact upon medal work and social dancing was instantaneous and profound, bringing life-changing joy and beauty.