Barbara Fewster (1928-2024). British dancer, teacher and associate director of The Royal Ballet School

Born in 1928, Barbara Fewster studied dancing at the Wessex School in Bournemouth before joining the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School in 1942. By 1943, at the height of World War Two, she was performing and touring the country with the Sadler’s Wells Opera Ballet. In 1946 she became a founder member of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet (SWTB), a company that became a hot bed of talent for the future of British ballet and a springboard for many and varied careers. There were extensive tours, both at home and abroad, where Fewster was at first a dancer, and then assistant ballet mistress in 1947. When Peggy Van Praagh left the company in 1951, Fewster became SWTB’s ballet mistress.

Against all the odds of a depressed post war Britain, ballet was vibrant. The emergence of a swathe of talented choreographers, together with a remarkably varied existing repertoire, ensured the help to build a bright future. On leaving SWTB in 1954, Fewster toured the United States of America as ballet mistress with the Old Vic Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, before joining the staff of the Sadler’s Wells (now Royal) Ballet School, which was now housed with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet at Barons Court in West London. She became deputy principal to Ursula Moreton in 1967, and succeeding her as principal in 1968. She joined the Grand Council of both the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) and the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD). She was made an Honorary Fellow of the Cecchetti Society by its founder Cyril Beaumont in the late 1960s.

Fewster was an indefatigable traveller. She was inspired by her experiences of teaching and adjudicating worldwide, and was at the heart of an historic cultural exchange with China in the early 1980s, involving an exchange of students and teachers. She was the driving force of a video for the Cecchetti Society in 1988, to promote and improve good practice in the teaching and understanding of pointework. Fester also frequently mounted ballets for professional companies, notably Coppélia for the Turkish State Ballet in 1993 and a revival of La Fête Étrange by Andrée Howard, a ballet close to her heart, for The Royal Ballet in 2003. There is a scholarship in her name as part of the Cecchetti Class Ballet Vocational Awards.

Barbara Fewster retired from The Royal Ballet School in 1988, and in the same year was appointed an OBE for her services to dance. She died in 2024.