Cyril Beaumont (1891-1976). Bookseller, writer, critic and historian

For half a century, 75 Charing Cross Road was a magnet for anyone interested in classical ballet. This is where Cyril Beaumont ran an antiquarian bookshop and his Beaumont Press. He was one of many from this period who had been inspired with a passion for ballet by seeing a performance of Anna Pavlova, to which he had been taken as a reluctant spectator by his future wife.

Following this revelatory experience this English critic, historian, writer, editor, bookseller and publisher became a fixture in English balletic life for the next six decades. His friend Lydia Lopokova introduced him to the great teacher Enrico Cecchetti. Recognising the value of Cecchetti’s work, Beaumont studied Cecchetti’s classes over a period of four years with help from friend and dancer Stanislas Idzikowski. In 1922 he published A Manual of Theatrical Dancing (Cecchetti Method), saving Cecchetti’s work for posterity. That same year, Beaumont founded the Cecchetti Society with Cecchetti as President and himself as Chairman. He had a profound knowledge of the history of ballet, writing many original studies and translating early balletic texts. In addition to numerous articles about the contemporary scene, his Complete Book of Ballets (1937) covering approximately 300 ballets from 1786 to 1954 became a standard reference book. Beaumont himself was quiet, modest and dignified, but imbued with passion for the art. To his surprise, he received the Légion d’Honneur from France and the Order of Merit from Italy, as well as the Order of the British Empire. Despite his own observation that the death of Diaghilev represented an end to a golden age in ballet, Beaumont was a central figure in the early years of British Ballet.