Rowena Fayre

in conversation with Patricia Linton

Rowena Fayre: My mother took me for the scholarship but there was nowhere to sit outside so she was sitting with other mums, leaning against a table, sort of half sitting on the table that was outside the door of what was then the only room, the Wells Room (which was used in the theatre in the evening as the bar and we had a barre round and that was our practise room where we’d had classes every day), and apparently there was another very nice girl called Joan, I can’t remember her surname who was in for the scholarship who was taller and her mother turned to my mother and said, “How do you keep her small, gin?” So my mother said, “No”. But it was an experience for her to be asked that question. And so it was from then on that I started to do classes with Madam [Ninette de Valois] and I’m very glad to say that Joan, who probably didn’t drink gin, also got in.

I mean the school, you have to remember, was us really. You know there were very … it was a small collection of dancers of girls and there were three boys, I think, if not only two to start with. You have to think that we hadn’t got [Margot] Fonteyn we hadn’t got Beryl Grey, she came at fourteen a year later or something and Fonteyn too at sixteen.

We used to be paid four and four pence a performance and on Fridays we went to collect our little brown envelopes from, of course, Lilian Baylis who was simply terrifying.

Patricia Linton: Did you have any support, extra financial support from home or did people manage to live?

Rowena Fayre: Well they managed to live. We won the scholarship, so that was all payed for but, no, I was lucky coming from a family who didn’t have to. I didn’t have to earn my living and so therefore that was alright.

Patricia Linton: So you were living at home at this time.

Rowena Fayre: I was living at home in Chester Square, yes. And finally when I was eighteen and became the student of the year, I won the award for the student of the year. Ninette de Valois sent me to Paris that summer of 1939 to be polished off by Olga Preobrajenska. My mother found the family where the daughter had been our Mademoiselle at school and who took in young girls for sort of “finishing” in Paris. So I went and stayed there for eight weeks, I suppose it was. And I don’t remember the names of the ballerinas but I mean I was working with the top brass from all over Europe because in that period which is their holiday time they came and worked with Preobrajenska.

Patricia Linton: And do you remember her and her classes?

Rowena Fayre: Yes I do. Oh, she was so ferocious! And you know she had a stick which she beat on the floor and I mean you rarely got any praise and, in fact, I do remember she called us out to do the fouettés and I thought, you know, I’d done rather well and finished in the perfect position. And, in French, she said, “You hit out like a man, use your arms more softly, softly! Doucement, doucement!” So, I sort of retired to the edge of the classroom. And it was so interesting, it’s something that sticks in my mind. You know, I didn’t mind a bit, but it stays with me to this day.

Madam also sent me for a term to Mim [Marie] Rambert. I mean, I must have been rather good because, and I wasn’t aware of any of that, I just did what Madam said! “Next term I’d like you to go and work with Madam Rambert”. Oh, alright. And I did.

I was also presented at court that spring and my mother had to write a letter to Madam to say could I be released from dancing in Meistersinger because I’d been commanded and so I was released. So I was really finding it at times quite difficult living a kind of double life.

Patricia Linton: To balance it?

Rowena Fayre: Yes. I did ask not to have a dance given for me but I did go to some of the balls. When you were eighteen in the milieu that I came from, you came out.

Patricia Linton: How would you describe that milieu?

Rowena Fayre: Well it’s very difficult because it’s dead now, long ago. But it was very safe and you knew exactly what happened and what you were doing. I wasn’t allowed to wear lipstick in public ‘til I was eighteen. It was quite formal and the mothers all got together when it was your turn to do the London season and you were asked to dinner parties and went on to the balls. And this had to be fitted in between performances at Sadler’s wells which of course always got priority.

Patricia Linton: Did your friends at Sadler’s Wells know that you were also fitting all this in?

Rowena Fayre: Oh, yes.

Patricia Linton: And they were quite accepting and interested?

Rowena Fayre: Well I think in those (days) there wasn’t the sort of real difficulties now, that if you came from that milieu that I came from you’re looked down on and, you know, the whole thing is very difficult, whereas in those days it was just taken for granted. We had Lady Rose… I can’t remember her other name, the Marquess of Anglesey’s daughter was also at Sadler’s Wells dancing in the ballet. So, you know that was part of life and nobody took it out on me at all, or even mentioned it.

Patricia Linton: So there was a range of society, if you like, and backgrounds and everybody accepted each other because the focus was on the work.

Rowena Fayre: Our passion was our dancing and it really is true. I never felt any feeling of, although I was chauffer driven to the theatre, which embarrassed me terribly, and I never went on a tube or a bus until the war was declared, but that didn’t enter into the thing at all. The main thing was the passion to dance and to be very good at it. Nobody had anything else on their mind. You know, that’s what was so inspiring. I mean we did our own makeup, we darned our own shoes, we were paid four and fourpence a performance.

Patricia Linton: Did you wear false eyelashes?

Rowena Fayre: Yes, oh yes we did. And when we danced in Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Oliver Messel make-up which took us two hours to put on we had false eyelashes onto which we had to put a blob of black on each eyelash. It took us hours! And there was whole lot of talk then about whether we would pass the Lord Chamberlain, because he had to look at it. I mean it was a real breakthrough that make-up when Helpmann danced, was Oberon in the Shakespeare, Vivien Leigh was Titania and it was quite a ..

Patricia Linton: And this was at the Old Vic.

Rowena Fayre: Yes, we were what Tyrone Guthrie called the “bollygols”. We were the attendants to Titania and we did fifty-two performances.

Patricia Linton: That’s extraordinary!

Rowena Fayre: Yes, we started on Boxing Day. I remember because I had to be driven up from the country to be able to dance on the stage that night.

Patricia Linton: So were they interspersed with performances at Sadlers Wells?

Rowena Fayre: No, that was when we attended Titania, at the Old Vic, and they did Midsummer’s Night’s Dream every night.

Patricia Linton: Every night?

Rowena Fayre: Yes. And so for some reason I suppose we weren’t dancing in anything else while we were the “bollygols”. And we had these awful battery operated candles which were constantly going out and I remember Tyrone Guthrie from the back of the theatre saying “Can’t you bollygols keep your lights on”.

And we had an amazing time, we had Queen Mary bringing the two princesses to one matinee and the King and Queen came in the evening. You know, that sort of thing went on and it was just very exciting and the princesses were quite young of course.

Patricia Linton: I’m going to ask you about specific ballets in a minute, but is there anything that specifically stands out to you. That stayed with you very strongly?

Rowena Fayre: I think the nightmare of the grand gallop in Giselle! Of getting across the stage in the right time and in the rows. The character dancing was always, for me, an effort, I found the classical dancing much better. And I do remember when we did Le Roi Nu, that I was a page with Helpmann and he stamped, with anger, and he stamped on my foot and scraped it down. I’ve still got a lump there, and I remember, to this day that instead of screaming, I just went on and that was one of the other things you learnt. You know whatever was happening you just went on.

Patricia Linton: It’s often said that Checkmate, de Valois’ ballet in 1937, which you must have been involved in..
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Rowena Fayre: Yes, I was a red pawn.

Patricia Linton: You were a red pawn?

Rowena Fayre: I hated it, absolutely, because it was mathematical and I was petrified that I wouldn’t, you know, get my hand up at the right time. And actually it was rather awful because I didn’t dance in it until we went on tour and we didn’t dance it at Liverpool and so I used to pray that something would happen before we went to Leeds and I was to dance in it. And of course war was declared so it was a rather frightening.

Patricia Linton: Well it’s a tricky dance even now.

Rowena Fayre: Very. But fascinating.

Patricia Linton: Yes, It’s often said now that de Valois was sort of worry about the impending war.

Rowena Fayre: I think that’s true I really do. Because it has, I mean Bobby [Robert Helpmann] and June Bray’s, the Black Queen they made it into the most, and Pamela May, I mean the battle that went on was terrific really.

Patricia Linton: You’d obviously had a wonderful time in the Vic Wells Ballet. It meant a huge amount to you and suddenly it just stopped. How did you cope?

Rowena Fayre: I don’t remember except you just get on with the next thing. But I think Ninette was very wise that, you know, there were certain things that she wasn’t going to be responsible for. She took the core of the company and that was quite right. I was certainly the last in, so I was the first out and that’s that really. I then danced again with Monica [sic] Inglesby in that production of the frescos from Eton College Chapel.

Patricia Linton: Mona Inglesby?

Rowena Fayre: Yes, Mona, I think that was her name…

Patricia Linton: So you did something with her?

Rowena Fayre: Well, all I can remember is that her father came over and took the Cambridge Theatre to back her, as it were. And she choreographed the Eton College Chapel frescos which had just been uncovered. I then went to be auditioned, because I’d left Sadler’s Wells and although war had been declared we were in that funny period of the war. So she took me on and I danced one of the main parts. I can’t remember anything about it now, except that my sons, grandsons had gone to Eton, my brother went to Eton. So it was very interesting to be part of something that had been uncovered at Eton after, I don’t know, several hundred years. But then I joined the Wrens and went to war and never danced again.