Moira Shearer

   On February 2^nd, 1944, The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer reported that the Sadler’s Wells Ballet (SWB) were closing their London season at the New Theatre on February 5^th and that on Monday, February 7^th “they begin an Ensa tour …..Miss Margot Fonteyn and the rest of the company and orchestra, a total of some 70 people, will be going out with Ensa”.

   Strictly speaking this report is not accurate. The sponsoring body was not ENSA but the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). ENSA was charged with bringing music and the arts to British military personnel during WW2 and immediately afterwards but primarily outside Britain. There is no record of SWB performing for the armed forces during this 1944 tour of the British provinces. The surviving programmes of venues on the tour credit CEMA. There is no mention of ENSA.

   CEMA provided financial support to SWB and other companies that allowed them to conduct tours outside London.

   The 1944 tour appears to have begun in Cambridge and continued to Derby, Hanley (Staffordshire), Bolton (Lancashire), Wimbledon, Newcastle and Hammersmith. The repertoire included A Rake’s Progress, Les Patineurs, Spectre de la Rose and Giselle.

   Moira Shearer danced a number of support roles in ballets like Giselle and Les Patineurs but on March 14^th, in Bolton, took over from Margot Fonteyn the role of the young girl in Spectre de la Rose and, on May 18^th in Hammersmith at age 18, danced the lead in Swan Lake for the first time. She was Odile to Pamela May’s Odette.

The lead dancers of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet on their way to a rehearsal in Brussels in late January 1945. From left to right are Moira Shearer, Alexis Rassine, Margot Fonteyn, Gordon Hamilton, Pamela May, Margaret Dale and, possibly, David Paltenghi. All wear their ENSA uniforms. Photographer unknown.

On January 18^th, 1945, SWB travelled to Paris to begin an ENSA-funded tour of northern France, Belgium and Holland. The tour ended in Ostend on March 30^th and included appearances in Paris, Brussels, Bruges and Ghent. The major venues were in Paris at the Theatre Marigny and the Theatre des Champs Elysees, where they performed for about a month and at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels (for 3 weeks).

The first page of the programme for January 22nd, 1945 at the Theatre Marigny in Paris. As was often the case in wartime programmes the dancers in each ballet are not specified.

The repertoire included Promenade, Miracle in the Gorbals, Dante, Façade, Sylphides, Hamlet and Les Patineurs. As the touring company was small Moira Shearer, as was true of all the dancers, performed in most if not all these ballets. A surviving snapshot shows her with Moyra Fraser preparing to go on stage in Brussels in Les Sylphides.

Moyra Fraser, left and Moira Shearer prepare to go on stage. Photographer unknown.