Here Barbara Fewster tells us about working at The Royal Ballet School. Her voice has a mixture of authority and kindness which will be remembered by literally thousands of students over the 40-odd years she both taught and directed there. However, there is also has a tinge of something students rarely noticed, something more searching and pensive, of sadness even. Many dancers, both in The Royal Ballet and in many other companies, owe their careers to her, and remember what she did for them with genuine gratitude. Patricia Linton, founder and director of Voices of British Ballet, feels she owes her own career to Fewster, saying, “She scooped me up from a moment of student gloom when I was about 18 and gave me an opportunity that led to a chance to join The Royal Ballet’. In this interview Barbara Fewster talks to Patricia Linton who also introduces the episode in conversation with Natalie Steed.

Barbara Fewster was born in 1928. She 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, 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 from 1947. When Peggy Van Praagh left the company in 1951, Fewster became the 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, helped to build a bright future. On leaving the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet 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 Ballet School, which was now based 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. Fewster 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.

Barbara Fewster was an indefatigable traveller and was always inspired by her experiences of teaching and adjudicating worldwide. She was at the heart of an historic cultural exchange with China in the early 1980s, involving an exchange of students and teachers. Fewster was also 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. She has frequently mounted ballets for professional companies, notably Coppélia for the Turkish 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 Fewster’s name as part of the Cecchetti Class Ballet Vocational Awards.

image: Barbara Fewster, Ballet Principal of Royal Ballet School (1968-1988) helping a student prepare for a school performance, circa 1960's; Credit: Royal Ballet School / ArenaPAL

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