Ron Smedley at 90

An appreciation by Malcolm Taylor, former long-time Director of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library

A shorter version of this appreciation appeared in the Summer 2018 edition of English Dance and Song, the magazine of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. The world’s oldest magazine for folk music and dance, EDS was first published in 1936 and is essential reading for anyone with a passion for folk arts. 

I think few would argue that the folk revival which exploded into life in the 1950s in all of its various forms, was arguably the most exciting and public period in its history to date. Reputations were made, innovations and political statements expounded, and inevitably differences of opinion were hatched which created something of a battleground for years to come. During this period EFDSS changed, principally in the hands of Douglas Kennedy and his son Peter with some very capable and equally forward thinking acolytes. One of these, whose star rose and shone brightly in that period, was Ronald Smedley. Ron turns 90 in June and his career inside and outside of EFDSS has been impressive.

Ron is a south-east Londoner, born and bred. When his father, George, a lathe operator from Newton Le Willows in Merseyside, relocated to London with the United Glass Bottle Company in 1924, he lodged in a house a spitting distance from The Valley, the home Charlton Athletic football club. He became much taken up with his landlord’s daughter, Eleanor, so much so that they married in 1927 and in June the following year Ron was born. By 1932 George had enough to buy their own house for £500 in a new estate of semi’s, in Merriman Rd, just about a walking distance from Ron’s grandparents. ‘Life was comfortable but the residents of Merriman Rd weren’t that well off,’ Ron insists. He still vividly remembers asking his mum for sixpence so that he could go to a local event. ‘There was a slight pause,’ says Ron. ‘I haven’t got sixpence, said Mum. It was the end of the week. I knew she was telling the truth. It came as a shock to a young lad. But we never went without.’

Having said that, maybe his parents had other priorities. The local primary school wasn’t good enough for young Ron, an only child, and ‘I was sent to a posh private school in Blackheath, Oakland House – which wasn’t really very posh at all!’ From there, at the age of eight, he entered Colfe’s Grammar School on Lewisham Hill, founded in 1494 and one of the oldest schools in London. The termly rate was seven guineas but, to the surprise of many, and no doubt a particular relief to his parents, he won a scholarship to attend the senior school for free. He was having a good education and getting something of a privileged start in life, but probably not really appreciating it at the time.

What he did appreciate though was the school’s evacuation during the war years, first to Tunbridge Wells in Kent and then to Frome in Somerset, where ‘we saw buildings made out of stone for the first time.’ However, some teachers regarded him as ‘a very lazy boy’ and he was thrown out of Latin and consequently deprived of taking subjects he was most interested in, particularly history and English literature, and gravitated towards those which led him to being accepted as a student at the London School of Economics when he left school in 1946, from which he duly graduated but was ‘bored witless. I did absolutely nothing apart from go to the cinema. However’, Ron goes on, ‘I had a friend who had been at Colfe’s, one year older than me, and now at LSE, one Derek McClintock. McClintock had a hobby which he’d learned from his parents – English Folk Dancing! Seeing that I was somewhat lost at LSE, he persuaded me to go with him to a couple of EFDSS events. They were OK but nothing to write home about. However, McClintock, always persistent, then persuaded me to accompany him to the Society’s Stratford Festival. So, in the first week of August 1947 I found himself in Shakespeare's town. I was immediately captivated by the colours and dancing in the streets, led by Peter Kennedy and other youngsters, and I was hooked - and it was where I was to form a deep and long-life friendship with Bob Parker.’ In just those three days Ron found his marvellous aptitude and enthusiasm for English folk dance and actually once overheard Ruby Avril say to EFDSS Director Douglas Kennedy and wife Helen, ‘He’s got it!’

Education over it was now time for the inevitable stint at National Service, which during his time was raised from eighteen months to two full years. He duly turned up with many others to register at the Blackheath office and was, because of the general working-class intake, bound for army training. It was only when he mentioned that he had just graduated from LSE that he was immediately seen as officer material and packed off to Lincolnshire and the Royal Air Force, rising fast from Pilot Officer to Flying Officer status and becoming part of the education team which helped induct the new intakes.

If Ron’s social life was beginning to take shape, his professional life was still very much up in the air. ‘I was basically at a loose end after National Service, with not a clue what to do.’ Then in stepped Douglas Kennedy with an offer to join the staff of EFDSS. Having obviously impressed with his input into Douglas’s Nursery Class, the Reel Club, and the Sunday Club, plus having nothing else going on, Ron jumped at the chance and was immediately despatched to the south-west region, where he was mentored by the very impressive Margaret Grant. She too was impressed with Ron and spoke of having ‘met the next Director of EFDSS’. Ron spent two years working in the region, cutting his teeth while mixing with the likes of Peter Kennedy and Nibs and Jean Matthews. ‘It was a baptism of terrifying fire,’ he says, particularly after attempting one day to teach the Flamborough sword dance to group at St. Luke’s Training College in Exeter. Doing and teaching were quite different in practice and he was on a sharp learning curve. He was also beginning to form strong opinions about the dances he found in a local context and what had previously been propagated by the Society: ‘Why on earth were they dancing Goddesses when they could be dancing the Six Handed Reel!’

In spite of such interesting experiences, Ron was already getting itchy feet and starting to think about his future. The catalyst for change came in a chance meeting with BBC producer Charles Chilton, although in true Ron-style, it took some time to germinate.

In 1952, Margaret Grant had asked Ron (basically because Peter Kennedy was unavailable) to assist with a square dance that Chilton had organised in Weston-super-Mare. Thanks to Princess Elizabeth being photographed having a great time square dancing whilst visiting Canada the previous year, a square dance boom was now full swing and Charles, who had spent time in the USA and gained some experience of square dancing whilst there, was getting in on the act. Ron agreed to help and Chilton was very impressed with his young helper, suggesting he look out for jobs in BBC radio. Ron didn’t act on this suggestion and by 1953 was working in the North of England, joining the staff in the newly re-opened York office and where he was confronted with ‘the silver queens.’ These were ladies who had known Cecil Sharp, had acquired their silver badges through the EFDS education training programmes, and were very reluctant to change. Their forbidding natures, however, were won over by Ron and he became very fond of Gladys Hall in particular. As in the south-west, he learnt a lot about the local traditions and experienced them at first hand and in context, which he says was very exciting.

However, Charles Chilton was persistent and a year later he wrote to Ron and again told him to apply for a job as an assistant studio manager in radio, telling him this was a pathway into the corporation and where he would get some good training for the future. Eventually Ron did apply and in 1955, with Charles as a reference, he left EFDSS and was taken on by BBC Radio and spent the next four years working in London and Manchester until the creation of BBC School Television in 1959, when he applied for a job as assistant producer. ‘I didn’t get it but managed to acquire a three months’ attachment to the department. I eventually got the job but I was completely out of my depth,’ he now admits, but no doubt with some false modesty because he progressed to the roles of producer, executive producer and finally assistant head of the department, working also on arts features for programmes such as Omnibus.

This apparent moving on from EFDSS couldn’t have been further from the truth. From the mid-1950s Ron became even more involved, beginning a twenty year stint on the National Executive Committee, chairing the Artistic Development Sub-Committee, taking on the reins of the Sunday Club when Douglas Kennedy retired in 1961, which eventually led to the formation of London Folk and display performances at festivals all over England and other parts of Europe. Moreover, he also took on the onerous task of intermittently producing the annual Royal Albert Hall Festival, seven of them in all. His most renowned production was in 1964, which also appeared on TV fronted by Frank Bough (with hair), and featuring his revolutionary Camden Town Sound, a light hearted ending to the first half of the show, including a longsword dance performed to the theme tune of TV’s Dr. Kildare, morris dancing Beatles, and a mass country dance display in the style of the BBC’s TV ballroom dancing show, Come Dancing. There were also memorable performances by singer Cyril Tawney and the exceptionally talented Jackie Toaduff, whose breathtaking solo clog routine stole the show. Ron was by now challenging many of the norms of folk dancing and recognising differing and higher standards for it within a theatrical or performance context, which didn’t always go down too well, especially at some of the early Sidmouth Festivals where almost anything went.*

In the mid-1950s, former EFDSS president Ninette de Valois had approached Douglas Kennedy to provide teachers of folk dance for the Royal Ballet School, known then as the Sandler’s Wells Ballet. She was a firm believer in its key elements of rhythm and togetherness and wanted these benefits to be integrated into the students’ work at the School. ‘The Society’s presence was a mild success as it gave the boys and girls a chance to dance together – but there was still some hiding in the changing rooms. What wasn’t a success – at all – was morris dancing by the boys. The boys found it dull, tiring and pointless. In 1959, Bob Parker and I were asked to take over the teaching of the hated rubbish (as the boys thought it). We asked for permission to bring in the boys from Chingford School, with Peter Boyce, their dance teacher and musician. They already had a reputation. They performed to both the lower and upper school with astounding success and there were never any more problems with Morris et al at White Lodge.’ Indeed, their approach was a revelation to the ballet boys and, a number of them duly graduating to the Royal Ballet Company, including Jonathan Burrows, resulted in them giving informal displays of morris and sword dancing on their many tours overseas. This led to the formation of the Bow Street Rappers under Ron and Bob’s careful eyes, and Ron’s coaching of a new generation of teachers of folk dance at the school, an association that only ended in 2018.

Ron retired from the BBC at the age of 55, having exerted some of his folk dance interest before leaving in producing a five-part series on the history of dance, May I Have The Pleasure, contributing a chapter (which he now regards as ‘extremely inaccurate!’) to Belinda Quirey’s book of the same name. However, his retirement was short lived – a day, in fact! He was immediately asked back to produce the very popular Grange Hill school drama for Children’s TV, which occupied him for the next four years. ‘I loved my four years as producer of Grange Hill. I had a hell of a good time.’

At the age of 60 he ‘retired’ again from the BBC, having been awarded two BAFTA’s, two Japan Prizes (the senior international award for educational broadcasting), an American Library Award and a BAFTA Special Award for lifetime achievement. With typical modesty, Ron would be the first to tell you that all these awards, other than the Special Award, he accepted on behalf of many others as well as himself. ‘There are lots of people involved in making TV programmes.’

Not letting the grass grow under his feet, Ron then formed Spelthorne Productions, successfully continuing to make programmes for children for the next ten years, the last of which was a series of three instructional programmes about social and morris dancing, featuring John Kirkpatrick and the Headington Quarry Morris Dancers. He is immensely proud of this series, especially as it has now been rebroadcast over a dozen times by the BBC since its first showing in 1998. Such a swansong was duly recognised a year later with the award of the Society’s highest accolade, the Gold Badge. And quite rightly so. His is a contribution that stepped far beyond the confines of EFDSS, placing ‘folk’ in a wider context, but always referring back to his mentor, Douglas Kennedy, ‘the second genius of the English folk revival.’ Serving as chair of trustees of the Douglas Kennedy Memorial Fund, set up two years after Douglas’s death in 1988, underlines this debt of gratitude.

Ron’s severance from London Folk in the late 1970s was also something of a severance from EFDSS, although he was always ready to pick up the telephone and advise or comment on matters which were of importance to the library at Cecil Sharp House, such as when we were researching material for the second Root & Branch publication about the 1950s**. Indeed, the final part of his BBC series on folk dances, featuring Headington, arose out of one such call for help from the Morris Archive Group. His deep well of knowledge and professionalism impressed us all.

So, what next? ‘Well, I am still riding my bicycle. As a member of BAFTA I get a mountain of films and TV programmes to watch, and I have a couple of trips planned for later in the year: to the Blasket Islands off the coast of Kerry and then to Orkney. I keep busy.’ And long may you be so.

Happy 90th birthday, Ron.

*See Ron’s EDS article ‘Show Dancing – some personal thoughts’ in EDS, Spring 1973.

** See Ron’s article ‘A New Society’ in the booklet for Root & Branch 2: ‘Everybody Swing’ (EFDSS, 2000)

Many thanks to Derek Schofield for his help in providing additional information.