I started clog dancing while still at school in Chingford where Peter Boyce was teaching morris, sword and, very briefly, clog stepping. I had been messing around with the basic rapper step trying different ideas and ways of doing it when he said “That reminds me of a clog step” and got me started as a clog dancer! I’d already seen Jackie Toaduff at the EFDSS Albert Hall Festival and been inspired! As a result of teaching his entire repertoire of approx. 2 clog steps and a break and needing more material he invited someone he knew as a clog dancer along to school to teach us more. This was Brian Hayden, ex pupil of Johnson Ellwood.
After learning about 5 steps from Brian, my first performance was in a pair of borrowed clogs which were too big so he had to wear 2 pairs of walking socks in them to keep them on. I bought my first pair of clogs by post from James Clare's market stall in St Helens. They cost 29/6 (about £1.48) and I was still dancing in them 30 years later.
When I was in the 6th Form, with the aid of Mike Jensen (later of Carlisle Morris & Sword) who was teaching at the school, I wrote a small booklet as an aide-memoire for workshop participants which I called "Clog Steps for Beginners". Since I didn't have enough steps or breaks, I had to make up a couple of new ones. The first 100 copies were run off on the school Gestetner and stitched together by hand, a skill that had been taught at primary school. A couple of years later someone from EFDSS noticed the booklet at a Sidmouth workshop I was running and asked if they could publish it. It still sells a few copies each year.
While I was at college in Chelsea I was asked by Ron Smedley to teach clog dancing to the pupils at the Royal Ballet School based at White Lodge in Richmond Park. Ninette de Valois had been keen that students at the school should learn about their traditional dances and invited the EFDSS to run Saturday classes on a variety of traditional dance forms which were taken by Ron Smedley and Bob Parker. At the first class I took Ron introduced me and one of the pupils asked if I had been the dancer performing the Clog Dance in La Fille Mal Gardée at the Royal Opera House the previous evening! Teaching the ballet students was amazing. I only had to demonstrate a step and they picked it up almost immediately.
In the early 1970s I was running a workshop at an event run by Peter Dashwood in East Anglia when I was approached by a lady who had seen the event advertised in the local paper and having been a clog dancer since she was very young had cancelled her day out with the local WI and had come along to find out who was running the clog dancing workshop. After interviewing me and making me dance my "most difficult step" and also a step I had made up myself, she announced that she would teach me her own dances. Her name was Mrs Marhoff, who had danced on the stage with her grandfather under the name Viona Wynne.
Over the next few years I visited Mrs Marhoff at her bungalow in Cambridgeshire and she taught me her hornpipe dances. She was very insistent that I danced them in the way she had been taught them by her grandfather, a former Durham Pitman's Champion. My daughter, Louise, was also there but she was a young baby at the time sitting on her mother's knee while her dad was put through his paces by a very strict tutor. Woe betide him if he crossed his feet when he shouldn't! Many years later, Louise was performing those same dances as a member of City Clickers. She also performed Mrs Marhoff's personal dance which had been given to her by her grandfather as a child and which Mrs Marhoff had passed on to me with instructions to not teach it to anyone else until I was ready to pass it on. I was pleased to be able to pass it on to my own daughter in due course.
In 1976 I danced in the inaugural revived Northern Counties Clog Dancing Competition in Durham Town Hall and met Johnson Ellwood for the first time. When Johnson found out that I had learnt my first steps from Brian Hayden he was really pleased. A few weeks later, Johnson wrote to me inviting me to visit him in Chester-le-Street and learn some new steps.
In 1996 I started a new team called Seven Stars Sword and Step Dancers and after years of dancing as a solo performer I've had to learn to dance the same steps as other people - quite a challenge at times! It has also given me the chance to choreograph dances for groups of dancers to avoid what I call "formation foot waggling". I still have my own dances using, as far as possible, steps which I have invented as I don't like to do the same routines and steps as other dancers and I have taught some of them at workshops over the years.
When the living museum opened at Wigan Pier I was asked to teach the professional actors clog dancing so that they could include it in their performances as Victorian Wiganers as they appeared in various locations around the museum. For a few years I held clog classes in the museum and ran a successful day of clog dancing performances, workshops and competitions there called "Clogs at the Pier".
Other experiences as a clog dancer have involved advising a BBC choreographer, working with the Library Theatre in Manchester for their production of "Hans, the Witch and the Gobbin" which opens with the Gobbin performing a clog dance.I also worked with the cast in a different production which involved the City Councillors performing a clog dance to "Manchester's Improving Daily". Two of them struggled to learn any steps in the very short rehearsal time but brought the house down by producing clogs fixed to broom handles with which to "dance" the steps.
I have also danced on the BBC live lunchtime show "The Garden Party", various Granada TV reports both filmed and live. A few years ago I spent a full afternoon being filmed from various angles at The Lowry in Salford Quays for one of the linking slots to be shown during the broadcast of the auditions for a BBC amateur dance competition show. called "Strictly Dance Fever". So many people turned up for the auditions that when it was broadcast my cameo lasted about 3 seconds!
After more than 50 years as both a solo performer and workshop tutor at Festivals throughout the country and also in the USA I am not dancing as frequently as I used to as I am no longer able to perform to the standard I would like and I don't want people to say "I remember him when he was good."