6 minute read
Profile: Marina Palmer
Dancing with Fire!
The Deepings Dancing School has existed since the 1950s but since 1985 it has been synonymous with its inspirational Principal, Marina Palmer, who took over the school from its founder, Gwen Wilbourne. From 1985 to 2020 Marina was the driving force of the school, not to mention being the ‘prima ballerina’, choreographer and chief administrator. But how did it happen that a ‘born and bred’ London girl should leave the metropolis and find herself, years later, running a dance school in rural Lincolnshire? An old Russian saying has it that, ‘to live your life is not as simple as to cross a field’, and it certainly isn’t!
Marina was born in Dulwich, London, of a Northern Irish mother and an English father. There was musical talent on her mother’s side of the family (including the famous tenor, Joseph Locke), and Marina’s mother played a number of different instruments. Marina started dancing classes early, at the age of three. It soon became clear that she was ‘a natural’ and before she was in her teens she had gone through some of London’s most prestigious dance schools and was trained in ballet, tap and acrobatics. Unsurprisingly, to dance on the stage became her ambition. Her first chance to appear with professionals in London Variety theatres came in 1948-49 when a Christmas/New Year show, entitled ‘Sauce Tartare’, was staged at the Cambridge Theatre in London’s West End. Marina auditioned and gained a place in the chorus and this was memorable as it was the time when Marina appeared on stage together with the 19-year-old Audrey Hepburn who was in the senior group! Not yet in her teens, permission had to be given by her school board for Marina to miss some days of schooling.
The following year Marina was again chosen to appear in the Christmas show – called ‘Sauce Piquante’; the cast included a number of actors who were to become the comic and variety stars of the 1950s and 60s, including Norman Wisdom, Bob Monkhouse, Moira Lister and Margaret Lawford.
In the years that followed Marina appeared regularly in pantomime in many of the London theatres from Brixton to Richmond, Clapham and the Golders Green Hippodrome where the well-known comics of the day also performed. The comedian, Charlie Chester, she says, gave her some of the best advice she ever received about, especially, the timing of the different aspects of her act – for Marina’s act soon expanded to include, as well as dancing, also contortion and fire-eating!
Not everyone would have been happy about their spouse performing fire-eating on stage. Marina and Ken married young, at 18 and 21 respectively, and Ken was at first opposed to the idea of Marina doing any fire-eating.
However, she managed to talk him round and eventually even persuaded him to design her a wheel of fire for the act. The wheel involved spokes of asbestos rope soaked in surgical spirit. ‘Health and safety’ had not been invented then!
Knowing that theatre work is always unpredictable, however, Marina’s wise mother had seen to it that her daughter had another string to her bow. Consequently she trained as a shorthand typist in addition to being a dancer and, for a number of years she worked as a ‘temp’ for many different firms, between shows. The shows took her all over the country from Dunoon in Scotland to Cromer, Yarmouth and Brighton in the south, where the company appeared in variety theatres and on seaside piers and, as well as contortion and fireeating, Marina, having acted as magician’s assistant earlier, added some magic tricks to her own act. It was in Brighton that she had her one fire-eating accident, the cause of which was an illustration of just how important ‘timing’ was: the comedian whose act was before Marina’s exceeded his time slot so that Marina, waiting in the wings had doused her sticks in the fluid too soon and it dripped onto her arm. Her arm burst into flames and Marina had to be rushed to hospital. Miraculously, the fire was extinguished quickly and no long-term injury or disfigurement resulted. It was a truly sobering lesson though, in the importance of timing, including that of other acts close to your own. When the company was on tour for weeks or even months at a time then the artists usually lived in ‘digs’, which meant having a room in a private house in whichever town they were in. Often the landlady was a widow who had rooms to spare and who regularly took in performers from the travelling theatre company.
Marina proved to be as skilled in her ‘secondary’ occupation, as in her dancing and stage career, and the companies that employed her for administrative and typing work were giving her increasing amounts of responsibility. Eventually this led her into a permanent position in the Civil Service (with agreed time off as required still to perform in shows!). In 1983 the Department of the Environment decided to relocate the main office, based in Belgrave Square, together with some regional offices of the Nature Conservancy Council, to Peterborough. Marina and Ken were persuaded to ‘up sticks’ and move north too. It was now 1984 and Marina, as well as dancing and choreographing shows in London, was also running her own large school of dancing in the city. There was thus a lot of travelling up and down during the first years in Market Deeping.
Juggling several very different, but demanding, jobs is never easy, even when they are all in the same town, but trying to do it when the venues are in different parts of the country, many miles apart, is hard to maintain over a long period. Marina decided to sell her London school of dancing. Some of her pupils went on to the Corona, Peggy O’Farrell and Italia Conti Stage School and appeared in films and shows alongside the likes of Ken Dodd, Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele.
By an odd quirk of fate Marina found, soon after arriving in Market Deeping, that her near neighbour in the town was someone who had herself been a dancer, in London, in her youth, and was now the ‘about to be retired’ teacher and proprietor of the Deepings School of Dancing! Serendipity made manifest. Marina took over the school and in the following years the Deepings School of Dancing went from strength to strength and grew bigger. In March 2020 Marina’s assistant teachers, Kerrie Pateman, Gemma Crowson and Holly Teixeira, decided to hang up their dancing shoes and with this Marina decided it was the right time for her to retire too. She had exactly the right person to hand over to as well, namely, granddaughter Jessica (McBride), also an experienced dancer who has worked in London with many famous people. Marina still continues her classes with the ‘Adults Tap and Jazzercise’ classes on Tuesday evenings. Meanwhile, as Principal Jessica has taken the Deepings School of Dancing to a whole new level with her team of Assistant Teachers and, some of their pupils have already been auditioned and will be appearing in the Aladdin Panto to be put on at the New Theatre, Peterborough, over this Christmas and New Year season. Marina says she feels astonishingly blessed to have had someone like Jessica to hand the school on to and to see it going on with such energy and ‘joie de vivre’.
