"Waiting for soup"
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"Isn't it nice to see
you here." |
It is clear from Elsie Oxenham’s books that she
visited Daisy Caroline Daking — ‘the Pixie’ —
at the Y.M.C.A.’s Red Triangle Club in Plaistow on more than one
occasion. In The New Abbey Girls (1923) ‘the Writing
Person’ (Oxenham as a character in her own books) says: “I
like to go when I can. I feel better for going.” It is Oxenham,
therefore, who has left the most tangible record of Daking’s time
in East London.
In The New Abbey Girls, Pixie has only recently
started to teach folk dancing at Plaistow. “The Plaistow men are
just beginning; I do feel so pleased about it! It feels just like being
in France again.”
The YMCA — opened on 4 June 1921 by the local
Labour MP Will Thorne and visited by King George and Queen Mary the
same day — is described as “a palace”, a “great
white building”, with a marble tablet at the top of the first
staircase proclaiming it “a memorial to the men of the district
who had fallen in the war”. Facilities included a café,
gymnasium, cinema-theatre, billiard rooms, lounge and reading rooms,
girls’ and boys’ club-rooms, and a swimming pool. All this
in an area that Oxenham describes as having “crowded streets …
unemployed men standing at the corners …. squalid houses ….
mud and dirt and bustle.”
"Children of Canning Town."
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"Coal Merchants." |
The Abbey girls watch Pixie taking a men’s Morris
class:
“The lads were only beginners. They forgot their
Foot-up, and with shouts of embarrassed laughter had to begin again.
They got lost completely in their hey, went too far in Cross-Over,
muddled the tapping and forgot to repeat it, bumped into one another
in Back-to-back, and roared with laughter at each new mistake. The
jingle of the bells and the clatter of the sticks could not drown
the thunder of their boots, for several had forgotten their shoes.
But their enjoyment was overwhelming; they fairly radiated delight
and good humour. … ‘How they love it!’ Jen whispered.
‘Isn’t it topping to see them … real men’s
morris, even if they are just beginners! It’s got life in it;
it’s tremendously real. And one or two of them are jolly good!”
However, Jen later asks ‘the Pixie’ why
she describes the dancers as men, since they look like boys of no more
than 16. ‘That’s Plaistow!’ the Pixie said grimly.
… ‘that’s the size and build you are at eighteen,
if you’ve lived always in overcrowded homes, perhaps one room
or two, and been underfed all your life. … the girls are just
the same. … And yet they can take as much and as deep delight
in a purely artistic thing like folk-dancing as any of your West Enders.
… You should see the joy, and life, and energy in our Saturday
night parties! I never saw heartier dancing. And yet they’re City
people; shows ‘country’ dancing isn’t really the best
name. It’s because it’s folk, of course; folk dancing.’
In the following book, The Abbey
Girls Again (1924), the girls return to Plaistow to watch Daking
run a children’s party. This is likely to have been a real party
run by Daking in March 1923, which was described in the YMCA newsletter
of April 1923 as follows:
“Miss Daking organized a wonderfully successful
folk-dance party for children in March. Over 160 children from the
local schools were present in the Hydro Hall, and charmed a large
audience with old English dances. Miss Daking has been training over
thirty school teachers, in folk dancing, weekly for two terms, in
the Red Triangle Club, and this party was the outcome of their work
in the schools.”
Similarly,
Oxenham writes:
“The children have been asked through their school
teachers, and the teachers have been going all winter to country-dance
classes taught by [the Pixie]. The children … are going to dance,
in a big, beautiful hall; it’s a swimming pool really, but there’s
a dancing floor put down for the winter.”
“Small girls in frocks of every rainbow colour
filled the hall. Where the frocks, and big hair-ribbons, and white stockings,
and coloured shoes, had come from it was difficult to imagine, for the
children were from poor schools in East Ham and Canning Town and Barking.
Already they were fairly jumping with excitement, racing about wildly
to find friends or call greetings to mother up aloft; new groups kept
arrive to swell the crowd. The Pixie, a vivid green spot, seemed in
every corner at once, like a very active fairy in a world of brilliant
butterflies.
The pianist played the air of ‘Galopede’,
and with a wild rush from every corner of the hall, every child was
on the spot assigned to her, thrilled to the limit, desperately determined
that not one moment should be lost.
“Eight times through!” announced the Pixie,
appearing suddenly on the platform, and piano and violin struck up the
tune. …
… the long lines of children fell back and crossed, swung their
partners, and broke into excited clapping to cheer the top couple down
from the middle to the bottom of the set…
‘They dance all over, not just with their feet,’
Mary ventured.
… ‘Your real East-Ender dances harder—and
almost better—than any one else. It’s curious, but it’s
true. It’s in them. They dance beautifully.’
… Oh, look at that! Isn’t it pretty?”
as the throng broke up into circling rings of ten or twelve. “Now
watch! Look out! … There! Isn’t it wonderful?” as
all the little arms went up. “And we clap right on the beat; its
very good. How they love it!”
The images above are copyright the estate
of Elsie J. Oxenham/Newham Archives/YMCA and cannot be reproduced without
permission.
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© Ju Gosling aka ju90 2010
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