It was 1942, Hilary Plummer was three, and nothing was going to entice her off the dance floor at the dazzling Blackpool Tower Ballroom. She remembers the moment vividly.
“I shouted, ‘No, no,’” she laughs. “When I see the children now and they don’t want to get off, it puts me in mind of me.”
She would dance there with her mother, May, a wife seeking relief from nagging worry while Hilary’s stepfather, Charles Tyrer, was away fighting, getting evacuated from Dunkirk.
It is said Hitler gave orders not to bomb the impressive ballroom as he wanted it pristine for his troops.
Fast-forward a decade, and excited teenager Jim Mason was jiving in the Tyrers’ footsteps, “meeting girls”; by 1955 he was taking sweetheart Hilary back there to foxtrot across the lacquered floor where she’d once taken baby steps.
The pair married in 1958 and honeymooned in Blackpool, just as Jim’s parents had done before him, dancing at the ballroom of course, again, just like them. They recall having to brandish their marriage certificate at fearsome boarding house landladies as they looked so young.
By the mid-60s, they were taking their toddler children, Peter and Gillian, to the ballroom, with grandmother May on hand.
Today, Jim and Hilary, aged 82, are dancing twice-weekly there still.
Jim has led his lady around the floor now for 64 years. The glorious setting runs through them both like words in a stick of seafront rock, a bind sweeter than candyfloss.
“The ballroom feels like part of us,” says Jim. “My dancing was not particularly good but you get used to dancing with someone. You get to make it gel. It’s like a relationship, you have to gel.”
There’s a harmony and groove to be found on this patterned dance floor which has ingrained itself in their marriage. “When you dance you are not thinking about what you may or may not have had a row about!” laughs Jim. “You know you will come out dancing again, so you let it float by, it’s not worth it.”
Hilary adds: “It’s romantic. Well, it is to us.”
After a long pause, Jim says: “We wouldn’t want to think of going without each other.”
The Blackpool Tower Ballroom, which has meant so much more than dancing to so many generations, opened in 1894, and it is once more looking as it would have done through Hilary’s eyes as a child.
It underwent a £1.1million restoration project last year, and the restoration of its stunning oak, walnut and mahogany floor this winter.
The general restoration was its first in 60 years, with 30 specialists on site, working 21,000 hours combined. Several hundred litres of gold paint were mixed to conserve the gold leaf decoration.
The floor was treated for the first time in 30 years, 100 layers of lacquer broken down before the sanding of its 30,602 blocks of wood could begin, making dips and dimples smooth. It is hoped that TV’s Strictly Come Dancing will return in the autumn to even greater aplomb after its Covid-enforced two-year break.
After experiencing a surge in visitors last year, 75% more than pre-pandemic, Blackpool’s tourists will now get even more enjoyment from the stunning room, with its distinctive organ music and afternoon teas.
When it reopened last week, Hilary and Jim were straight in for a foxtrot. Although they’re also partial to a rumba.
“You still get that shock feeling, that awe at the magnificence of it,” describes Jim, a retired accountant who lives with retired legal secretary Hilary in Lytham St Annes, Lancs. The ballroom’s closure during the pandemic was “the worst”, he says, leaving them isolated and down. The pair caught Covid but they thankfully recovered.
Many regulars did not. There is a bittersweetness to returning because a number have not been able to retrace their steps on the new varnish, taken by coronavirus or other illness during the ballroom’s closure.
They never knew their last swirl under Blackpool’s Tower in early 2020 would be their last.
One of them was Arthur Riley, who died last July, aged 96.
His last dance was the waltz, with his beloved wife of 74 years, Pat.
A rear gunner in Lancaster bombers, Arthur met Pat at a tea dance during the war.
They married in 1947, and kept dancing, gifting their children and grandchildren the same joy. The family migrated to Blackpool, and from 2010 four generations of Rileys danced together at the Blackpool Tower Ballroom every week. “He would have loved the new floor,” says Arthur’s granddaughter, Beverley Hunt, 46.
The hotel worker shows me a video of her grandparents turning elegantly, patiently, gracefully around the floor before the pandemic, dressed in matching skirt and waistcoat.
“They liked to co-ordinate colours,” she says. One of the ballroom’s organists, Chris Hopkins, recorded Danny Boy to be played at Arthur’s funeral.
When the ballroom reopened, Beverley, her son Ethan, 20, niece Mia, 15, and her parents Arthur, 73, and Susanne, 71, rushed back, but with a painful eagerness.
Their leads were missing. Pat, 94, has not felt able to return without her leading man. “I think it would be too emotional for her,” says Beverley. “She would be dancing with him there twice a week.
“She still has his dancing shoes.”
But she has been excited to see photographs and footage of the new floor. Beverley hopes one day to coax her back to join the three remaining Riley generations.
For them, grieving their loss, the continuity and familiarity the ballroom gives them is powerful.
“When you change into your dance shoes everything seems less bad,” she says. “The new floor is beautiful, I wish my grandfather could see it.”
For Kevin Garrigan, too, the ballroom will always be family.
The 61-year-old, originally from Durham, would travel as a child to Blackpool every summer holiday with his great-grandparents, grandparents and parents.
The men were all miners who loved to dance.
He recalls new clothes for the trips he wasn’t allowed to wear beforehand. “I can remember my mum teaching me the square tango aged five,” he beams. “It was the highlight of our lives to come for holidays. The ballroom seemed a magical place. It was so massive, with more people in it than I’d ever seen.”
As a teenager he shunned dance lessons but when he courted his wife-to-be, Gillian, he took her to the Blackpool Tower Ballroom.
“The only dance I could remember was the square tango,” he laughs. It was their wedding dance.
Their daughter, Sarah, “was dancing before she could walk,” he says proudly, and the family were back again, with another generation. It’s just the three of them now but they still go often.
Kevin, a former NHS manager, and Gillian, have just retired to Blackpool.
“The new floor is amazing,” he says. “So smooth, but not slippy, it’s unreal. This must be how Torvill and Dean feel.”
Thinking of his parents, his grandparents and great-grandparents, he adds: “I wish they could all see it.
“When I walk in I still have the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There are nice ghosts in there.”
