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Danton, left, Michael Somes and Brian Shaw in Symphonic Variations at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1946Henry Danton was 100 when he
received the Royal Academy of Dance’s
Adeline Genée silver medal. He had
actually won the prestigious award 77
years earlier, but a wartime metal
shortage meant that the medal itself
could not be struck.
As a member of Sadler’s Wells (now
the Royal) Ballet he had appeared in
February 1946 in Marius Petipa’s Sleep-
ing Beauty, the first postwar production
at the Royal Opera House. “This was a
whizz-bang, wonderful new produc-
tion,” he told The Daily Telegraph, add-
ing that his were supporting roles: as a
cavalier to Gillian Lynne’s fairy, as suit-
or to Margot Fonteyn’s Aurora in the
Rose Adagio, and in Frederick Ashton’s
new pas de trois.
Yet there were contretemps with
Ninette de Valois, the company’s
founder. “At the first rehearsal she told
me to learn by counting, but I wanted to
learn with the music,” he said. “She
called me ‘boy’, even though I was in my
twenties and [had been] an army cap-
tain.” On stage he was irritated by a
large plume falling in his face. “One
night, I broke it off,” he recalled. “De Va-
lois came storming backstage. She
shouted ‘Danton, what happened to the
plume?’ The next night, it was back.”
Food rationing remained in force.
“Everyone in the company got sick,” he
said. “They brought in a doctor to test
us, and he called it Sadler’s Wells Dis-
ease: it was actually malnutrition.” For-
tunately, there was “an angel” who ran
a tea house in Soho “who somehow
managed to get sugar and make sweet
things for us”.
In April 1946, Danton and Pamela
May were one of the three couples in
the premiere of Ashton’s Symphonic
Variations to music by César Franck.
Fonteyn and Michael Somes, Moira
Shearer and Brian Shaw were the
others. It was Ashton’s first abstract, or
plotless, ballet for the company and was
an immediate hit with the public and
the critics. During this time Danton de-
veloped a friendship with Fonteyn.
“She was having trouble with her part-
ners,” he recalled. “One day, she called
‘Catch me!’, and I saw her running and
put my arm out, and caught her in a fish
dive lift.” They also shared a teacher in
Vera Volkova with whom he had an
affair, despite her being 15 years his
senior and married. When Volkova’s
husband returned from war service in
India she broke off the relationship with
Danton, who soon left the country. He
spent two years studying with Russian
ballet émigrés in Paris, where he part-
nered Lycette Darsonval in Les Ballets
des Champs-Élysées, and by 1950 was
touring the US with the Ballets de Paris
de Roland Petit. The following year he
appeared in the first full-length Austra-
lian production of Sleeping Beauty.
Danton had soon been forgotten by
all but the cognoscenti of British ballet.
He reappeared at a 2011 conference cele-
brating the work of de Valois and in 2014
he featured in Dancing in the Blitz: How
World War Two Made British Ballet on
BBC television.
Henry David Boileau Down was bornin Bedford in 1919, the youngest of three
children of Major Charles Down and his
wife, Beatrice (née Forsyth). His father
was killed towards the end of the First
World War and his mother raised the
young family on a small army pension.
As a king’s cadet he attended Wel-
lington College before enlisting at the
Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. “I
was educated with the idea that I was
going to be a soldier,” he said, adding
that his mother insisted it was the only
way he would get a decent education.
Just before the war he saw Colonel de
Basil’s Covent Garden Russian Ballet
perform in London.
He was commissioned in the Royal
Artillery in 1939 and promoted to cap-
tain at the outbreak of war. “I wasn’t a
conscientious objector,” he explained.
“But we were taught to stick a bayonet
into a sack of straw and imagine it was
a German. It went against my feelings.”
On one occasion he was jumping over agymnastics horse when the sergeant
yelled prophetically: “What are you, a
bloody ballet dancer?”
In 1940 he “got lucky when I fell off a
truck and was invalided out of the army”.
Now he was able to swap arms for ara-
besques. He took up ice-skating and was
paired with an aspiring champion whose
ambitious mother introduced him to
Judith Espinosa, a renowned ballet
teacher. “I used a small legacy to pay for
my training,” he explained, but kept it
secret from his family. “They thought I
was going to be a major-general,” he
said. “I hid my ballet clothes in my gas
mask and cycled three miles to the sta-
tion during the blackout.”
He took the Royal Academy of
Dance’s elementary, intermediate and
advanced certificates in quick succes-
sion. Turning professional he took the
stage name Henry Danton because
“everyone thought [Down] is not a good
name for a dancer”, though his first jobstroying everyone else’s livelihoods as
well as ruining the ecosystem.
Returning to port that afternoon,
Sales made an angry phone call to the
authorities. It was the start of a 23-year
campaign to highlight the damage
being done by the dredgers that became
known as the battle of Lyme Bay and in-
volved fishermen, wildlife trusts, naturewas as Henri D’Anton with Allied Ballet.
“There were no men around at that time
at all, so they grabbed me immediately,”
he said. “I was put into Les Sylphides right
away... and another one called La Plus
Belle. I didn’t know what I was doing. I
put on a costume and make-up. I had no
idea.” The company soon folded and he
moved on to the International Ballet,
partnering its founder Mona Inglesby.
Rehearsals were held in a military
hall on Tottenham Court Road or in the
National Gallery. “Most of the paint-
ings were removed, but there was one
left, Michelangelo’s The Madonna and
Child with St John and Angels. I loved
looking at that,” he said. It remained a
time of danger. “Our 10 o’clock morn-
ing class was like a roll call,” he added.
“People died in bombings every night,
and we were never sure if we were going
to be missing someone.”
Moving on to Sadler’s Wells Ballet,
Danton appeared in the 1946 revivals of
Miracle in the Gorbals and Les Patineurs.However, he took exception to what he
saw as the immorality of the dance
world. “Everyone had lovers, men and
women, living with each other, chang-
ing partners,” he said.
From Paris and Australia he moved
on to Colombia before founding the
National Ballet of Venezuela and own-
ing a vegetarian restaurant in Caracas.
He found work in the US as a dancer and
choreographer, teaching at the Juilliard
School, New York, and eventually set-
tling in Mississippi. A lithe and sprightly
figure who never married, Danton was
still teaching in his 11th decade. He put
his longevity down to being a vegetarian
for more than half his life — and his be-
lief that “after swimming, dancing is the
best exercise”.Henry Danton, ballet dancer, was
born on March 30, 1919. He died on
February 9, 2022, aged 102He was the suitor to
Margot Fonteyn’s Aurora
in the Rose Adagio
Henry Danton
Lithe and sprightly dancer who performed in Frederick Ashton’s Symphonic Variations and fell out with Ninette de Valois
GETTY IMAGESDave Sales
Fisherman and conservationist whose campaigns helped to protect Lyme Bay and make his industry more sustainable
One glorious sunny morning, just before
Whitsun 1985, Dave Sales was fishing
from his boat, the Sea Dragon, three
miles off West Bay near Bridport, in
Dorset. While his inboard engine idled,
he hauled crab and lobster pots from the
sea bed with his hydraulic winch, then
sorted them: some were destined for a
local fish merchant, the rest for the fish
restaurant run by his wife, Gill. After-
wards he carefully laid fresh pots, baited
with gurnard, on the sea bed.
According to Charles Clover’s forth-
coming book, Rewilding the Sea, at
about 11am Sales noticed 16 large fish-
ing vessels on the horizon heading his
way. He was used to being passed by
trawlers, which always gave him a re-
spectful berth. This fleet, which he rec-
ognised as scallop dredgers, was differ-
ent. Although his gear was clearly
marked, they advanced alarmingly. He
waved and pointed, but they roared
straight through his flags, buoys and
pots, dragging steel lines behind them.
On the end of each line were four
heavy-toothed dredges that stirred the
scallops into their nets while tearing up
the flora and fauna of the sea bed.
Forty of Sales’s pots were mangled;
inside were mutilated crabs, their limbs
broken off. The dredgers’ owners were
making a fortune. They were also de-
conservation agencies, politicians, div-
ers, journalists and the public. Reports
were commissioned, surveys carried
out, voluntary agreements set up and
bylaws proposed. Yet ever-higher
prices for scallops and the development
of West Bay harbour led to an increase
in the number of scalloping boats.
In 2006 Natural England applied for
an order to close 60 square miles of
Lyme Bay to dredging to allow the dam-
aged sea bed to recover, but it was re-
fused. Two years later Sales was in
Downing Street and handed to No 10 a
file containing photographs showing
the sea bed before and after scalloping.
This undoubtedly contributed to an
announcement shortly afterwards by
Jonathan Shaw, the fisheries minister,
of a statutory instrument protecting 60
square miles of Lyme Bay and creating
the largest wildlife protection closure in
British waters. It has remained in place
ever since and, said Sales, is now the
blueprint for protecting the whole eco-
system of an area: “The great recovery
that has been started in Lyme Bay is a
wonderful example for the conserva-
tion of all inshore waters.”
David Edward Sales was born in
Windlesham, Surrey, in 1937, the son of
Lottie (née Gibbons) and her husband
“Red” Ted Sales, who worked at thelocal golf club; he had an older sister,
Jane. Their father was called up at the
outbreak of war and the rest of the
family moved to Studland, near Poole
in Dorset, to live with Sales’s grandfa-
ther, who had served on the Titanic’s
fateful maiden voyage but survived the
sinking by crewing one of the lifeboats.
As a child Sales learnt to harvest gull
eggs from the cliffs that his mother used
to make cakes.
He recalled the Isle of Purbeck being
used to test Britain’s effectiveness
against a German seaborne invasion.
Later George VI, Winston Churchill and
Dwight Eisenhower, supreme com-
mander of the Allied Expeditionary
Force in Europe, came to view rehears-
als for the D-Day landings, which Sales
watched from a grassy bank.
His uncle Bill was a keen boatman
and often took him fishing. Sales was
educated in Swanage but left at 14 to
work on a farm. He found that boring
and instead, using his childhood experi-
ence, started fishing with Maurice
Lane, a skilled fisherman who was also
a womaniser and gambler.
In 1958 Sales met Gill Hampson, who
was spending the summer working at
Knoll House Hotel in Studland. They
were married the following year. Gill
survives him with their son Jonathan,who fished with his father and now
works on a farm, and their daughters,
Nicola and Anna, who married two
farmer brothers.
By the end of 1959 Sales and a cousin
had commissioned their first boat, the
39ft Purbeck Isle. Yet the going was
tough; at times he could barely afford to
eat. Slowly, he and his crew of two
hauled themselves off the breadline, in-
cluding sprat fishing in the winter.
In 1968 he received a travelling fel-
lowship to study lobster fishing in Ca-
nada. There he discovered a far more
accurate method to measure the mini-
mum landing size for lobsters than was
used in the UK and on his return cam-
paigned successfully for it to become
the legal measure here.
After 60 years of living off the sea, he
retired. He remained concerned for the
industry. “There are so many small boats
fishing out of Lyme now that in a couple
of years there won’t be any fish left,” he
said in 2019. “I look back and think
‘Thank goodness I’ve had my day’.”Dave Sales BEM, fisherman, was born on
May 5, 1937. He died of prostate cancer on
March 6, 2022, aged 84Sales at West Bay, Dorset, in 2019Email: [email protected]