Josephine Bradley

Josephine Mary Catherine Wellesley-Smith (née Bradley; 24 March 1893 – 16 February 1985) was a ballroom dancer and dance teacher. Although born in Dublin, she was raised from an early age in London, the youngest of eight children. Bradley was among the first ballroom dance professionals of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) who standardised the basic techniques of foxtrot, tango, quickstep and waltz. These are the English ballroom dances of what is now the World Dance Council's International Dancesport category. For her activities she had earned herself an informal title "The First Lady of the Ballroom".

The early years

Youth Bradley's father was a strict Roman Catholic, who abhorred dancing and the theatre. He died when she was ten, and an older sister subsequently succumbed to tuberculosis. It was feared that Josephine might be infected, so the family moved from London to Chorley Wood, at that time a rural village. In the overall World Championships for 1924 (professional), and again in 1925, Maxwell Stewart and Barbara Miles won, ahead of Victor Silvester and Phyllis Clarke.

That same year (1924), Bradley started her first dance school in the Knightsbridge Hotel. She was asked by the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) to join a working group to codify the dances and develop a syllabus for teachers. The ISTD formed its Ballroom Branch with Bradley, Eve Tynegate Smith, Murielle Simmons, Cynthia Humphreys and Victor Silvester as founder members. Bradley was a leading figure in the British ballroom dance world.

Marriage In 1927 Bradley married Douglas Wellesley-Smith, whom she had met in 1919. He had won the Military Cross (MC) in World War I, as a captain in the 1st Battalion, the Lincolnshire Regiment. He had been twice wounded by bayonet thrusts, and they met when he was convalescing. Needing some light exercise, he came to her for dance lessons. They became regular dance partners in 1925. Their marriage lasted only four years until his death at the age of 35. She later found a dancing partner in Frank Ford, but she never married again.

Bradley became one of the few women to lead a British band between 1920 and 1950; others included Ivy Benson and Mrs. Jack Hylton. Bradley set up her group in 1935, Bradley's recordings sold well, and represent "the very best of ballroom music over half a century after they were made".

Other events She danced in the British film Let's Make a Night of It (1937), which contained the first sequence of formation dance. In it she and Frank Ford, together with Victor Silvester and his wife and two other couples, danced to Jack Jackson and his band.