The Dance Goes On

Graham Sargeant FRPS

Irst met Elizabeth Twistington Higgins in 1976. Until the age of thirty she had enjoyed a career on the London stage as a classical ballet dancer, when Paralytic Polio struck her down in 1953. Ironically this was only months before the famous Sal vaccine virtually wiped out Polio in most Western societies.

The onset of Paralytic Polio meant that Elizabeth was conned to wheelchair living; at home during the day and in an Iron Lung to support her breathing every night for the rest of her life. This involved a nightly trip to the local Broomeld hospital in Chelmsford.

Through a mutual friend I was commissioned to photograph her life for the autobiography she was writing. I set about the job armed with many rolls of 35mm Kodak Tri-ex and a Leica M4. At that time I lived in Barnet, within reasonable distance of Chelmsford, so I was able to travel on a regular basis to cover the wide variety of activities that Elizabeth had engaged in after contracting Polio.

As I got to know this amazing woman, I felt that I would like to record her story, so on a number of occasions I took my portable reel to reel Nagra IVs sound recorder on visits to Chelmsford. Having suffered such a sudden and devastating onset of Polio and its disastrous effects on her original career, I asked how she had coped. Her reply: “Ballet … the discipline of Ballet”

Fast forward to 2008 when I dusted off the sheets of negatives shot in 1976 and I submitted Elizabeth's story as a print panel to the RPS for which I was awarded a Fellowship. This was several years before I took up AV seriously in 2012. Giving myself a couple of years to learn the basics of Pictures to Exe and now looking around for ideas and potential projects, I remembered Elizabeth from the 1970s.

All photographs courtesy Graham Sergeant FRPS

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My decision to record an interview with her all those years before was to pay dividends. She died in 1990, but having shot the visuals together with sound, I was in a good position to produce the very human story of this remarkable woman. For sometime I had felt that in many ways her story was more appropriate for an AV than a panel of prints. Having also recorded her voice gave me the opportunity to build an authentic narration.

Sifting through the black and white darkroom prints brought back so many memories and special events that I had photographed. Among them was a performance by Elizabeth's Company of Dancers at both the new Coventry Cathedral and in the ruins of the old building (pictured below).

I had also photographed her at work teaching in her studio at home. Another highlight (above) was to have photographed her doing “mouth painting” at a specially made easel designed and built by one of her neighbours.

Perhaps one of the most memorable events was Elizabeth and “her girls” at a performance in Chelmsford maximum security prison housing “lifers”. Prior to the performance, Elizabeth had to be carried up a staircase in her wheelchair and into the prison Chapel.

One of the volunteers to lift her was none other than Charlie Kray, the brother of Reggie and Ronnie, the infamous East London gangsters.

There was a “full house” of prisoner in the prison Chapel for the event and some of us in Elizabeth's team wondered what the response would be of “women-starved” lifers to the band of very attractive young dancers; cat calls and wolf whistles, we thought would be the very least of our problems. There could be a riot! In the event, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop and to a man, the inmates behaved perfectly.

In fact after the performance, a number of them gathered around Elizabeth to chat to her. We thought that perhaps the men had the sobering thought that Elizabeth, like themselves, were in their different ways, all suffering a life sentence.

The lesson I learnt from this project was not only to “ carry a camera” but to have a sound recorder to hand; as we are all aware, you never know when and where a good story for an AV is going o crop up!

PS. I should have remembered that when I shot the material for Beeswing! (see AV News Issue 203, February 2016)

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