Afternoon Tea with Miss Milligan
the boys he selected and that was really the start of my country dancing. We were a mixed team, all about 15 or 16. The Beresford Girls Choir were all schoolgirls from about 13 to 17. We flew out from Prestwick – 125 in all! I know this is difficult to believe today but, because of a strong tailwind, our plane touched down three hours early at Toronto’s Malton Airport and we had to wait four hours for the buses to turn up. We did three big concerts at the Massey Hall in Toronto. Apart from our team of dancers and the choir, the Toronto Police Pipe Band were there along with soloists. We did a concert in Hamilton, too, but that was a bit of a disaster. A form of food poisoning affected the choir and about 16 girls were rushed to hospital by police cars with wailing sirens. The concert was finally halted when there were too few girls left to sing. There were dramatic reports in all the UK papers. (The Liverpool Echo reported, ‘Girl singers collapse on stage’. Ed.)
Who went with you? Our teacher, Anne Hughes, came with us. Muriel Johnstone’s mother, Dodo, was our pianist and played at all the concerts. By that time Muriel was at university, so she wasn’t with us. Alastair Aitkenhead wasn’t with us either; he had only been involved in the selection. We all stayed with Canadian families. (One of the hosts was Georgina Finlay of Toronto. Ed.)
Kenneth Macdonald with his cocker spaniel, Milo
Kenneth Macdonald was President of the Glasgow University Scottish Country Dance Club in the early 1970s when he was a student studying dentistry. But his story begins in his home town of Ardrossan. Editor Jimmie Hill caught up with him in Stornoway where he has lived for the past 38 years. Did you dance in Ardrossan when you were a boy? My parents went to a local class, and I often used to go with them. Then in 1966 when I was about 15, it was decided that a team of secondary school pupils from Ardrossan Academy would go from north west Ayrshire over to Toronto, along with a school choir. There was a selection process to pick a team of dancers, organised by Alastair Aitkenhead, who put us through our paces. I was one of
Do you have any special memories of that trip? Apart from visits to places like the Niagara Falls, we went to the town of Ayr in Ontario where we were given the freedom of the town and a big civic reception. Ayr is a very small town near Kitchener, so you can imagine the Town Hall was packed to welcome all these young visitors from Ayr, Scotland. It was a very memorable trip for a 15-year-old Scottish schoolboy! I missed the civic reception because I had eaten too much pizza the night before. Our hosts had taken us to a ‘Pizza Takeaway’ and bought a 3 foot square pizza, which we had never seen or heard of before in our lives!
Three years later saw you at Glasgow University. Yes, I arrived in 1969 and joined the Scottish country dance club, which at that time was not very successful. I took it over the following year and started doing all the teaching and organising events. It was never on a par with Edinburgh University’s New Scotland club, but we had some recruits from Strathclyde University because their club had failed in 1969. We did some Scottish events along with Stirling and Edinburgh. We took part in the Intervarsity Folk Dance Festivals in Nottingham, Reading, and Northumberland. We struggled to get a team of really good dancers, compared with Edinburgh. Most of the university dancers were beginners who started when they got there. And that was the reason I had, what I thought, was a brilliant idea!
What was that? It was the idea for a Teach Yourself Scottish Country Dance cassette tape. Every week we would get new people and it was so difficult to progress if you had to stop and try to integrate the new beginners.
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