TRIBUTES have been paid to ‘legendary’ dance teacher Valerie Guy, who has died at the age of 101.
Generations of Islanders took their first steps on the dance floor under her expert guidance at the Jersey Academy of Dancing, which she established towards the end of the Occupation and ran for some 74 years.
Alison Baker – whose aunt Annette Perkins studied and then taught with Miss Guy at the academy – described her as ‘a really lovely lady who I will miss terribly’. ‘She really was a legend in the dance world,’ she said.
Mrs Baker’s parents met when they attended ballroom classes with Miss Guy, the first of four generations to benefit from her ‘firm but very fair’ tuition. ‘She has always been a constant in my life. She devoted her life to it and she looked upon the children as her own children,’ she said.
Denise Renouf, who sent her three daughters to Miss Guy’s classes, paid tribute to ‘an unbelievable life’. ‘Even at the end, she had such a lovely twinkle in her eye and all my children looked up to her. She came to all of their weddings. She was so special,’ she said.
Former academy member Cathy Keir said: ‘Three generations of my family have been taught by Miss Guy – my mother and my daughter, and me – and we all learned so much more than ballet technique.
‘It always meant something if Miss Guy praised a soft-arm movement or a turnout leg, as we knew her praise did not come lightly. My daughter was always delighted to tell me if Miss Guy had said “well done” to her,’ she said.
News of Miss Guy’s death was announced by the academy on Tuesday, when they paid tribute to ‘a truly inspirational lady [who] will be greatly missed by us all’.
It was while she was a student at Jersey College for Girls during the 1930s – then known as the Jersey Ladies’ College – that Miss Guy first developed an interest in dancing.
She was later to recall those early days in an interview with the Jersey Evening Post.
‘All my friends learned dancing and we used to play a game called statues. I used to feel awkward because they always got into pretty positions and, of course, I couldn’t, so I said to my mother “Please let me learn dancing”, and eventually she gave in. I started dancing when I was nine and I’ve been doing it ever since,’ she recalled.
She attended the Jersey School of Dancing run by Josie Lillicrap, and then the Noreen Bush School in London, where she trained for three years from the age of just 15.
Ironically it was to be the German Occupation that was to change the course of her life, interrupting her summer holiday in 1940 and preventing a return to England to seek employment there. She later recalled that she was playing the piano at the moment when bombs were dropped on the Island, the prelude to the arrival of the occupying forces.
Newly qualified, she founded her first dance school in Jersey at the Pembroke Hotel in Grouville with six students. By the end of the first week, thanks to word of mouth, she had 30. Later she established her academy at its David Place home.
In recent years fellow dance teacher Mary Walledge had visited Miss Guy each week to help put her life story into ‘a great thick file’ to go to the Jersey Archive.
‘She wanted all that done. In a way I think she was preparing for the end of her life. We had some really good laughs looking back at all the things.
‘She had so many pupils and so many went on to become teachers themselves – they are teaching literally all over the world,’ Mrs Walledge said.
