ABSTRACT
When mass Observation, those pioneer ethnographers o f the ‘beliefs and behaviour o f the British Islanders’1 produced their book on Britain (a Penguin Special published in January 1939), they devoted a whole chapter to the phenomenon of ‘The Lambeth Walk’, monitoring its impact as a song hit (41 per cent o f those they questioned had first heard it on the wireless), charting its progress as a dance craze and recording memories and opinions in Lambeth, the old London borough from which the ‘Walk’ alleg edly derived. Me and My Girl, the musical which iaunched the Walk on its career, had opened at the Victoria Theatre, Westminster, at Christmas 1937 and was to play for the following four years. The Walk was introduced later as a ‘novelty dance’ at the Locarno, Streatham, and popularised by instructors at the great public dancehalls. Tom Harrison and Charles Madge, the founders o f Mass Observation, would have liked to believe, as socialists, that it was the working class who had taken up the Lambeth Walk, yet they were bound to admit that its popularity was a cross-class phenom enon: ‘You . . . can . . . find them doing the Lambeth Walk in Mayfair ball-rooms, suburban dance-halls, cockney parties and village hops.’ The Lambeth Walk became an international success. As in England, its popularity transcended political and social divides. The Nazis, relieved apparently that the dance did not come from the blacks nor its libretto from a Jew, permitted it to be broadcast on German radio, whilst in Italy, Mussolini took instruc tion in its steps. It was no less popular in Czechoslovakia, hitting Prague about the time o f the Munich crisis in September 1938. As the war clouds gathered, it offered a magical escape from care: ‘The first contemporary dance from this country that has put the world on its feet.’2
