At first all we had to depend on when teaching the dance was the memory of our working girls who had first learnt the dances, and the manuscript of the music which Mr Sharp had taken down from the men who taught us. Thus it became necessary to make the record more permanent and to leave some guide to the dances with those whom we taught. Mr Sharp and Mr MacIlwaine, with the help of Miss Florence Warren, who danced again and again while the actual steps were being recorded, then published a book of tunes and instructions for the dances, and these have been followed by three more sets of the dances. Mr John Graham published two volumes very shortly after, and Mr Clive Carey, Mr Geoffrey Toye, and I followed with two volumes of tunes and instructions. We are all still engaged both in searching for dances, teaching them, and recording them for future use, and though probably the best and most characteristic dances are now duly recorded, still one is never sure where the work is really ended, and we shall always be glad to hear from any readers of fresh dances, which we shall be glad to investigate and, if genuine, record for future use.
In 1907 Mr Cecil Sharp and I disagreed over the constitution of a committee, and from that date have worked on entirely separate lines. I have kept very carefully to the traditional lines, making a great point of having those whom I send out to teach taught by country dancers without the intervention of professional dance instructors, so that to-day, after eight years’ practice, I believe they are dancing as much like the original dancers as is possible.
After the recognition of the traditional dances by the Board of Education, Mr Sharp started a school of teachers at the London South-Western Polytechnic, and the teachers sent out from there have also taught in different parts of the country. As lately as 1911 these young ladies from the Polytechnic have formed the nucleus of the Folk-Dance Society, with Mr Sharp as Director, while the Espérance Club, as the Espérance Guild of Morris Dancers, also continues its work.
In 1910 I organised a vacation School at Littlehampton in Sussex, when sixty teachers from County Council Schools in different parts of the country met to learn the folk-dances, and later that year I transferred the School, with Miss Florence Warren and Mr Clive Carey as instructors in dance and song, at the request of the Governors of the Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon to that place, and about two hundred availed themselves of the opportunity of learning the songs and dances.