The ballet mother - Black Queen, Margot Fonteyn’s mother, Mrs Hilda Hookham: Women’s History Month in Dance, 2021

Women’s History Month in Dance 112; 113; 114; 115; 116. Behind a number of history’s world-class ballerinas (not all), there is a sociological pattern. The dancer’s parents are not financially prosperous; the mother chooses to support her daughter rather than her husband, often travelling to accompany her talented daughter to the big city where there are an important ballet school and company; the daughter’s talent is rewarded with leading roles; the mother’s marriage does not survive. To some large degree, the ballerina is her mother’s wish fulfilment, the embodiment of the eminence she herself never attained. (The pattern is not ubiquitous: Alicia Markova’s parents remained together, Marie Taglioni was principally shaped by her father.)

Perhaps most of us are our parents’ wish fulfillments to some degree; and very many women find themselves taking their children (usually daughters) to ballet classes. The peculiar circumstances that then prompt a very few mothers to commit primarily to their dancing daughters are intensely curious; the umbilical cord between mother and daughter remains of lasting importance, in some cases remaining as central to the daughter’s life as any marriage. Some ballerinas’ mothers are notorious for the conspiracies and machinations (ground glass in other ballerinas’ point shoes, hiding their Giselle costumes, urging their teenage daughters to yield to the advances of the ballet masters who will advance their careers).

Margot Fonteyn’s mother was Hilda Hookham, often held up as the most exemplary of all ballet mothers. She herself had been illegitimate; perhaps this was what motivated her to seek eminence for her daughter. Her marriage took her and her daughter to Shanghai in the early 1930s; it was the young Margaret (Peggy) Hookham’s studies there with George Gontcharov and Vera Volkova that promoted Mrs Hookham to revisit London, where a performance by Alicia Markova was the epiphany that caused the young dancer to recognise that this was what she wanted to do for her living. Mrs Hookham and Margaret/Peggy then left Shanghai permanently; it was Mrs Hookham who persuaded the reluctant Serafina Astafieva, Markova’s teacher, to take on her daughter. Months later, Mrs Hookham took her daughter to audition for the Vic-Wells School, from which she soon began to dance with the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1934 as Margot Fontes, soon changed to Margot Fonteyn. 

Many who knew mother and daughter were puzzled: the daughter seemed an anonymous character, while the determination belonged to the mother. This changed, however: Fonteyn became deeply committed to her art, generous to colleagues but also profoundly competitive, a mystery often to her own mother, who quickly allowed her teenage daughter to have her own private life while always being around her performances; she watched carefully, learnt by observation, discussing dance points with her daughter, helpfully drawing attention to dance details that prompted Fonteyn to work yet harder. 

Markova left the Vic-Wells enterprise in 1935; Fonteyn was the youngest but ultimately the strongest, loveliest, and most poetic of the five young women who began to inherit leading roles in Markova’s wake. (Mary Honer, Elizabeth Miller, June Brae, Pamela May were the other four - I spoke extensively to Miller in 1997 and knew May as a friend in 1996-2000.) Those were the years when Fonteyn’s most celebrated ballet contemporaries were the Russian baby ballerinas Irina Baronova, Tamara Riabouchinska, and Tamara Toumanova, all trained in Paris by the great émigré Maryinsky ballerinas Lubov Egorova, Mathilde Kschessinskaya, and - above all - Olga Preobrazhenskaya. Mrs Hookham organised trips to Paris in which May and others came with her daughter to study with the three teachers; she watched classes, observed all kinds of flaws, but noted how beneficial all the three English dancers found these classes.  

In I937, the entire Vic-Wells Ballet spent a week in Paris, where Ninette de Valois‘s chess ballet “Checkmate” had its world premiere. Pamela May later recalled that she, Fonteyn, and Frederick Ashton sat at a café on the Champs-Élysées having fun by likening their mothers to chess pieces. (Ashton’s was the bishop.) Mrs Hookham was “Black Queen”. Over the years, the name stuck, affectionately, with none of the guile or destructiveness that the Black Queen has in the ballet; often Mrs Hookham was known simply as “BQ”. 

Fonteyn was not ready for all the lead roles that came her way: Ninette de Valois, director of the Vic-Wells Ballet, long remembered that, after Fonteyn’s first performance as the Sugar Plum Fairy in “The Nutcracker”, she spotted Mrs Hookham and said “You and I need a stiff drink!” 

During the Second World War, when the Vic-Wells Ballet danced nine performances a week, often while the bombs were dropping on the West End, Mrs Hookham would make sandwiches backstage for the entire Vic-Wells ballet company. Somewhere along the line her marriage had ended. She did not accompany her daughter on every tour, but in later years, perhaps especially when Fonteyn’s husband Roberto de Arias was rendered quadriplegic, Mrs Hookham and he would be part of the extensive entourage that often accompanied the ballerina. In 1978, Fonteyn published her second book, “The Dancer’s World”, about the many aspects of a dancer’s life. One chapter - full of good sense and shrewd observation - is about the dancer’s mother; it’s written by Mrs Hookham. Her daughter had been the world’s most celebrated ballerina for almost thirty years, but her voice has no vainglory: she is level-headed and generous. In Meredith Daneman’s admirable 2005 biography of Margot Fonteyn, the quiet complexity of the mother-daughter bond becomes one of the most psychologically enthralling threads.

Tuesday 30 March 

112: The young Margaret (Peggy) Hookham with her mother in Shanghai in 1931.

113: Mrs Hookham and her daughter Peggy on board ship

114: Paris, 1936 - left to right, Laurel Martin, Mrs Hookham, Margot Fonteyn, Molly Brown

115: Paris, 1936: Laurel Martin, Mrs Hookham, Margot Fonteyn, Molly Brown

116: Mrs Hookham, right, behind Margot Fonteyn and Roberto de Arias in Fonteyn’s dressing room in the late 1960s