Dublin's National Ballroom is facing demolition. Kathy Sheridan takes a trip down memory lane with some of its former patrons
larryA rather earnest Kildare farmer swears that he met what he imagined to be the love of his life, one glorious night about 35 years ago, in the National Ballroom. Everything was magical, until she asked him would he buy an ass (which in those days had only one meaning). Once would have been tolerable, but the woman would not desist. Too pushy. And Kildare farmers were way above asses anyway.
These days, the only wildlife about the National are the pigeons dive-bombing the old, red banquettes. There's a steady drip of rain-water and bird-droppings onto the mineral bar. Old cash registers sit in the middle of the floor, sludge-green curtains moulder behind the dance hall seating, and the old maple sprung floor is barely visible beneath the dust.
Was that small stage really great enough to hold Jimmy Masson's 10-piece orchestra, those smooth, smiling, tuxedoed musicians who launched a thousand dreams with Goodnight Sweetheart and My Heart has Learned to Sing? Downstairs, the Ladies' cloakroom seems far too narrow to have contained all those acres of pancake make-up, ferocious beehives, swinging petticoats and bursting hearts.
While the Dublin City arts officer, Jack Gilligan, was based in the building in recent years, it was commonplace for women to knock on the door and ask to see the place that continued to exercise such a powerful pull on their lives and memories. Typical was the emigrant who brought her American daughter back to show where her parents had met in the 1950s. The National was well established by then, with its electronic, blinking "Dancing" sign over the door, and "Welcome to the National Ballroom" etched in gold in the fanlight. It was opened in 1945 on our national saint's day, because it was, after all, the National. Dances on all but high days were 8pm - midnight ("with valuable spots"), and when "under the auspices of" groups like the Grocers Assistants' Club, Erin's Own, the Royal Meath Mens' Club or the Travel Club, they were known as "socials".
A charming Campbell-Ryan documentary, made in association with Dublin Corporation for RTÉ, catches a glimpse of another era, where mannerly men in báinín jackets, black trousers, tie and handkerchief, were employed to keep things strictly ballroom, asking girls without partners (or "wallflowers", bluntly) out to dance, giving a tap on the shoulder to a lad who tried putting two hands on a lady's waist or a couple who were close dancing. Of course, no one with a sign of drink of them was allowed within an ass's roar of the place. But one tiny indiscretion was sanctioned. The last dance (where the lads vied to walk the fancied one home, alongside his bike), was usually a very slow waltz and at the very end, remembered Maureen Daly, "someone would switch off the lights and there would be a little kiss - but only for a second - and you were hoping you liked the fella you were dancing with".
But if this sounds like romantic heaven for big girls, there was a downside. There was no such thing as dancing around your handbag with your mates, because girls were not allowed to dance with girls. "Sometimes, you could be standing for a long time waiting to be asked," said Una Crosbie mournfully, "and I thought that was very unfair, because you'd have paid your money in, the same as the fellas." And she had other quibbles with the system: "If you refused a fella a dance for any reason, you couldn't get up to dance the same dance with another fella, because you could be told actually to sit down for the whole night". The rules were the rules and the lads in the báiníjackets were no pushovers.
But one of them, an MC in the National, recalled one magical May night in 1946, when he "noticed a beautiful girl, gentle, kind and lovely", who also proved to be a "magnificent dancer" when he asked her up. Deeply smitten, he used his powers to announce a Ladies' Choice "to test the water - and she came and asked me and I was in heaven". The following St Stephen's Night, he asked her to marry him. "She said 'I will - because I love you'," he remembered, his voice cracking and softening to a whisper, "and we lived for the loveliest 48 years that you could wish for".
Then suddenly in the late 1950s, edging into the 1960s, Brendan Bowyer emerged wriggling his ample bum to the frantic strains of the Hucklebuck. "We want Dickie," screamed the back-combed, mini-skirted ones with the inch-thick eyeliner, massed at the front to catch every droplet of Dickie Rock's worshipful sweat. But to every generation its own. For here's Peg Prenderville, who landed up in Dublin from the country in 1971, and had very little experience of dancing at home. "But as soon as I came to the door and heard the country accents, I was at home again." Culchie heaven.
Michael Walsh met his Maura there. Maura, apart from being a pretty woman, distinguished herself by rising above the monosyllabic "D'ye come here often" cliches of dance hall conversation. The talk was non-stop, recalls Michael, "and I was saying to myself even at that stage, she's the one". Maura, meanwhile, was probably listening for the blessed jangle of car-keys, the signal for any sensible girl that she had bagged a lift home for herself and her pals. In the end, says Michael, looking at her fondly, she was the one.
But even then, the writing was on the wall for the ballroom of dreams. Disco was taking over. At Zhivago on Baggot Street, you could drink plonk, eat awful food and shake your booty on the handkerchief-sized dancefloor till three. The National, with its mineral bars and teas and coffees, turned off the lights at one.
This Tuesday, Dublin City Council is voting on whether the proposed extension to the Hugh Lane Gallery, which involves demolition of the ballroom, can go ahead. But even as the day of the wrecking ball moves ever closer, the ballroom's legacy will live on, in the countless children of the couples whose eyes once met across its immaculate maple floor - the Culchies who conquered Dublin.