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Shortly after Leslie Edwards joined the Rambert organisation in 1932, Antony Tudor told him that he was a big disappointment to them all: they were expecting 'someone more proficient and talented'. Fortunately he wasn't put off by such frankness, and went on to the longest career in the Royal Ballet's history, retiring officially only in 1993. When he died, a couple of years ago, there were lots of rumours that he had left an autobiography, and it's good to see it now published, with assistance from Graham Bowles.

Through his long association with the company, Leslie Edwards' story is to a large extent also the story of the Royal Ballet. Much of it, therefore, will be familiar to you if you know the tales of the early days, the flight from Holland at the beginning of the war, and of course the triumph in New York in 1948; but they're tales well worth retelling, and hearing them from the point of view of a hard-working dancer brings out aspects we haven't known before.

It's the beginning and end of the book I found most interesting. Life as a young male dancer in the London of the 1930s must have been truly amazing - flitting between Rambert and the Vic-Wells ballets, dancing in the first nights of some of the cornerstones of the growing repertoire (Lilac Garden, Checkmate and Les Patineurs among many others), appearing in some of the earliest televised ballets - deeply rewarding, by the sound of it, but all done for the tiniest amounts of money, out of which Edwards had to pay back to Marie Rambert the £100 she'd advanced him to pay for his training.
 

The book cover - Leslie Edwards in front of the Royal Opea House
The book is available from Dance Books: www.dancebooks.co.uk

Then from the mid 1960s onwards, Edwards ran the Royal Ballet Choreographic Group, which developed out of a fundraising concert he organised in Guildford. It's only when he starts talking about this, rather than about his own career, that some bitterness creeps into the narrative: the obstacles put in his way by the company management were evidently too much for even his charitable temperament to accept.

Unfairly, it's his shining niceness that makes the book a little less unputdownable than it might have been. There's little about his own private life and virtually nothing about anyone else's, so if you're wanting inside gossip on backstage and offstage dramas, this is not the place to look. The 'warts and all' story of the Royal Ballet is still to be written: this one is done with love, by one of the most faithful servants of the company, and deserves to be read with love in return.