SHE'LL get into trouble from her mother for wearing a dress that short. This is the Albert Ballroom in Glasgow's Bath Street in January,1962, so judging from the date, I suspect the Albert's dance troupe is doing The Twist, which was a hit for Chubby Checker in 1960. An ungainly dance where your feet rarely left the floor, it's only advantage was that anyone could do it.
The female patrons of the ballroom, sitting around the edges, don't look too happy, perhaps imagining that their partners are too interested in the short-dressed dancers on the floor.
The Albert opened in 1905, and was named after Queen Victoria's concert. It had a reputation of a stiff door policy where anyone looking as though they had imbibed too much were not allowed, so young ladies felt they could go there and feel safe.
Ballrooms began to lose their popularity in the sixties, and the Albert tried to make some money by opening a discotheque in its basement called Joanna's. Anyone over sixty in Glasgow will have a little smile on their faces when you mention Joanna's. The slow dances at the end of the evening were memorable - mainly because they always played Scott Walker's Joanna. I'll be humming it all day now.
Sadly the Albert Ballroom was destroyed in a fire in 1974, and the site near the King's Theatre is now an anonymous office block.
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