[2] Frank Cedric Staff was born to an Irish mother and an English father in the diamond mining town of Kimberley, in what is now the Northern Cape Province of South Africa.
As a teenager, he moved to Cape Town, where he attended Diocesan College and received his early dance training from Helen Webb and Maude Lloyd, who had studied with Marie Rambert in London.
[5] Staff inherited many of Hugh Laing's roles in the Rambert repertory, including The Lover in Jardin aux Lilas and Mercury in The Planets, both works by Antony Tudor.
For the London Ballet, he created the role of The Boy, Julien, in La Fête Ėtrange (1940), set to music of Gabriel Fauré by Andrée Howard.
A pas de trois for himself, his wife Elisabeth Schooling, and Walter Gore, set to music by William Boyce, it was made for Ballet Rambert in 1938.
Over the next two years, he contributed three of his best works to the company's repertory: Czernyana (1939), to the piano exercises of Carl Czerny; Enigma Variations (1939), to the score by Edward Elgar; and Peter and the Wolf (1940), to the music and text of Sergei Prokofiev.
[9] Upon completion of his military service, Staff returned to his homeland in 1946 and joined the South African National Ballet in Cape Town.
There he danced in his own ballets and produced works in which he had appeared in England, notably Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un Faune and Howard's Death and the Maiden.
Staff's unfinished work, The Rain Queen (1971), set to a commissioned score by Newcater, was planned as the first full-length ballet with an indigenous South African theme.