Maude Lloyd

From 1930 onward, she was a leading dancer in the regular Sunday performances of Rambert's Ballet Club at the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate.

[6] Other members of the club included emerging choreographers Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, and Andrée Howard, each of whom would respond to Lloyd's technical ability, as well as her intelligence, elegance, and sensitivity, by creating roles for her in their works.

"Not only was she very pretty, with beautifully curved feet, but she also danced with a rich, natural expressiveness that fed the psychological realism with which Tudor was experimenting.

[12] Lloyd's portrayal of Caroline, who gives up Her Lover (Laing) for The Man She Must Marry (Tudor), was "a beautifully modulated exposition of the simmering passions and dutiful restraint characteristic of Edwardian life.

As the Italian ballerina in Tudor's Gala Performance, she displayed both elegance and wit in competing for the limelight with her French and Russian rivals, and in Howard's La Fête Étrange, a haunting, dreamlike tale, she was mysteriously beautiful as the bride-to-be who captures the fancy of an adolescent boy.

After the outbreak of war with Germany in September 1939, and Tudor's departure for greener, and safer, pastures in America, Lloyd and Peggy van Praagh directed and danced in the company until the blitz caused nearly all the London theaters to close.

In the summer of 1939, Lloyd married Nigel Gosling, an art and dance critic, and settled into retirement to wait out the war years, concentrating on doing welfare work.

She began a second career when Richard Buckle persuaded her to start writing reviews of dance performances for his magazine Ballet, working in tandem with her husband.

[3] In 1955, when Buckle left his post as dance critic for The Observer, a weekly newspaper published on Sunday, the Goslings took over, staying on until Nigel's death in 1982.

Soon after, when Margot Fonteyn persuaded the young Russian virtuoso to come to London to appear in a gala for the Royal Academy of Dance, she asked the Goslings to befriend him.