Honest Jo. Priest’s School in Chelsea

In 1712 a letter was sent to the Spectator puffing the theatre benefit on 12 May of the actress Lucretia Bradshaw, but this letter had to wait for publication until 1725, when it was included in Original and genuine letters sent to the Tatler and Spectator … none of which have been before printed. The puff comes towards the end of a detailed account of a wedding celebration to which the bride, ‘a pretty blooming beauty, who having been bred at honest Jo. Priest’s school in Chelsea, had invited a fine sample of her school fellows’. The party was a merry one with much dancing. The ladies, we are told, had not met together since they had performed in an opera at the school. They now praised the goodness of their mistress and were concerned about the recent problems of their poor master. This paper will look at what we know of Priest’s career as a theatre dancer, at the school he ran with his wife Franck, and at the interesting questions raised by the 1712 letter. 

Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson have written extensively on seventeenth and eighteenth-century singers and theatre performers for musical periodicals and for New Grove and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Recent articles and papers include ‘Watching the Maskers: Masquerade Dances in the London Theatre’ (Oxford, via Zoom, 2021), ‘Places for Dancing: Assembly Rooms in eighteenth-century Essex’ (Oxford, 2022), ‘A Hundred Years of the Funeral Procession and Dirge in Romeo and Juliet’ (Theatre Notebook, 2022), ‘Mistresses of Dancing-schools in Edinburgh, 1755 to 1814’ (Historical Dance, 2022); ‘John Hindmarsh, 1758‒1796, Violinist and Viola player’ (Early Music Performer, December 2022), ‘Dancing Sailors and their costumes’ (Oxford, 2023) and ‘Little Braham: the Apprenticeship Years of a Great Singer’ (A Handbook for Studies in 18th-Century English Music, forthcoming).