AFTER 20 years of helping people from across mid Cheshire to trip the light fantastic, dancer Fred Boast is heading back to his roots.

In the past two decades Fred and his late wife Joyce have lived in Middlewich teaching scores of people how to dance after setting up their group Frejoy when they moved to the town in 1999.

Specialising in old time sequence dance, Frejoy ran classes, organised tea dances and charity events in Northwich venues such as Wincham Community Centre, Barnton Royal British Legion and St John the Evangelist Church hall in Lostock.

But following Joyce’s death earlier this year, 86-year-old Fred is making the move south to be with his family in Surrey where he was born and lived for 65 years.

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And he wants to say thank you and farewell to all the friends and dancers he’s helped to mentor over the years.

“After 20 years of running and teaching old time and sequence dancing I’m retiring back to my roots in Surrey and wish all the dancers who have supported me and my late wife, Joyce, over the years and say a big thank you and the best of health and happy dancing in the future, he said.

Fred, a fellow of the United Kingdom Alliance of Professional Teachers of Dancing and the Allied Dance Teachers Association, first took up dancing in 1947, but didn’t qualify as a teacher until the late 90s.

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“I was a teenager at school when I first learned to dance. I remember being at a St John’s Ambulance Brigade event. A young girl dragged me on to the dance floor, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I thought ‘I’d better try to get good at this’.”

Fred cites some of his favourite dances as the Veleta, a 1900s sequence waltz, and the Lancers, a quadrille dance that was fashionable in the late 18th and early 19th century.

And even though he is moving on to pastures new, he has no intention of hanging up his dancing shoes yet.

“I love the social aspect of it, the music and I think it’s important that we preserve the heritage of these dances,” he said.

“I love to dance. I’ve danced for most of my life and I don’t plan to stop any time soon.”