Blanche Lund returning to Canada on hospital ship Lady Nelson, 1945.Courtesy of Dance Collection Danse
It was 1945, the final year of the Second World War. Blanche and Alan Lund, the Canadian dance team, were performing in Blitz-ravaged London, headlining at the Hippodrome in a spectacular, morale-boosting variety show produced by the Royal Canadian Navy. The young Torontonians had tied the knot only a year previously and liked to spend their down time with two other married couples in the company.
One afternoon, between performances, they all decided to stay at the theatre for tea. As the women prepared the teapot backstage, their husbands left to buy sandwiches at a little café across the road. It was then that the explosion hits.
The women were blown off their feet. Blanche Lund ended up on the floor with a chair on top of her. As soon as the three had recovered from the blast, they rushed out of the theatre to find their men.
“My husband was on his knees in the middle of the road,” recalled Mrs. Lund, in a 2010 interview for Historica Canada’s veterans archive, The Memory Project. The other two men had also been knocked down, she said, “and all the windows of the café were blown out.”
As they later learned, a German V-1 flying bomb had come hurtling down toward the theatre. Had it not been intercepted by a barrage balloon and exploded in the air, it would have killed them all.
The Lunds were shaken by the close call. “Al and I said, ‘We’re never going to separate, even to buy a sandwich, until after the war is over,’” Mrs. Lund recalled, laughing. “So we didn’t.”
They were more than true to that vow. Although work – and fate – sometimes kept them physically apart for long stretches, in every other respect they remained inseparable for the next 47 years.
Noel Coward, Blanche Lund, Alan Lund at 'Meet the Navy' opening night Hippodrome Theatre, in London on 1945.National Defence Photo / Courtesy of Dance Collection Danse
Postwar, the couple enjoyed a splendid career back in Canada, starring on the fledgling CBC Television, fronting the Canadian National Exhibition’s mammoth Grandstand shows in Toronto and opening their own dance school. Mr. Lund would later run the Charlottetown Festival in Prince Edward Island and help launch its mainstay, the Anne of Green Gables musical. Mrs. Lund served as his unofficial adviser and closest confidante. Their fabulous double act only ended in 1992, with the death of Mr. Lund.
“They were partners for life, onstage and off,” said film and television actress Sheila McCarthy, who spent her formative years at their school and thought of Mrs. Lund as her second mother.
“They truly loved each other all those years,” added Jeffrey Lund, the youngest of the couple’s four sons.
Mrs. Lund, who died Dec. 1 at the age of 97 in Orillia, Ont., spent her latter years keeping her husband’s memory alive. She played a key role in a 2014-15 exhibition devoted to him in Charlottetown and Toronto, which drew on her trove of photos, clippings, videos and other memorabilia. She happily shared vivid stories from their dancing heyday and was able to celebrate their induction this year into Canada’s Encore! Dance Hall of Fame.
Dance historian Amy Bowring, who curated the Alan Lund exhibition for PEI’s Confederation Centre and Toronto-based archivists Dance Collection Danse, believes the couple’s romance infused their performances. “They had this incredible chemistry that came out onstage,” she said. “You could see the love between them.”
Yet, when the two first crossed paths as dance-crazy kids in 1930s Toronto, Mrs. Lund wasn’t all that impressed with her future life-mate. “I don’t think she liked him at first,” Jeffrey Lund said with a chuckle. “She thought he was arrogant.”
Alan Lund was a talented but cocky lad who boasted about entering the Wednesday night amateur dance contests at the Roxy, a downtown burlesque theatre, just so he could win the $5 first prize. The equally talented Mrs. Lund – then Blanche Harris – decided to give the young hotshot a run for his money. She took part in the next contest. He placed first again, but she came a close second.
Alan and Blanche Lund in the dressing room during Piccadilly Hayride, 1946.Courtesy of Dance Collection Danse
Blanche Mary Harris had been born on July 22, 1921 in Toronto and came from the city’s working-class east end. Her father, Hedley Harris, was a First World War veteran who eked out a living as a steel worker. Her mother, the former Blanche Cutts, was a homemaker who dutifully sewed her daughter’s stage costumes, for young Blanche had been obsessed with dance from the age of seven.
Alan, a shoemaker’s son who lived just three blocks away, shared her passion. After both were cast in a show called Thumbs Up at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, they decided to strike out on their own as a duo. Still fresh-faced teens, they began performing in the smoky nightclubs of Montreal – then Canada’s entertainment capital – as a ballroom- and tap-dancing act called Lee and Sandra.
Starting out at seedy joints in the east end, they soon graduated to playing the floor shows at the city’s finest hotels. It was while they were appearing at the Samovar Club in 1943 that Capt. Joseph P. Connolly, special services director for the Royal Canadian Navy, approached them with an offer. He was putting together a splashy revue to entertain the troops and wanted to sign them on as the dance headliners. The only catch: they had to join the Navy first.
Following their basic training, they joined the show. Boasting a cast of 75 and a 30-piece orchestra, Meet the Navy launched with a cross-country tour before shipping overseas. By then, the two dancers had fallen in love. On their opening night in Vancouver, Mr. Lund proposed to Miss Harris. They were married on May 13, 1944.
In February of 1945, Meet the Navy opened at London’s Hippodrome and was a smash success. It was seen by the Royal Family and many members of British theatrical royalty, including playwright Noël Coward, who became smitten with the Lunds. “He asked the Navy if they could be released from their duties so that he could have them in one of his shows,” Ms. Bowring said, “but the Navy wouldn’t let them go!”
After the war had ended, the show toured liberated Europe. At Oldenberg, Germany, in the fall of 1945, Mrs. Lund’s career almost came to an end. The city had been stricken with a polio epidemic and one night she awoke, delirious, with the sensation that her legs had turned to marble. The doctors diagnosed polio and said that she’d never be able to dance again.
Mrs. Lund reluctantly left her husband – who was contracted to stay in England and shoot a film of Meet the Navy – and sailed for home on a hospital ship. Back in Toronto, she was determined to prove the doctors wrong. She began a self-imposed regimen that included swimming and workouts at the ballet barre. Mr. Lund had no idea of her progress. When he finally returned home, she met his train at Union Station in a scene straight out of a classic Hollywood romance. “I got up out of the chair I was sitting on and walked the five steps to him,” Mrs. Lund would recall in a 2011 CBC Radio interview. “He didn’t know I was walking and he was so thrilled! It was just a wonderful reunion.”
The couple resumed their dance partnership, performing in the U.S. and again in London’s West End, before finding a new outlet in a new entertainment form – television. They were the first artists contracted to CBC TV, becoming household names in the 1950s for their appearances on a slew of variety shows, including The Big Revue, Showtime and Mr. Showbusiness. South of the border, they performed on CBS’s legendary Ed Sullivan Show.
Videos of their televised performances capture their elegant appeal. “Alan had this amazing smoothness, where every movement just seemed to glide easily into the next,” Ms. Bowring said,“ and Blanche added to it this grace and delicateness that was so beautiful.”
Their busy years on CBC also saw the Lunds embark on what would be a lengthy stint performing and choreographing for the CNE’s summer Grandstand extravaganzas. And somehow, they still found time to start a family. Their first son, Brian, was born in 1953. Raymond, Kevin and Jeffrey would follow over the next 12 years.
During that period, Mrs. Lund shifted her focus to teaching, becoming the principal instructor at the Alan and Blanche Lund School of Dance, located in North York. Among the first students was a five-year-old Ms. McCarthy, who was agog from the moment Mrs. Lund entered her ballet class.
“Blanche was this elegant, red-haired vision in a white shirt and black Laura Petrie capri pants,” she recalled, still sounding in awe. Ms. McCarthy and the other little girls remained enchanted, especially when Mr. Lund would pop in for brief appearances. “He would whisk in unannounced and he and Blanche would fall into each other’s arms and do a pas de deux,” she said. “It was as though we didn’t exist. They were our Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers – it was magical.”
Alan and Blanche Lund on CBC television. .CBC / courtesy of Dance Collection Danse
Mr. Lund was largely absent because he was preoccupied with the Charlottetown Festival. He’d directed the premiere of the Anne of Green Gables musical, which launched the festival at the newly opened Confederation Centre in 1965. Appointed artistic director in 1968, he would run the festival for 18 seasons and establish it as the primary developer of new Canadian musicals.
During that time, the Lunds maintained a long-distance relationship for half the year, reuniting during summer vacation when Mrs. Lund would arrive in Charlottetown with the boys.
Mounting new, untried musicals each season was a huge stress for Mr. Lund, said actress and dancer Amanda Hancox, who performed in several of them, most notably Johnny Belinda. “When Blanche arrived for the summer, you could see a burden being lifted from him. He knew that she was there with her unconditional understanding, love and support.” She also provided a valuable outside eye for his productions, helping him find solutions to problems. “He had the artistic genius,” Ms. Hancox said, “but she had the objective, big-picture view that he needed.”
Each year, Mr. Lund would also stage the ever-popular Anne musical, which called for a sizable cast of young people. It sometimes included the Lund boys, although only Brian – a superb dancer himself – would go on to a professional performing career.
Mr. Lund died of esophageal cancer on July 1, 1992 at the age of 69. Mrs. Lund found consolation in the ensuing years as the beloved grandmother of a large extended family. She also kept her hand in as a choreographer. In 2010, at the age of 88, she recreated one of Meet the Navy’s dance numbers in Halifax for the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo.
Until her health declined this year, Mrs. Lund lived independently in a retirement community in Innisfil, Ont. She remained spry in mind, if not in body. In an interview for her induction into the Encore! Dance Hall of Fame, she said she had “loved every step” that she and her husband had done. Her only wish was that he could be with her for one more dance.
Mrs. Lund died of natural causes at Orillia’s Victoria House Retirement Home, surrounded by family. Predeceased by her son Brian, she is survived by her sons Raymond, Kevin and Jeffrey Lund, their wives, 16 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.