Thursday 11 January 2018

Charles William Ray Vinio

The man working at the 1895 Ball as MC (master of ceremonies, announcing the guests and the dances to be performed), Charles William Ray Vinio, was born Carlo Guglielmo Ray, and took British citizenship in September 1878. Vinio, with adverts (like those for Jerome) for lessons in all the local newspapers, was originally in partnership with Hubert Mason (b. 1811, so 74 when the partnership was dissolved in 1885 but a teacher of dance as far back as 1842) and Charles carried on alone ‘the profession of the teaching of Dance and Deportment’.
But there is also a Giovanni Vinio, running an Exeter 'Academy of Dancing, Deportment and Calisthenics’ at Mount Radford School (one of the main fee-paying establishments in the city), also advertising everywhere, who wrote to the Dancing Times in the late 1890s deploring the lack of a licensing system or formal programme of education for those who set up as teachers of dance.



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