Famous people in England get celebrated with a blue plaque inserted into the exterior wall of their former home which is visible from the public highway. ie Someone famous lived here.

The Times has carried an article on these commemorations and adds a comment about Dame Ninette de Valois, ” Nearby, at 14 The Terrace, overlooking the river, is a recent plaque to Dame Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, who in her declining years was sometimes seen drinking a pint of beer while reading the papers on a Sunday morning in the garden of the Coach and Horses round the corner.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_...icle6822483.ece

I can imagine it ... as long as it's just ONE pint. And little sips.

And a napkin.

But she was Irish. And in no clips of her or quotes from her would I have concluded that she was dainty.

I don't find it impossible to believe. There is a story that she and the dancer and teacher Errol Addison went into the Nag's Head (a pub in Floral Street, just across from the then stage door of the opera house). Madam started to take out her purse and Addison stopped her saying "When I take a girl out I pay for the drinks".

Irish and not guiness???

The family was posh and Anglo-Irish. They were land owning and a military family. Her father was a Lt. Colonel and a great, great grandfather fought in the The War of American Independence.
But as so many posh people do drink Guiness you are quite right to question her tipple.

I believe anything and everything that is attributed to Errol Addison. I watched him teach class over a long period of time. He was an excellent teacher of boys and helped to form many RB dancers. He was also the most outrageous but warm and friendly character of his era.

I shouldn't have been facetious. I'm a serious admirer. Her career speaks for her sharp mind, vision, drive, and ability to get things done.

I guess I was fixating on that wonderful word "Dame" which conveys something more genteel in Britain context than it does in the U.S. Not to mention her adoption of a professional name -- de Valois -- plucked from a long-defunct French royal family. Her accent in interviews certainly was -- as leonid suggests -- on the posh side.

There is, as the song says, "nothing like a dame." I mean "Dame."

I shouldn't have been facetious. I'm a serious admirer. Her career speaks for her sharp mind, drive, and her ability to get things done.

I guess I was fixating on that wonderful word "Dame" which conveys something more genteel in Britain context than it does in the U.S. Not to mention her adoption of a professional name -- de Valois -- plucked from a long-defunct French royal family. Her accent in interviews certainly was -- as leonid suggests -- on the posh side.

And once you're drinking Guiness (which isn't easy to get here on tap, just a few places, whereas literally everywhere in U.K., and obviously Ireland, although I've never been), it's so velvety that you don't drink it in sips, but rather 'pour it down' robustly, not crudely, but it's so voluptuous a drink, different from other beer (forget the bottled versions, one of which I had the other day), that you'd never just sip it--otherwise, you'd have wine instead. I hardly ever get it here, it's very expensive to get on tap, much more than other beers even in the (usually) Irish bars you can get it.

And beer with breakfast, indeed, beer AS breakfast follows a great old tradition. It was very usual in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages, and even the Pilgrim Fathers did it. One reason that they put into Plymouth in Massachusetts Bay was to replenish water supplies in order to make some fresh beer. Those Pilgrims might have been rather stern, but "sober-sided" might not have been the best way to describe them.

:dunno:May not have been Guiness, the more refind alternatuves are Murphys, a similar product, or what older ladies drank Milk Stout. Dame Ninette or Madame as she was known, was avery sharp lady
who everyone respected, she would stand no nonsense not even from the top dancers. She mellowed a bit as she grew older, I remember writing to her about a project I was working on for young dancers and she was very supportative and helpful. Yes she was quite well spoken, but her Irish accent slipped in sometimes.