In 1983, they were asked to join the cast of the show for its Berlin premiere but returned later to London for Crawford's revival of the show at the Victoria Palace.After they had spent five years with Barnum, a Walt Disney talent spotter auditioned the Barbours for a role at one of the American company's theme parks, which resulted in their playing for seven years as stilt-walking Beefeaters at the Epcot Centre in Orlando, Florida. Peter recreated his "Little Tich" dance routine for a Royal Variety Show performance at Drury Lane in 1983.Peter's daughter, Sue, took her mother's place in the act eventually and father and daughter forged a successful version of the stilt-walking act for the West End premiere in 1981 of the Broadway musical Barnum, which starred Michael Crawford. Later, they were both able to work together in the Ensa production Stars in Battledress, touring in Germany. It was there that Peter met his future wife, Jean Dooley, a singer in the show. Demobilised in 1946, the brothers resumed their stage career and in 1952 Jean joined Peter and Roy in the long-boot dance routine and also mastered the high stilts, which became a hallmark of their act, a debonair top-hat-and-tails dance number.They worked in every major theatre and, at one time, also travelled with their own revue company before Roy left to form an act of his own, puppetry on stilts, with his wife, Billie. As the need for distinctive high-quality programming in every genre becomes ever more prevalent, pragmatic partnerships must emerge.The best plan for the future in all this change and uncertainty is to invest in creative staff, trust them and their ideas, reward them and create organisations which are prepared to take risks, to back creativity and be interesting and exciting places to work.A final thought: a man, Ze Frank, became famous when he created a collection of video invitations to his 21st birthday.
He and Roy followed in the elongated footsteps of the celebrated Little Tich by performing the difficult long-boot dance as a speciality.The Second World War interrupted their success on the stage, Roy being drafted into South-East Asia Command for four years, while Peter enlisted in the Royal Artillery for five. He was born in Skegness in 1922 and began as a dancer and comedian in variety and revues, joining his elder brother, Roy Jnr. Within two years of his stage d?t at the Leeds Empire Theatre, he was appearing in London. The variety artiste Peter Barbour towered - quite literally - over his contemporaries, in a career which encompassed six decades.
He was a stilt-walker in an unusual speciality act that took him to all the leading British music-hall and variety theatres and to many foreign countries too, ending up with a long stint in America for the Walt Disney organisation. The son of a comedian and stage producer, Roy Barbour, who was noted for summer shows, revues and panto, Peter was the middle of three sons who all went on to become stilt-walkers. "More choice for parents makes clear that admission to school will be central to achieving the radical reforms that the White Paper outlines," the report says.. Peter Dudley Barbour, stilt-walker: born Skegness, Lincolnshire 5 November 1922; married 1948 Jean Dooley (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1975); died Northampton 12 September 2005. Ministers are consulting over a proposed new code of practice on school admissions to be published this autumn.Today's report concludes that schools should be legally compelled to comply with the code, arguing that the current situation, which only requires them to "have regard" to it, was not working. This social selection has produced a worrying situation where middle-class parents are hogging too many places at successful primary schools at the expense of poorer children who live nearby, it says.The report warned that England is heading for an admissions crisis where only parents who know how to play the system will win places at the best schools because of the Government's new White Paper proposals to allow all 24,000 of England's schools to run their own admissions.It also singled out faith schools for criticism arguing that many took far fewer children eligible for free school meals - an indicator of poverty - than they would have been expected to given their catchment areas.The report follows an earlier study by Mr Waterman into covert selection in secondary schools which concluded that they were using parental interviews to pick children from better-off families in the hope that they would boost their exam league table rankings.It came after an Independent survey revealed that up to 100,000 parents failed to get their children into their first-choice secondary school this year. Other primaries use their open days, when prospective parents visit, to put poorer families off by stressing the contributions they would be expected to make to the school fund or the extensive programme of residential visits and music lessons that they would have to pay for."Add these elements together, which some schools seem unashamedly to do, and it is all too apparent that education that is free at the point of delivery can actually mean quite expensive at the point of delivery," the report says.