CONSTANCE Mary Swift, founder of Wisbech School of Dancing, has died at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King s Lynn. Mrs Smith, 87, was born in Lenton, Nottingham, but the family moved to Herne Bay where they lived until the death of her father. In 1937 she cam

CONSTANCE Mary Swift, founder of Wisbech School of Dancing, has died at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King's Lynn.

Mrs Smith, 87, was born in Lenton, Nottingham, but the family moved to Herne Bay where they lived until the death of her father. In 1937 she came with her mother to Wisbech and lived in The Crescent where, after training in London, she opened the Wisbech School of Dancing. She was also a member of the Wisbech Amateur Operatic Society and took part in a performance of The Vagabond King.

During the war she joined the Wrens and worked as a dispatch rider. After the war she restarted her school of dancing and it was through this that she met her future husband Sidney. They married in July, 1948. The couple had two children, a son who died from cancer in his mid-forties and a daughter.

Once her children were born Mary stopped teaching dancing. The family lived in The Crescent until 1975, when they moved into a bungalow they had built at the bottom of their garden on the site of the old Medworth Almshouses.

It was just a week after their return from a holiday in Malta that Mary was taken to Queen Elizabeth Hospital where she died a week later. She is survived by her husband, daughter Karen, three grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.