“Look here,” I said. “A few years ago this beautiful house had what? Shilling dances. Who peopled it? Drunken sailors, among others. Bow Street and the streets adjoining were places you either avoided like the plague; or else you worried and hurried through them, if you must. “Today, you have a great opera house restored to its proper uses. Now you have something to criticize. Before you didn’t.” It has been thanks to David Webster’s sympathetic guidance that ballet has grown in popularity until its audiences are larger than are those for opera. A man of firm purpose, few words, eclectic taste, and great personal charm, David Webster is a master of diplomatic skill. I can honestly say that some of the happiest days of my life have been spent working closely with him. Had it not been for his warm cooperation, his unquenchable enthusiasm, America might easily have been denied the pleasure and profit of Sadler’s Wells, and our lives would have been the poorer. The last time I was in Webster’s office, I remarked, “We must prepare the papers for the next tour.” Webster looked up quickly. “No papers are necessary,” he said. For the reader who has come this far, it should not be necessary for me to underline the difference between negotiations with the British and the years of wrangling through the intrigues and dissimulations of the Russo-Caucasian-Eastern European-New England mazes of indecision. My respect for and my confidence in David Webster are unlimited. He is a credit to his country; and to him, also, must go much of the credit for the creation of a genuine national opera and for the solid position of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. _ROBERT HELPMANN_ It was towards the end of the San Francisco engagement of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet that there occurred a performance, gala so far as the audience was concerned, but which was not without its sadness to the company, to me, and to all those who had watched the growth and development, the rise to a position of pre-eminence on the part of British ballet. The public was, of course, completely unaware of the event. It is not the sort of thing one publicizes. Robert Helpmann, long the principal male dancer, a co-builder, and an important choreographer of the company, resigned. His last performance as a regular member of the organization took place in the War Memorial Opera House. The vehicle for his last appearance was the grand _pas-de-deux_ from the third act of _The Sleeping Beauty_, with Margot Fonteyn. It was eminently fitting that Helpmann’s final appearance as a regular member of the company was with Margot. Their association, as first artists with the company, encompassed the major portion of its history, some fifteen years.