Fox-trotting through the new bliss

"The young men in their ever-widening 'bags' and double-breasted jackets, slicked and fresh, a different race from their fathers, 'jazzed' with the shameless females in those dance halls and they became together, almost incidentally, the first 'moderns' of the twentieth century ... In the explosive dancing boom after the war, the young from sixteen to twenty-five flocked into the dance halls by the hundred thousand; some went 'jigging' as often as six times a week. The great 'barn' we patronised as apprentices held at least a thousand. Almost every evening except Friday (cleaning night at home) it was jammed with a mass of young men and women, class desegregated for the first time. At 6d. a head (1s on Saturdays) youth at every level of the manual working class, from the bound apprentice to the 'scum of the slum', fox-trotted through the new bliss in each other's arms ..."

- Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum, on post-WW1 life in Salford