Dorset author and actor, 75, publishes new biography

John Chapman, who lives near Sherborne in Dorset, has just published “Playing the Empire - A Dancer's Life” – the biography of a remarkable woman. Peggie Sheridan was, at various times, a weaver, a shoemaker, a horsewoman, an ice-carter and a successful dress-designer. But, above all, she was a dancer – a performer. Born into the Edwardian theatre, she danced her way through India and the British Empire in the Twenties and Thirties. She survived some of the great upheavals of the century; she saw the Empire in its prime, and she knew it in its last declining years. Married three times, she had her share of triumph and tragedy; and she died in Bournemouth, alone and unknown.

“Playing the Empire” tells of her adventures – appearing in music hall as a child, playing panto in South Africa in her teens, joining a Russian ballet company in Vladivostok, marrying in Shanghai, travelling – and performing – all over India and the Far East, escaping from the Japanese, settling in post-war Malaya and founding a fashion house during the Emergency.

The book can be purchased from his web site.

The author, who lived in Malaya himself in the Fifties and Sixties, says: “I knew Peggie personally, both out East and in her old age. What has been absolutely fascinating, though, has been researching the background to her life – the places she knew and the events she lived through. Hers was a life that could not, perhaps, have been lived at any other time.”

John Chapman was born in Surrey and educated at Epsom College. He took a degree in agriculture at London University and worked in Malaya for the Rubber Research Institute for eight years. Returning to England in 1963, he was, briefly, a teacher and then worked in public relations for over twenty years. A keen amateur actor all his life, he turned professional after his retirement (stage name John Nicholas) and has appeared on television and in many theatre productions. He was recently seen in a national tour of ‘Rebecca’. He has written many articles, and some poetry, over the years, but ‘Playing the Empire’ is his first book.