June Dally-Watkins takes her charm school to China
Our queen of etiquette, June Dally-Watkins, is on a new crusade – to bring old-fashioned Australian manners to the world. Michelle Endacott discovers a legend ready to reveal the secrets of her success.
The Grand Ballroom is awash with shiny Dior dresses and white patent leather shoes by Dolce & Gabbana – and all the diamonds are real. We’re in China’s industrial mega-city of Guangzhou and the people in the world’s most expensive clothes are children who are in equal parts loved, indulged and pushed to succeed.
In the middle of this frenzy of 44 Chinese children learning all things “Western” is Australia’s very own June Dally-Watkins. She is our undisputed queen of etiquette, our nation’s rst recognised supermodel, who mixed with Hollywood greats and was romanced by Gregory Peck. Over six decades, her deportment school taught a generation of Down Under teens the “Dally pose” – one foot in front of the other, body at an angle and always with a smile.
In a China so desperate to modernise it is demolishing the “old” at breakneck speed, Miss Dally (as she is known to all) is nding spectacular success teaching a new generation her secrets of deportment and good manners. In doing so, the former Weekly cover girl is fast reviving her brand – and all at the age of 89.
Outside, it feels very 21st Century – the promising bright blue sky of early morning has been smudged grey by smog, as industry here never stops. A pollution meter is posted with every weather report: spend an hour outside and you feel a little short of breath. Yet inside the city’s ve-star, oak-panelled Mandarin Oriental Hotel, it’s like stepping back to the 1950s. Those designer buckle-up shoes are teamed with white ankle socks, the frillier the better.
This afternoon, Miss Dally is giving special tutoring in the art of the curtsy to 31-year-old Angel Chen, who shares her incredible story via an interpreter.
“I was left at an orphanage as a baby – it was 1985 and the one-child policy was very strict. Girls were given up, as people wanted a son.
“When my adopted mother came to the orphanage, they said they heard a child crying so loudly she must be healthy, so they would pick her. That was me,” Angel says, tears streaming down her face. “Back then, people thought a daughter was cheaper than a son. My parents cared for me well, but I was teased at school and by neighbours about being adopted.”
Angel’s new family were poor peasant farmers. At 18, she left home, married and together she and her husband built a jewellery business – one so hugely successful, she can send her own 10-year-old daughter, Julie, to Miss Dally’s four-day $4000 course. “I want to give Julie con dence,” Angel says.
Angel’s story has poignant echoes of Miss Dally’s own childhood back in rural Australia. “Did you know I was adopted?” Miss Dally asks me, over a cup of Earl Grey in ne bone china, perched on a leather sofa on the 24th oor of the Mandarin Oriental.
“Just look where we are now. I have had a very amazing life, from a little bush girl who never really had a name. I was an illegitimate child and my mother only married Major David Dally-Watkins when I was 15, and he adopted me. I was never christened.
“My mother went to Sydney to hide the fact she was going to have a child. When my grandfather heard I was born, he sent my mother a telegram to say, ‘Bring your baby home, we will love her’. They reared me out in the bush, but some people called me terrible names, like ‘you little bastard’.”
So, at 15, June moved to Sydney with her mother, Kay, and new stepfather. And it wasn’t long before strangers began to tell her mother, “June should be a model”.
“I was very successful, so afterwards, people would ask me, ‘How do you walk like that? How do you do your make-up?’,” she recalls.
An entrepreneur at heart, she swiftly launched the Southern Hemisphere’s rst “charm school” in 1950 to train women in etiquette and deportment. A year later, Miss Dally started Australia’s rst model agency and modelling school, and later a Business Finishing College.
She modelled the rst range of
“New Look” Christian Dior gowns own from Paris and shown at
David Jones. In between all that, she travelled the world modelling, meeting the likes of Bing Crosby and visiting the set of Roman Holiday, where she met Audrey Hepburn and enjoyed a holiday romance with Gregory Peck. She married back in Sydney (in June 1953, to John Clifford, a lieutenant in the Royal Australian Navy, though it didn’t last), and was trailblazing as a working mother with four children at home – though hateful, anonymous phone calls at the time still haunt her.
“Why don’t you go home to your poor, starving children,” a voice would say, always around 7pm. Remarkable transformation
Back in modern China, next door to Miss Dally’s base in Guangzhou is the TaiKoo Hui shopping mall, with its acres of polished marble and three oors of prestige stores. Shoppers are swinging Hermès and Salvatore Ferragamo bags on each arm and there is clearly money to burn. Miss Dally slips effortlessly back into model pose as we set up our photo shoot at the mall’s two-level Dior store.
Back in the classroom, it is day four and the students are netuning their skills for graduation. On day one, the school Director
Jodie Bache-McLean lmed the students giving speeches – they almost all whispered, shoulders hunched and with terri ed eyes.
Today, they are transformed.
Just as Miss Dally and Jodie have taught them, they take up the “Dally pose”, clasp the microphone in one hand (“two hands make you look terri ed”), with head held high and a smile at the ready. Most read from gratitude letters they wrote in class.
One young teen begins, “I just wish Mother and Father could be here. I know they work hard to send me here so are too busy to come, but
I’d love them to see me now. I would like to say thank you,” she says.
Jodie is clearly bursting with pride and also touched by the honest admission. Many of the children rarely see their parents, who work long hours or overseas. Only two fathers attend graduation.
Brisbane mother Nicole Hagen is a Dally graduate who found success as a Dally deportment teacher, and is now with the team in China. “I was this very tall teenager and
Some people called me terrible names.
I would hunch myself down to look like everyone else.
“Then Miss Dally’s lessons taught me how to stand and I opened up – like a ower blossoming,” Nicole says, throwing her shoulders back and turning on the company smile. “That’s what I see every day, children blossoming.”
Indeed, while much of the course teaches deportment, curtsies and table etiquette (it is the rst time with knives and forks for some pupils), there is a focus on kindness and humility, as these children come from some of the world’s wealthiest families.
In one class, the children observe as a chambermaid cleans a room. In another, they learn how to interact with someone serving you – “Always look them in the eye and say, ‘Thank you’ with a smile”.
After the formal course, most students accompany Miss Dally on a bus to Hong Kong, where they deliver goods to Crossroads, a charity which ships them worldwide. This 89-year-old’s energy is boundless and while she could easily sit back and be a gure-head, she micromanages much of the course, and as graduation day dawns she is in the classroom, using a tissue to wipe bright red lipstick off her youngest students. “It’s just not appropriate. They are juniors,” she says, sternly ticking off the make-up artist.
Living a happy life
Now it’s time to return to Angel, who welcomed a baby brother for Julie, just as the country relaxed it’s onechild policy. “My relationship became closer and my in-laws were happy because I gave them Oscar, who is now two,” she says.
Angel made her public speaking debut during her own Dally course. “I told everybody my true life, about how I was born,” she says.
“Miss Dally always smiles and tells us to live a happy life. So now I choose to treat myself truly, so I will tell you my story,” she told a room full of fellow students. “Maybe you are the one who has the same history as me. I tell you, cherish your life. Prove you can have a happy life, even though you are adopted.”
As half the audience cried, she continued, “We need to take off the mask and live a true life.”
And Angel (born with the name YuanYuan Wang on February 1, 1985, in Beibei, Fotang, Yiwu, Zhejiang province) has a message for her birth mother, whom she longs to nd. “I live a good life,” she says. “I forgive you.”
Miss Dally’s mask is off, too. She shares her life’s story with elegance and generosity, and insists there are many more adventures to come.
“I don’t feel I am growing old. I tell myself I am still 25, the best year of my life, travelling the world. I’ll never retire. After all, what would I do?”