The Mermaids of Miss Margaret Morris

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In the summer of 1922, a photographer named Fred Daniels posed three young women on a rock jutting out of the sea and took a picture that ended up in fashion magazines around the world. The women weren't models. They were dance students, trained by a London-born choreographer named Margaret Morris, who by then was already one of the most unconventional figures in British performance. Newspapers had a catchier name for what Daniels had captured than “dance students on a beach.” They called them mermaids, and the nickname stuck so well that it's still what people call the photos a century later.

The story behind those images is stranger and more interesting than the pictures alone let on. It involves a child actor who became the youngest theatre manager in London, an affair with a married novelist, a Riviera hotelier trying to fill empty rooms, and a woman who spent the next six decades reinventing what dance could be for.

A child star turned bohemian

Margaret Morris was born on March 10, 1891, in Kensington, London. She was performing professionally by the time she was three, reciting at parties and society drawing rooms, and had her first real stage role at eight in a pantomime production of Little Red Riding Hood. At nine she joined a Shakespearian touring company and played Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream in Regent's Park, then spent years working children's parts at Drury Lane and studying under the ballet master there.

By twelve she'd already decided the rigid Italian classical technique she was being taught wasn't for her, and she started inventing her own, freer style of movement. In 1909 she met Raymond Duncan, brother of the famous Isadora, who taught her the six classical Greek dance positions his sister had built her career on. Morris adapted them into the foundation of her own method. Not long after, the press dubbed her the first woman actor-manager in London and the youngest one yet, running her own small theatre on King's Road, Chelsea, at just twenty-one.

Building a movement

In 1910, Morris met the novelist John Galsworthy, who encouraged her to open her first proper school on St Martin's Lane and became her lover while still married to his wife, Ada. Three years later she met the Scottish painter J.D. Fergusson in Paris. The two became life partners (contrary to what a few sources claim, they never actually married) and Fergusson would go on to shape nearly everything about her artistic direction for the rest of her career.

Together they opened the Margaret Morris Club in Chelsea in 1915, which quickly turned into a gathering point for what was left of London's pre-war avant garde. Regulars included the sculptor Jacob Epstein, the writer Katherine Mansfield, the poet Ezra Pound, and the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In 1917 she opened her first Summer School in Devon, which has run almost every year since, war years excepted, and by 1922 she'd built the first school in England to combine standard education with formal training in dance and acting. The curriculum was genuinely eccentric: alongside dance composition and stage lighting, students studied painting and sculpture, mask making, dressmaking and swimming.

How a hotelier turned a photo op into a sensation

The mermaid photos came out of an unplanned bit of hotel marketing. Morris ran a summer dance school on the French Riviera through the 1920s, at a time when the Côte d'Azur hadn't yet been overrun by tourists and hoteliers were struggling to fill rooms. One of them, Antoine Sella of the Hôtel du Cap, spotted Morris's students dancing near a villa close by and invited them over for a photo shoot to help drum up business. Fred Daniels, who photographed Morris and her dancers on and off for years, staged the group in nymph-like poses around the hotel grounds, and the pictures were sold on to fashion magazines across Europe and America. It's the same visual language the modernists around her were working in at the time, closer to Arthur Kales and the soft-focus pictorialist photography that was fashionable a decade earlier than a straightforward beach snapshot, and it's likely no coincidence Morris kept close company with painters obsessed with the human body in motion, Henri Matisse's The Dance being an obvious touchstone for the era.

That same summer, a newsreel crew caught a group of her students dancing along the waterline at Harlech, on the north Wales coast. It was released by the Topical Budget newsreel series on August 14, 1922, under the title “Miss Margaret Morris' Merry Mermaids,” and it's the reason the nickname outlived the original photo shoot. Two minutes of grainy silent footage of girls larking around on a beach turned into the label people still use for the whole era of her work.

More than a summer fling

It's tempting to treat the mermaid photos as a one-off publicity stunt, but Daniels photographed Morris across at least half a decade, and the National Portrait Gallery's collection includes a 1919 postcard print titled “Reflections,” showing Morris and her dancers years before the Riviera shoot ever happened. In 1924, the pioneering cinematographer Claude Friese-Greene filmed one of her pieces, Dance of the Moods, using one of the earliest colour film processes available at the time. The mermaid photographs weren't an isolated gimmick. They were one especially photogenic moment in a much longer collaboration between a choreographer and the people documenting her work.

From beach nymph to wartime ballet pioneer

Morris didn't stay in the shallow end of her own legend. From the mid-1920s she developed a serious interest in the remedial and therapeutic side of movement, trained in physiotherapy at St Thomas' Hospital, and spent years working with disabled patients and co-writing a book with the tennis champion Suzanne Lenglen. In 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, she and Fergusson moved to Glasgow and settled into a flat at 4 Clouston Street, where they stayed for the rest of their lives.

In Glasgow she founded the Celtic Ballet in 1947, blending her own technique with Highland and Scottish country dance, and later formed the Scottish National Ballet, performing in Glasgow and Pitlochry. Her company toured the United States in the 1950s, appearing at Ted Shawn's Jacob's Pillow festival, and crossed into the Soviet Union, Austria and Czechoslovakia before the decade was out. At eighty-one, she was still working, training the dancers for a Glasgow production of the musical Hair. Margaret Morris died in Glasgow on February 29, 1980, a leap day, just shy of her eighty-ninth birthday.

You can still see the mermaids today

In November 2025, as part of Glasgow's 850th anniversary celebrations, the city unveiled a pair of blue plaques outside 4 Clouston Street honouring both Morris and Fergusson, unveiled in person by the Lord Provost, Jacqueline McLaren. Their combined archive, including footage from the original mermaid dances, is now part of a permanent exhibition, “Fergus and Meg: A Creative Partnership,” at Perth Museum and Art Gallery. It's a long way from a rock off the Riviera coast in 1922, but then again, it isn't really. A century on, people are still looking at the same photographs and wondering how a handful of dance students in swimsuits managed to look that timeless.