STEVE WRIGHT sits at a large table in a lounge he refers to as the “dancing room” inside his Darlington home. The surfaces are filled with porcelain ornaments of elegant dancers frozen in delicate embraces and a framed drawing of a waltzing couple dominates one wall.

In front of Steve, spread out across the brightly-polished table top, are dozens upon dozens of black and white photographs and newspaper cuttings of a dashing young couple in ballroom attire, smiling as they waltz and fox-trot across distant dance floors together.

Steve, now 80, is the dashing young man in the photographs, and the beautiful woman is his late wife Kathy. At the height of their powers, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the couple were the toast of the professional dancing circuit; winning all the top national dance competitions including the British Open Senior Championship which they waltzed away with three times in a row. They danced on BBC television decades before it became the preserve of celebrities, and their reputation brought the renowned Blackpool Festival Orchestra up to play at Darlington’s Dolphin Centre three times in the 1980s.

Last month, Kathy died, at the age of 80, after a period of ill-health, and her passing marked the end of the most successful dance partnership ever produced in the North East, if not the whole country.

“They were great days,” says Steve, as he looks over at the bright young couple in the photographs.

“We travelled all over the country for competitions, it was exciting although we never actually got to see anything because we’d go down to places like London and our only thoughts were how long it was going to take us to get there and back from Darlington. It was only later when we got a caravan that we actually got to see and enjoy these lovely places together.”

The couple danced at the most illustrious venues of their time including London’s Royal Albert Hall, the Winter Gardens, in Blackpool, and Bridlington Spa, on the Yorkshire coast.

THE pair regularly graced the ballrooms at Butlins back when the holiday parks were the height of mini-break sophistication for British families, not yet engulfed by waves of cheap overseas package holidays.

“Butlins was something different back then,” says Steve. “We won the Butlins’ National Championship when Butlins used to be all the swing. We won the first National Senior Veleta competition, which used to be organised by Butlins and the News of the World.

That was a very big do. There were 25,000 competitors at the start. It was open to everybody, so I suppose there must have been a few who probably couldn’t dance, but we danced at the Royal Albert Hall, in London, and then won the final at the Winter Gardens, in Blackpool.

It was quite special.”

Kathy was famous on the ballroom dancing scene not just for her effortless grace on the floor, but also for her beautiful handmade dresses.

“When we went to competitions it was well-known in the dancing circle that she made all her own dresses,”

says Steve. “How on earth she managed it I don’t know. She had a Singer sewing machine that she used to wind by hand and she used to spend hours at a time on it. In the early days she would stitch each and every sequin on by hand; later it was rhinestones.”

Steve, originally from Brigg, in Lincolnshire, met Darlington-born Kathy when they were both 21 and he was doing his National Service at Catterick Garrison. Fittingly, their very first meeting was at a dance and Steve says it was a genuine case of love at first sight. They danced together that first night and marriage soon followed. The young newlyweds lived together in Victoria Road, Darlington, before moving to Woodland Road, where they spent the last 46 years together.

The couple retired from competing in the 1980s, but they continued to don their dancing shoes. They got involved in informal sequence dancing and set up their own weekly dances in Darlington – first at the Dolphin Centre and later at the community centre in Bowen Road.

“The dances were very popular,”

says Steve. “We had such fun with the parties and social events that came with the dancing and we had so many wonderful friends.”

The couple also turned their talents toward creating their own dances and one of them, the Lovely Lady Waltz, proved incredibly popular and still features in dance programmes today.

Steve says: “I was dancing before I met Kathy. I was dancing when I was in the Army. Kathy was a natural musician. In early life she played the piano and the accordion, but she was also a very natural dancer and it didn’t take her long to get into the swing of things.

“Dancing was our life,” adds Steve, who says he takes some solace from the fact that his wife died peacefully at home, not in a hospital.

“We had a pact that we would never leave this house, that we would be carried out the front door in a box,” he says. “That is what happened with Kathy, and that is what will happen with me.”