Ben the Sailor
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Inspired by Keith Rose's Crib Diagrams, for Playford style dances I have added a few extra symbols.
Ben the Sailor is an English Country Dance. It was devised by George McFarren in 1808 and published in 12 Country Dances dedicated to the Young Gentlemen of Ealing School. It was interpreted by Regency Dances (website) sometime before 2026-04-30. It is a proper Triple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars. An online description of the dance may be found here.
McFarren writes:
Promenade three couple ::::: cast off one couple and half figure at bottom ::::: the three Ladies hands round, while each Gentleman takes hold of the Lady's hand who stands next him ----- back again ----- the Lady hey at top and the Gentleman at bottom :::::
The Regency Dance site appears to show the dancers doing the star "back again" by having everyone dropping hands, turning 180 to face the other way and taking hands again, this time the ladies have their left hands in the center. The quadrilles I've looked at (and later, US square dances) would have the couples wheel around putting the gents into the center to take left hands, but I don't know whether that was a later invention.
Considering how the dancers are moving at the end of B1, I think it would make more sense to have M1 pass M2, and W1 pass W3, (for the heys in B2) but that's not what the animation on the regency site shows.
The animation plays at 120 counts per minute normally, but the first time through the set the dance will often be slowed down so people can learn the moves more readily. Men are drawn as rectangles, women as ellipses. Each couple is drawn in its own color, however the border of each dancer indicates what role they currently play so the border color may change each time through the minor set.
The dances on the Regence Dances site are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
| A1 | 1-8 | Three couple promenade round |
| A2 | 1-4 | 1s long cast down as 2s move up |
| 5-8 | 1s half figure eight down through the 3s | |
| B1 | 1-8 | Ladies take right hands for a star, men step clockwise to next lady and join hands with her, then star promenade back to places |
| B2 | 1-6 | W1 pass W2, M1 pass M3 right, heys for three across at ends |
| 7-8 | 1s partner change to become proper |
If you find what you believe to be a mistake in this animation, please leave a comment on youtube explaining what you believe to be wrong. If I agree with you I shall do my best to fix it.
If you wish to link to this animation please see my comments on the transience of my youtube URLs. You may freely link to this page, of course, and that should have no problems, but use one of my redirects when linking to the youtube video itself:
https://www.upadouble.info/redirect.php?id=BenTheSailor
The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. I do not have a date for the interpretation, so it may be under copyright. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2026 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This website is copyright © 2021-2026 by George W. Williams V
My work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Most of the dances have more restrictive licensing, see my notes on copyright, the individual dance pages should mention when some rights are waived.