He may be 94, but Frederic Franklin is not hanging up his ballet shoes just yet. Peter Elson reports:

THERE are very few people around who can still remember the end of the First World War. And fewer still who can recall exactly what they were doing.

Frederic Franklin, now 94, can clearly remember what he did on November 11, 1918.

“I put my head in the horn of my parents’ gramophone, at our home at 141, Wavertree Road,” he says.

“The house was full of lots of people and it was all very jolly with the music.”

He was four-years-old and this was a seminal moment, not only for the world, but personally.

“I began moving around and doing things to the music.

“I was very ambitious and I’ve never stopped since. I so badly wanted success.”

That talent and drive took him all over the world, dancing with the top ballet companies in London, Monte Carlo and Washington.

A long-time resident of Manhattan, he is currently over from New York performing at the London Coliseum.

As part of the American Ballet Company for the past week, he played the Prince’s tutor in Swan Lake, with his last performance tonight.

After the first night party, he was hailed as the one and only man to make his debut at the Coliseum, and perform again there 75 years later.

“The tutor’s a walking role. Good entrance and good costume. The old ham is still at his best out there on stage. I still feel the thrill.”

Aged five, he saw his first silent film at Tunnel Road’s picture house, in Wavertree.

“I fell in love with the star, Pearl White, and asked, ‘Do you think we could ask her to tea?’,” he chuckles.

Yet it presaged friendships with world-famous dancers ranging from prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn to Hollywood star Ginger Rogers.

Frederic was born in 1914, in the flat over his parents Frederick and Florence’s Cocoa Rooms restaurant, later lost in the Blitz.

His first lesson was aged six, when his aunt, Doris Franklin, took him to a dance studio run by a Mrs Kelly.

“There was no bar and I just used a chair. My mother and I went off to buy dancing shoes at a theatrical shop near Lewis’s.

“When we returned, Mrs Kelly gasped, ‘What on earth are you wearing?’

“They were girls’ toe ballet shoes, but I’d got the general idea about what my destiny would be.

“The film of Billy Elliot is the story of my life. Both my parents loved the theatre and were very supportive of what I wanted to do.

“I come from a big, close family. I have relatives including my brother John, who’s 87, living in Woolton and Allerton.

“We’re always interested in what the others are doing. My nieces, nephews and their children are coming to London to see their funny old Uncle Freddie on stage.”