Talking to the 74-year-old photographer Colin Jones is like meeting an early prototype of Billy Elliot. The son of an East London printer, he grew up during the Second World War, was evacuated on three occasions and attended no fewer than 13 schools before he was 16. He suffered from dyslexia, and one school told him he would be “lucky to get a job as a road sweeper”.
Instead, he took up ballet lessons, made it into the Royal Ballet School, joined the touring company and married the great ballerina Lynn Seymour. The marriage didn’t last long.
“Kenneth Macmillan did everything he could to break us up,” he says of the Royal Ballet’s celebrated choreographer. “She was his muse and he was a very selfish man.”
