Elsa Wells

Elsa Wells was a British ballroom dancer, coach, and championship organizer whose career spanned the 1920s through the 1970s. In the 1920s, she competed as an amateur alongside her brother John Wells, winning the Star Championship during its original 1925–1931 run in London. In the early 1930s, Wells turned professional and partnered James Barrel, later known as James Holland. Together they placed second in the Star Professional Championship behind Timothy Palmer and Ella Spowart. Their partnership belonged to an inventive phase in British ballroom, though later attributions of particular quickstep and tango figures to Wells and Holland remain matters of tradition rather than documented choreographic record.

After Holland's death following the Second World War, Wells left competitive dancing and redirected her work toward teaching and coaching. She operated a studio in Bayswater, London, and worked with competitive couples; pupils remembered her as an unusually responsive partner-teacher who adapted closely to the dancers she coached. She later married Lavy Bakstansky.

Wells's most enduring contribution came in 1952, when she proposed a new London championship. With Lavy Bakstansky and Latin-dance pioneer Lyndon Wainwright, she assembled an organizing committee that brought the event to life. The International Professional and Amateur Ballroom Dancing Championship debuted at the Royal Albert Hall in 1953 and has taken place there annually since. The championship grew to encompass professional and amateur Ballroom and Latin divisions, as well as junior and juvenile competitions, bearing Wells's name into the 1970s and beyond.

Following Lavy Bakstansky's death in 1971, Wells appointed Albert Rudge as organizer, and later Bobby Short took the role in 1976. A Royal Albert Hall programme record from 30–31 October 1975 documents the event in its mature form under the Elsa Wells name, showing how thoroughly the championship had become embedded in the calendar of international competitive dance.