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Anne Bloomfield was born Anne Childs in 1942 in Huthwaite, a village on the Nottinghamshire Derbyshire border.   Her mother, who had been a dressmaker and seamstress, was living with her sister as both women’s husbands were serving overseas. Anne’s father was a sergeant in the Durham Light Infantry. Before the war he had been a butchery manager for the Co-op.  He returned to this profession briefly after his return from the war.  However he later became a coal miner as it offered greater financial security for his family. A brother, John was born in 1948.

Anne attended the local primary school where she was taught by elderly teachers who had come out of retirement due to the Second World War.  They had been pupil teachers in the early 20th century and Anne was to draw on this experience as she developed her interest in the training of teachers under this system.

Anne began taking ballet lessons at this time and this was to provide her with an interest which would become the most important thing in her life.  For Anne, to dance was to live and even when terminally ill and confined to her hospital bed she responded to music by interpreting it with movement.

At the age of eleven, Anne moved with her family to the nearby town of Mansfield and was settling into her new secondary modern school when she received extra-ordinary news. She returned home from school to discover that the head teacher had called to see her parents and told them that a student had failed to take up a grammar school place and that it was available for her.

Anne always spoke with affection about her school days. The school was based in a former prisoner of war camp and she felt greatly privileged to move, with the other female pupils, to the newly built Sherwood Hall School.  Anne completed A-levels in English, Geography and Art and went in 1960 to Sheffield City Training College (Now part of Sheffield Hallam University).  She completed her certificate and started teaching at Windley Junior School in the tough Forest Road area of Nottingham in September 1963 having married Don Bloomfield just three weeks before.  Don, a teacher and cabinet-maker, who died suddenly in 2000 provided grounding to her creativity and enthusiasm.  They both had a very strong sense of a combined vocation as teachers, developing skills which enabled young people to express themselves and develop aesthetic appreciation.  During this time they both enjoyed attending the Dartington International Summer Schools and the East Midlands Dance Group.

Anne began to make a name for herself as a very creative and child-centred teacher able to reach out to some of the most vulnerable children in the city.  She also undertook some youth work, teaching dance in girls’ clubs across the city. After two years she moved to a post created specially for her as a peripatetic teacher of dance.  She taught dance across several secondary schools and later at the City Training College, where she continued to teach part-time following the birth of her daughter, Felicity in 1972.

In 1976 she returned to full-time work, the college had become part of Trent Polytechnic and she was appointed as a teacher of dance on a new Creative Arts Degree. At the same time she began her association with the University of Hull, teaching on in-service courses for Humberside teachers. She began studying for a Batchelor of Education degree, but contacts at Hull suggested she enrol on an M.Ed which she did, carrying out research into the teaching of Dance in Higher Education especially the tricky subject of assessment, graduating in 1981.  This was followed by a PhD where she examined the role of dance in the curriculum from a historical and philosophical perspective, which she finished in 1986.  It was at this time when she became a Fellow of the RSA. She also became involved in the History of Education Society.

Following her PhD she used her knowledge of the developing physical education curriculum to contribute to JA Mangan’s Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism and numerous publications and journal articles followed, the last, was published posthumously and was only finished a month before she died.

By the early 1980’s Anne had returned to working in teacher education and was responsible for setting up a B.Ed in the Combined Arts.  Later this was to become a BA course and she remained responsible for it until her retirement in 2003.  Always wanting to develop innovative methods for teaching and learning, Anne began an innovative scheme to interpret history through the arts.  Based at Clifton Hall, the stately home where the Education Department was located, over 1000 children visited to dress up in period costume, to re-create everyday life and to dance.  Later an international dimension was added to this when Anne became visiting professorial scholar at Edith Cowan University, Perth and she took the costumes with her.  Australian school children danced in the replica of Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour in Fremantle Harbour.  Later when this ship came to the UK, the same children took part in a record-breaking school trip to dance with their British counterparts in Whitby. 

Anne’s next major project was to construct a biography of Jane Annie Roadknight, an innovative educator who had revolutionised Early Years Education in Nottingham City in the early 20th Century.  Her account of her life is in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Anne’s professional identity made her at home with artists, but as a dancer she also saw herself as a physical educator and a lesser known aspect of her work was her contribution to Nottingham Trent University’s BSc Sport Programme, lecturing on the aesthetics of sport and supervising student dissertations.

Don’s death in 2000 was a severe blow to Anne and although she continued to work at Nottingham Trent University, she became more interested in her leisure time and social life. She bought a camper van and travelled all over the UK visiting historic sites, painting and keeping up with her many friends.  On her retirement in 2003 she travelled to New Zealand and Australia and attended the Australia and New Zealand History of Education Society Conference and met with her friends from Edith Cowan. 

She continued her involvement with Nonesuch Historical Dance, an interest she had shared with her husband, himself a keen folk dancer and attended workshops in both the UK and in Spain.  She also attended a conference in Sweden on the famous ballet dancer Marie Taglioni on whom she had written.

It was a shock when only 2 years into her retirement she suddenly became ill with diabetes.  A form of pancreatic cancer was diagnosed.  Faced with the prospect of an extremely limited lifespan Anne set to making sure she lived it to the full.  She organised a concert at Hassop Hall in Derbyshire by her friend the concert pianist, Ronan McGill, which was enjoyed by a hundred RSA Fellows and guests from the East Midlands and surrounding regions. She also judged the History of Education Society Book Prize, which now bears her name.  She made one final trip abroad to Spain to visit friends and to see the Alhambra.  She died within two weeks of her return.