THE undefeated world professional ballroom dancing champion Harry Smith-Hampshire was an incorrigible perfectionist and a true gentleman. With his slim figure, upright posture, fine head of wavy silver hair and his bow-tied, moustachioed, immaculate turnout, he seemed like a figure from a bygone age. Yet with his quick wit and the hint of rakishness in the glint of his eyes, he would have fitted perfectly in the current hit BBC series, Strictly Come Dancing.

With his wife, the late Doreen Casey, he became the world master on the Viennese waltz. Their speciality in this dance was a dizziness-inducing finale of 64 bars of continous fleckerls, or 360-degree spins on the spot, at speeds rising to 84 rotations per minute.

Harry Smith-Hampshire was born in 1921. He grew up surrounded by a large extended family, and, after leaving school in Blackpool, he went to work for an estate agency.

On turning 18, he volunteered for the Royal Navy in the Fleet Air Arm and he remained in the services through the Second World War, based mainly in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as an engineer. He met his first wife, Mary, in Australia at the end of the war. In 1946 they married and had a daughter, Ann, a year later, going back to Blackpool to live in the family home.

Blackpool was the perfect home town for a budding ballroom professional but as Smith-Hampshire became more serious about competitions, his wife decided to give up dancing to look after their daughter. His first new partner did not want to turn professional and it was with his next partner, Doreen Casey, that he made his mark on the world dancefloor. By 1960, his first marriage was beyond repair. He and Casey married.

In the meantime, they had become the world’s most successful couple on the floor. Between 1955 and 1961, when they retired from competition dancing after winning the World Professional Modern Championship, they were unbeaten in five-dance titles.

But this success did not come without a struggle. In 1950, after winning the British Amateur title, they had concentrated on building up their schools around the country, including the Lambeth School of Dancing. But the time spent teaching meant that there was not enough left to practice, and in 1953 they had a humiliating defeat in the Star Championships, trailing home in the last 24.

After three days of agonising, Smith-Hampshire and Casey decided to hire a manager to run the schools. They went on to win the 1955 European Championship, beginning their run of unbroken success across five dances, although it was not until 1958 that they won the British title, a four-dance event without the Viennese waltz.

In 1957 they were invited by the Russian Ministry of Culture to give demonstrations and lectures in Moscow on the art of ballroom dancing. During their two-week visit, they performed in the Kremlin on a specially built outdoor stage next to the Presidium building, to a live audience of 18,000 people, which included many politicians. This show was televised, and through it Casey and Smith-Hampshire introduced the international or “English” style of ballroom dancing to the former Soviet Union.

Ballroom dancing swiftly caught the Soviet public imagination, just as it is doing in China today. There are now hundreds of thousands of young dancers in Russia and its surrounding states — many more than there are in the UK, although Strictly Come Dancing may be about to inspire a renaissance. There are champions from the former Eastern Bloc countries in almost every international final, across both Latin and ballroom, and their balletic and athletic dominance seems almost unassailable — a feat of national success for which Smith-Hampshire and Casey must bear much of the credit, at least as the pair whose dazzling performances first impressed so many potential dancers.

The couple were regular stars on Come Dancing when that programme was at its height and were dance consultants to Steptoe and Son and Hancock’s Half Hour. They danced in front of the Royal Family, and gave 170 ballroom-dancing performances at Blackpool’s Opera House. They continued to dance in shows and demonstrations and on television until 1968, when their daughter Sophie was born.

They then turned to adjudicating, and Smith-Hampshire took to writing. He published the bestselling technique manual on the Viennese waltz, wrote many articles for Dance News and edited the magazine of his professional society, the National Society for Teachers of Dancing.

A stickler for technique, he was afraid of no one, meaning that his views, including his opinions on the efficacy of the “skating system”, by which marks are awarded in dance competitions, were often controversial. This meant that he was not always popular with some of dancing’s most powerful, but it was a rare occasion when he was unable to charm a lady into acquiesence.

Although he spoke rarely of this period in his life, after handing over the management of the schools he joined the company Mecca as the manager of the Tiffany nightclub in London. He worked for Mecca until retiring at 65. His other passions were bridge and golf.

In the last few years of his life Smith-Hampshire taught himself computer technology, including HTML, so that he could rail on his website against the modern depredations upon the world of ballroom dancing. One recent target was the tango: “The tango has now become the worst championship dance in terms of the destruction of its historic character by unsuitable choreography,” he wrote. He welcomed the return of expressions of “love” to the dance of love, the rumba, which had passed through a unwelcome fast stage: “It is not supposed to be all frenetic whiplash movement.” And he criticised the British Dance Council, the governing body of dance, for seeming “excessively concerned with secrecy”.

His wife died in 2002. He is survived by daughters from both marriages.

Harry Smith-Hampshire, ballroom dancer, was born on May 8, 1921. He died after a heart operation on November 9, 2004, aged 83.