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Rathbone Stock Co. Good For 1 Dance Token

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 Posted 08/29/2020  11:00 am Show Profile   Bookmark this topic Add dar76124 to your friends list Get a Link to this Message Number of Subscribers
Anyone familiar with this? It is not listed in Tokencatalog and the only online reference to Rathbone Stock Co is in the UK.


Rathbone-Stock-Co.-Good-For-1-Dance-Token
Rathbone-Stock-Co.-Good-For-1-Dance-Token
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cointagous's Avatar
United States
1143 Posts
 Posted 08/29/2020  12:29 pm  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add cointagous to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
The look and style of it feels American with the fancy five but I have not seen a "good for" that was for a dance before. I ran the name and came up with the Rathbone Brothers UK connection as well so it easily could be English. I could find no further info so and would be interested to see what others will say.
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Sap's Avatar
Australia
16810 Posts
 Posted 08/30/2020  07:38 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add Sap to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
Assuming the "5" is an effective denomination, then it presumes a decimal monetary system - the 5 would thus be 5 cents, and given the age of these tokens typically, then the use of a decimal currency and English-only language restricts the usage to America and Canada.

Presuming that the "dancing" in question would be of the exotic and not-entirely-legal variety, it seems unsurprising to me that there will be little public documentation on their use.

I've also corrected the spelling of the thread title, to aid future Google-users to find this thread.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Circus's Avatar
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3079 Posts
 Posted 08/30/2020  09:45 am  Show Profile   Bookmark this reply Add Circus to your friends list Get a Link to this Reply
Generally They were dance halls, that charged a small sum to dance with women. A taxi dancer is a paid dance partner in a partner dance. Taxi dancers are hired to dance with their customers on a dance-by-dance basis. When taxi dancing first appeared in taxi-dance halls during the early 20th century in the United States, male patrons would typically buy dance tickets for a small sum each. They were around for 100 years, and can still be found today.
The women were known as taxi-dancers because their pay was proportional to the amount of time they spent dancing with customers, as with a cab driver and a passenger. They were themselves not very different from their customers: unmarried, working-class women who were often stigmatized as prostitutes. Many of these women justified their choice of career to those who judged them by noting the comparatively high wages they received as taxi-dancers.
Immigrants from all over flocked to the dance halls to overcome the loneliness in their new lives with the help of the taxi-dancers. The patrons are a motley crowd. Some are uncouth, noisy youths, busied chiefly with their cigarettes. . Others are middle-aged men whose stooped shoulders and shambling gait speak eloquently of a life of manual toil. Sometimes they speak English fluently. More often their broken English reveals them as European immigrants .

In other words, the taxi-dance halls empowered men who would have otherwise been outcasts.
Most used paper tickets as means of keep control of the money coming in. There was a cashier cage that sold them. During the 20's 30's and 40's there were some that probably used tokens, more likely due to another business that used them pool halls, arcades or saloons. They were dance halls in most western countries. Lots of times near military bases.
I saw some old west type dance token in pictures, but they were more likely fantasy items according to the sales catalog.
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