“Turn your feet out and keep your bodies straight, I don’t want to see any creases around your stomach,” chirps Maureen Millard to her class of lively students. “Think about what your hands are doing,” she calls out to the ladies.

“Stretch as far as you can and now breathe in and hold it for eight seconds – fill your lungs with oxygen.” Welcome to classes for the Margaret Morris Technique where women up to the age of 92 take on therapeutic dance routines that exercise the whole body. Maureen, aged 68, from Kinver, started using the technique when she was 27.

She has worked her way through the 12 grades before passing her teacher’s exams.

“I found that I felt so much fitter and full of energy,” she says. “I used to suffer from sciatica but this helps to keep you fit and healthy.”

Margaret Morris trained in drama and ballet as a child and this formed her desire to create her own “more natural” method of movement.

She opened her first school in 1910 and went on to develop performance dance companies from the 1920s to 1960s.

Maureen teaches classes at Wombourne and Kinver community centres but sessions are held all over the world including in Canada, Australia and Japan.

Trudy Grieve, aged 92, of Wombourne, has been coming to the club in Wombourne for more than 40 years. “It helps to make you flexible and keeps your brain active as you are having to co-ordinate different parts of your body at the same time,” she smiles.

Piano music plays gently in the background as the ladies stretch their bodies, move their hands and arms in graceful ballet-like movements and point their toes.

Margaret Dowson, 72, of Bull Meadow Lane in Wombourne, joined a few months ago. “People who have suffered from arthritis have noticed that it starts to improve when they do the class,” she says. “We even do eye movements to work the muscles and keep us as fit and young-looking as possible.”

Maureen, who has two children and three grandchildren, adds: “Recently during the bad weather I was able to go snow walking with my family and I said to my grandchildren that us older ones can still show them a thing or two.”