Mr Cottle (94) is believed to be not only the country's oldest dance teacher, but, with 73 years' experience, the longestserving.
Last week, he and wife Dorothy (82) bade farewell to current pupils and a lifetime of training competitive and social dancers.
‘‘We've had a wonderful time with it,'' Mr Cottle said.
New Zealand Federation of Dance Teachers president Barbara Edwards said Mr Cottle's career was ‘‘quite possibly a New Zealand record''.
She did not know of any professional dance teachers who were older or had worked for as long.
‘‘It's very unusual,'' Christchurch-based Mrs Edwards said.
‘‘Most people would not have turned professional so early . . . and most retire in their 70s.''
Mr Cottle got serious about teaching dance in 1935, when he was 21.
‘‘I got pretty keen on it and did a lot of study,'' he said. ‘‘I read nothing much else really.''
Competent dance teachers understood the intricacies and subtleties of all the great dances, Mr Cottle said.
The waltz, quick step, foxtrot, tango and Viennese waltz as well as Latin, cha cha, rumba, samba, jive and paso doble . . .
And then there are also about 30 new vogue dances. All up, Mr Cottle knows hundreds of dance steps.
Mr and Mrs Cottle have been married for 40 years and have taught dance together for just as long.
‘‘We did not compete together, because Sid was already professional and they would not let him go back to being an amateur,'' Mrs Cottle said.
So Mrs Cottle took the examinations to become a dance teacher.
‘‘They are very tough exams. And tougher for a woman because she has to know both the men's and women's parts,'' she said.
Training competitive dancers was their preferred work. Recent star pupils include James Moore, Paula Good, Ammon Mulqueen and Shane Lean.
These days, finding good male dancers ‘‘is like digging for gold''.
‘‘Peer pressure at high school seems to put them off,'' Mrs Cottle said. Her favourite dance is the foxtrot. ‘‘The hardest dance is probably the slow foxtrot because you need to be so exact with your technique,'' Mr Cottle said.
‘‘You use every part of your body from your toes to your dandruff.''
His favourite is the tango.
‘‘I like the staccato movement. It's a man's dance.''
Despite their love of dance, the couple did not often dance together in public.
‘‘People would think you were showing off, so we would just amble around like they did,'' Mr Cottle said.
Until last week, they were still teaching dance five hours a day, two evenings a week in the Sacred Heart School hall, North East Valley.
But a broken hip for Mr Cottle and arthritis for Mrs Cottle has brought the curtains down.
The Cottles had served dance in Dunedin well, Mrs Edwards said.
‘‘They have been passionate. ‘‘I'm sure they have kept going this long because of their commitment to dance.''
They would continue to take an interest in dance and in their former pupils, Mr Cottle said. ‘‘We say we've stopped. But if any of the good ones get stuck, they'll come up here and see us.''
