Round and round the garden

Juliet Townsend finds that children’s arcane playground rituals have survived television, texting and computer games

When Iona and Peter Opie published their groundbreaking work The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren in 1959, they started their preface by pointing out that

Queen Anne’s physician, John Arbuthnot, friend of Swift and Pope, observed that nowhere was tradition preserved pure and uncorrupt ‘but among School-boys, whose Games and Plays are delivered down invariably from one generation to another.’

Theirs was the first study to establish that this was still largely true in the mid 20th century. Steve Roud now brings the story up to date, and seeks to find out whether this rich oral tradition has survived the onslaught of computer games, texting and television.

He is the first to acknowledge that he could not duplicate the sheer scale of the Opies’ field research, which involved 5,000 children, 70 local authorities and all types of schools throughout the country. It appears that he has had direct contact with a relatively small number of individual children and schools. On the other hand, he has had access to the internet, through which he has garnered a rich store of contributions, especially from adults remembering the games and rhymes of their own childhoods.

Roud points out that for more than a century writers have bewailed the fact that ‘children are forgetting how to play’, blaming city life, the cinema, television or computer games, according to the date and the perceived threat. Actually, children’s play thrived on city streets and in playgrounds, and the stars of the cinema, television and pop music were effortlessly absorbed into their rhymes and games, from ‘Charlie Chaplin sat on a pin, How many inches did it go in?’ to ‘I’m Popeye the Sailorman, I live in a caravan’ or the more abrupt ‘Jingle Bells, Batman smells’.