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.
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