SOME PRESS OPINIONS

It is not every day that you can watch folklore in the making ...
One may at least be glad that some of the only gold with which London
streets were even paved, the make-believe of childhood, has been
stored so sympathetically. Punch.

Never was such an entertaining catalogue. <u>Manchester Guardian.</u>

A valuable contribution to the literature of child life ... As
far as our experience goes, we find Mr. Douglas remarkably accurate
in reproducing both the action and the sing-song which accompanies
it. His record ( we owe him our warm thanks for it ) must be the
result of hours of fraternizing with those urchins who are so quick
to resent " spying ", and of careful, patient research. <u>Christian</u>
<u>Commonwealth.</u>

A most interesting chapter in the social history of our time.
<u>Athenaeum.</u>

What a time he must have had at Islington, Stepney, and in the
obscure by-ways around the dock walls of Deptford, Bermondsey, and
the East End ! And what guile and cunning must be his to have wheedled
out of those sophisticated kiddies, who fear ridicule more than they
do motor-buses and canals, so many of the secrets of their street
fun ! His must have been a more hopeless quest, when he paid his

266

WITH OLD WHEELS.

TOPS.

PICKABACK WRESTLING.

SOME LONDON STREET AMUSEMENTS.

By EDWIN PUGH.

STILTS.

IT is Saturday and all the streets in this mixed neighbourhood are a riot of children. “Are you out?” says one boy to another; and it seems a superfluous question. Translated, however, it means: “Are you on some vexatious errand for your mother? or are you at liberty to join in any fun that may crop up?” The boy replies that he is out, and joins the noisy, moving crowd.

Men must work and women must weep, says the song; it might be added that children must play. Even the ill-used, half-starved child of the London slums can find surcease from the horrors of its lot in a world of make-believe. Rag dolls and paper balls serve the purpose just as well as the more elaborate toys of richer children; and perhaps there is compensation for the lack of such luxuries in an inevitable quickening of the imagination. Of course there are things to be enjoyed in the streets of London that are, comparatively speaking, quite aristocratic of their kind and out of the reach of the very poorest. I refer to such subtle delights as riding in goat-shays, and flying kites and air-

balloons; even marbles, balls, tops, and skipping-ropes are not to be acquired without some small outlay. But effective substitutes for these things can often be made at home by means of a little ingenuity and some miscellaneous lumber. Carts and toboggans can be constructed out of soap-boxes and the wheels of disused perambulators. It is just as easy to be happy with a rusty iron tyre, a hoop off a butter-tub, a kite made out of a bit of cane and a page from a copy-book, a tin lid with a piece of string passed through a hole in the centre that revolves merrily on its edge as you run, a lump of soft clay and a catapult or a rhubarb-bind, as with a genuine shop-made article.

In a few years the sport will be out of these children. They will be playing “pitch and toss,” and “banker” with a

MARBLES.

272

A LECTURE AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION.

SCIENTIFIC LONDON.

By JOHN MUNRO

LONDON, of course, is the scientific centre of the British Empire. Over a hundred learned societies of renown have a home there, without speaking of smaller local bodies more or less of the Pickwickian order. They are scattered throughout the heart of the Metropolis, but, like certain trades, they show a tendency to cluster in certain parts owing to kindred societies in the neighbourhood and to suit the convenience of members. Comparatively few lie east of Temple Bar, and they seem to gravitate towards the West-End. New Broad Street, E.C., has an important Institution of Mining and Metallurgy; Finsbury Circus, besides the London Institution, has the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society—dealing with antiquities of the city. When we come to Bloomsbury, we find not far from the British Museum the Royal Photographic Society, the Society of Biblical Archaeology, and the Egyptian Exploration Fund—the last pair devoted to the study of Scriptural countries.

In quiet nooks off the roaring Strand are planted the famed Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce, and Manufactures, better known as the "Society of Arts," the Institution of Naval Architects, which aims to perfect ships of every kind, the "Society for Psychical Research," engaged in the eerie task of investigating "ghosts," hypnotism, presentiments, and other uncanny phenomena of the mind, the Royal Statistical Society, and the Victoria Institute or Philosophical Society of Great Britain, which is concerned with all nature, from stars to atoms and from men to microbes.

Larger still is the scientific settlement of Westminster. Here the Royal Meteorological Society puzzles its brains over the caprices of the weather, the Royal Horticultural Society records experiments in growing flowers and fruit, and the Society of Chemical Industry is deeply engrossed with the preparation of dyes, gases, fertilisers, and so on. Here, above all, are the engineering societies,

Dr. Chester Keefer, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, ducuted ward rounds on May 4.

Recent publications include:

"Physiological Action of Natural and Artificial Radioactivity," J. G. Hamilton, *Amer. Jour. Physiol.*, Feb. 1939, V. 125, 2.

"The Diabetes of Bearded Women (Suprarenal Tumor, Diabetes and Hirsutism); A Clinical Correlation of the Function of the Suprarenal Corpus and Edward Shapiro, *Endocrinology*, 24:347, Feb. 1939, No. 2. (7th ed.)

"Sixty Dirty Republikins"

Mrs. Dorothy G. Mills Howard, a 37-year-old widow, is a junior high-school teacher in East Orange, N. J. She spent seven years in what many an educator would consider a shocking waste of time: sitting in school yards and on curbstones listening to the impromptu songs of skipping kids. Last week, having also collected songs from assistant eavesdroppers from coast to coast, Mrs. Howard was ready to publish her collection, *Folk Jingles of American Children*. It is not for squeamish readers. Sample:

Teddy on the railroad
Picking up stones;
Along came an engine
And broke Teddy's bones.
Oh, said Terry,
That's no fair.
Oh, said the engineer,
I don't care.

Mrs. Howard found that the songs of U. S. tots, often accompanied by ritualistic fingerprinting, spitting, face-making and nose-thumbing, were savage but cheerful in spirit, had "a Rabelaisian flavor." Sample:

Mary's mad and I am glad
And I know what will please her,
A bottle of wine to make her shine
And a sweet little boy to squeeze her.
Children love inelegant taunts:
Marguerite
Go wash your feet
The Board of Health
Is 'cross the street.

Old man Kelly had a pimple on his belly
His wife cut it off to make a bowl of jelly.

I see London
I see France
I see Betty's under pants.

Still popular is a ditty of the 1904 Presidential election:

Sixty needles and sixty pins
And sixty dirty Republikins.

Sixty rats and sixty cats
And sixty dirty Democrats.

More up-to-date:
Roosevelt in the White House

Talking to the ladies.

Landon in the back yard

Washing nigger babies.

Among other contemporaries of whom U. S. children sing are Macy's and Marshall Field's department stores, Mickey Mouse, Ivory Soap, Tootsie Rolls.

Sample:

All the girls that wear high heels
Work down town at Marshall Field's.

Some songs have an old English origin. One of the oldest is based on Edmund Spenser's line (in the *Faerie Queene*):

* For this work, presented as a thesis, Mrs. Howard got a doctor's degree from New York University's School of Education.

TIME, August 21, 1939

Peppy, pottering Dr. Herbert Putnam, 78, longtime head of the Congressional Library at Washington, D.C. (now librarian

emeritus), was given the J. W. Lippincott Award ($500) for distinguished service in librarianship, in accepting told the American Library Association, outspoken opponent of President Roosevelt's selection of Poet Archibald MacLeish to succeed him, that as a Scot, poet, humanist, lawyer, soldier, and orator, Poet MacLeish was a fine man to be Congressional Librarian.

Roses red and violets blew. This song has many variations, e.g.:

Roses are red, violets are blue
Vinegar stinks and so do you.

Mrs. Howard concludes that all this "unconscious literature" is "an integral part of child life," as inevitable and necessary as the smoking-room stories with which politicians and even professors give "meaning and significance to otherwise unwieldy subjects." She suggests that parents and teachers recognize the educational value of children's folk literature, that writers for children use it as a model. Says she, sagely: "[Children's] humor involves a laugh at the simpleton. But perhaps children love the simpleton better than the wise man."