Nigel Kelsey’s Games, Rhymes, and Wordplay of London Children is a hefty (my butcher’s scale weighed it at 2.4 pounds), handy, treasure of 2000 examples of verbal childlore collected in the city of London between the years 1960 and 1984. Kelsey, in his introduction, states that he chose to collect from a “specific area, namely Inner London” and to gather from a specific age group, “from children roughly between the ages of nine and eleven, who are full of their currently used repertoire but can look back to their younger years very easily and without embarrassment” (xxviii).

Kelsey was a career educator for thirty-two years, first as a primary school teacher, then as a class teacher, then as deputy head and headteacher. His interest in children’s traditional lore began in the 1960s, and his early fieldwork was used for his thesis, Speech and Creative Writing of Fourth Year Junior School Children, submitted for the University of London Diploma in the Education of Children in Junior School (1969). Then, spanning the years 1982-1984, Kelsey visited and recorded in “twenty-one schools in the area of what was then the Inner London Education Authority” (xxvi). He states, “The study took two years and included the transcription of about thirty hours of audiotape. Because of the limited time-scale, and its coverage of the whole of an inner city area, the study is unique” (xxiv). By 1986, Kelsey had transcribed and collated all the data he had collected over close to twenty-five years. He then produced a typewritten manuscript and deposited a copy of it in the archives of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at the University of Sheffield in 1989. Unfortunately, Kelsey did not live to see his life’s work published; he died in 1990. However, he did live long enough to bequeath to the National Centre the entire set of material on childlore that he had collected in the field, as well as his manuscript notes.

Kelsey was meticulous in his aims and scholarship. He carefully chose to tape-record verbal lore from the widest possible social range. Between 1982 and 1984, he states, he visited schools and recorded children from locations that fell into roughly three categories:

1. Schools where the majority of the children came from professional, managerial, and “white collar” families.

2. Schools where the overwhelming majority of children came from semi-skilled, unskilled, and unwaged families.

3. Schools where there was a fairly balanced social composition.

The introduction to Games, Rhymes, and Wordplay of London Children illustrates Kelsey’s scholarly breadth. In the space of twenty-two pages, Kelsey presents a quick overview of the history of children’s folklore studies, from Chambers and Halliwell, through Lady Gomme and the Opies in England, to Brian Sutton-Smith in New Zealand, Ian Turner in Australia, and a number of American folklore collectors, including Botkin, Abrahams, Talley, and Hughes and Bontemps.

Kelsey’s methodology included tape-recording small group sessions, roughly of ten or twelve schoolchildren, ideally made up of equal numbers of boys and girls. These sessions took place in “classroom, school library, or spare room” (xxxii). He would usually transcribe the recordings between visits. He states, “I have not bowdlerized or censored rhymes, although in the case of the ephemera . . . I have left out some of those which seemed to offend the general consensus of children’s extremely liberal conceptions of good taste” (xxxiv). What Kelsey left out seems to be the majority of his jokes and entries that made it to the section “Just For Fun” (Section 11, pages 581 - 741). He defends his choice of leaving out material which was scatological or sexual in nature by informing the reader, “I had to be aware when collecting children’s lore in many schools that I was an ex-teacher, and that if I showed too much familiarity and permissiveness it would not be helpful to discipline” (xliii).

Janet E. Alton and J. D. A. Widdowson, the editors of Kelsey’s manuscript and notes, offered to work with him in 1989. Though Kelsey was seriously ill in his last year, he was able to convey in correspondence, and an occasional meeting, his views and intentions for his manuscript. Alton and Widdowson tell us that they supplied minimal editorial “interventions.” The corrected and retyped manuscript lacked only one major thing, page numbers to Kelsey’s numerous “references to authors and abbreviated titles of printed sources.” Alton and Widdowson, along with a group of voluntary researchers and students at the Centre, spent the 1990s carefully checking references and providing page numbers. During the checking process, the editors found “many more parallels and a few additional publications which had not been noted in the first round of editing” (xiii). Alton and Widdowson decided to “trace and present only those selective references already accessible to Nigel Kelsey at the time the original manuscript was completed in 1986, but to include a selected further reading section to extend the research for parallels (xiii).

The result of their work is impressive. It is a comprehensive compilation of London childlore, including selective references to numerous publications, as well as a discography. It is a scholarly treasure of a book, which deserves a place on the English childlore shelf, alongside the works of Alice B. Gomme and Peter and Iona Opie.

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[Review length: 876 words • Review posted on February 25, 2022]