Tom Roberts – plink-a-plong – 1893

Tom Roberts – plink-a-plong – 1893

Vale Iona Opie – 13 October 1923 - 23 October 2017

When asked how she became a custodian of the lore and traditions of childhood, Iona Opie, who has died aged 94, told a bedtime story. The publishing company that employed her husband, Peter, was exiled by the London blitz to Bedfordshire in 1943, and there the couple walked by a field of corn. Iona, who was pregnant, picked up a bug and recited “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home / Your house is on fire and your children all gone.” It flew and they were “left wondering about this rhyme – what did it mean? Where did it come from? Who wrote it?”

No index in the public library could direct them, so from scratch they started researching nursery rhymes. Iona claimed the rhymes were uniquely British: “All part of being frightfully tough and not minding the weather; we’re nourished with nonsense and it does us a lot of good”. The Opies collected, codified and published that nonsense.

ona had learned to study while young, as a silent child who read locked in a loo in the family house in Colchester, Essex. Her father, Sir Robert Archibald, a pathologist, was often away in Africa researching tropical diseases; her mother, Olive (nee Cant), nurtured Iona’s studies and her first purchases of old books. She meant to follow her father into science, but “I was hijacked”.

During the second world war, she made meteorological maps in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Off duty, she read I Want To Be a Success, a popular 1939 publication written by, and very much about, an old Etonian, Peter Opie, another peruser of reference books. She sent him a letter; the correspondence became a romance, an elopement, and in 1943 a marriage. “I did this very stupid thing of letting myself get fascinated with Peter. I was 19 and knew it was the end of my independent life.”

Since they had no academic background, the Opies did not know they lacked proper qualifications, or how to publish within academic conventions; the keeper of western manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, discovered them collecting riddles, and recommended them to the Oxford University Press. The couple’s inquiries were exhaustive and exhausting. Peter did the writing; Iona, whom he called “old mother shuffle paper”, did the research. They worked three shifts daily in separate rooms, communicating by note in work hours – no social life, no money, picking nettles in the park to eat in lieu of greens.

“We were both puritans; we liked hurting ourselves,” said Iona. “Neither of us liked luxury. I wanted a hard life.” She got it, although both Opies could burst into playfulness: “The happiness a child can find … is more intense than any in adult life and the treasures of childhood which often exist only in the memory are among our most precious possessions.”

Their first publication was I Saw Esau (1947), a slim precursor of the wide spines of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951) and The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book (1955). The Opies applied years of rigour to an oral culture too commonplace to have received attention before: their scholarship, informally communicated, was important to the postwar discovery of the words of ordinary people. “It took 50 generations to make up Mother Goose,” Iona said. “Nursery rhymes are the smallest great poems of the world’s literature.”

They slogged on. “We stayed home and plod, plod, plodded along.” The Opies wanted to do fieldwork among the juvenile tribes of Britain, about whom anthropologists knew nothing; they ignored claims that traditions were dead and recruited helpers to question children in 70 schools. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) revealed a complex, secret society with its “own code of oral legislation for testing, betting, swapping, keeping secrets”.

The tribes remembered from generation to generation a codex of knowledge, yet could speedily disseminate a joke nationwide. This society was unsentimental, anti-authoritarian, aware of the absurdity of adults. The book that recorded it – just before its customs were changing with the commodification of childhood – was on all the reading lists for the new subject of sociology in the 1960s.

On the Opies plodded, no car, no telly, interviewing thousands for Children’s Games in Street and Playground (1969) and filing folk fictions for The Classic Fairy Tales (1974); they also anthologised children’s verse. Books furnished their Hampshire homes (first at Alton, then West Liss) and because they tried to “think as a child”, these homes also became repositories of once-put-away childish things – toys, games and teaching aids.

After Peter’s death from a heart attack in 1982, Iona continued the work alone. Her publications included The People in the Playground (1993), a diary of two of the 13 years for which she attended morning playtime at Liss junior school to document the scatology and lewdness left out of The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren –“In 1959, you didn’t publish anything worse than ‘knickers’: now in the name of science I’m going to put in everything.” Tail Feathers From Mother Goose (1988) and Here Comes Mother Goose (1999) were meant to transmit tradition to children who no longer learned it from peers or grandmas. Iona overcame a fear that printing would dispel the spell: “The world of childhood is too independent, too large, and too vital to be affected by any book.”

She sold 20,000 books from the Opies’ private collection, worth £1m, half-price to the Bodleian in 1987. Oxford University’s appeal for purchase funds exceeded its target. Some of the money helped subsidise her son Robert’s collection of ephemera – he applied Opie principles to collecting items such as the baker’s brown paper bag and the bus ticket, and the result is now housed in the Museum of Brands in west London. Robert collaborated with Iona on The Treasures of Childhood (1989). Her son James was an expert on toy soldiers; her daughter, Letitia, worked in education. All three children had been sent to boarding schools so they should not distract from their parents’ work.

Iona changed direction temporarily with A Dictionary of Superstitions (1989), but never lost faith with children: “I have a way of life that comes from the children, I’m going to go on playing until I expire.” The encyclopedic by-product of this vow was Children’s Games With Things (1997).

The universities of Oxford, Southampton, Nottingham and Surrey, and the Open University, awarded the Opies honorary masters’ degrees and doctorates; and they won international literary medals. Iona was made CBE in 1999.

Jeremy Corbyn in Brussels – Notice the BBC Sneer added to the video

Vic Turner – October 1927 – 30 December 2012

"Turner represented all that is good about the dockers and working people," Len McCluskey

Vic Turner was one of the dock leaders known as the Pentonville Five, whose imprisonment for picketing in July 1972 led to one of the largest mass demonstrations in London, and the threat by the Trades Union Congress of a general strike. The men were arrested and jailed on the orders of the Heath government's newly set-up National Industrial Relations Court; the dispute over their jailing would be one of the defining moments in postwar industrial relations.

The dockworkers were secondary-picketing the Chobham Farm container depot in protest at proposals by employers to move their jobs to the depots; another company, Midland Cold Storage, part of the multi-national Vesty Group, applied to the NIRC for an injunction to stop further picketing; the dockers defied the injunction. MCS hired private detectives to identify the mens' leaders, and five Transport and General Workers Union shop stewards – Conny Clancy, Tony Merrick, Bernie Steer, Derek Watkins and Vic Turner – were named as ringleaders. Warrants for their arrests were issued by the NIRC for contempt of court, and four were arrested and imprisoned on 21 July; Turner, seen as the most prominent, was arrested and imprisoned as he led a demonstration outside Pentonville, where the men had been taken.

Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite (formerly TGWU), was a young shop steward in the Liverpool docks at the time, and remembered what an inspiration Turner had been. "Vic Turner," he said, "represented all that is good about the dockers in particular and working people more generally. To go to prison in the cause of trade union freedom is not something many of us have had to face, we can only hope that we would live up to the example that Vic Turner set."

There was uproar throughout the UK with demonstrations and walk-outs; the TUC General Council called for a one-day national strike to take place on 31 July, after Prime Minister Heath ignored their plea for him to intervene. A march and demonstration was organised which saw thousands march on Pentonville.

Faced by the threat of a general strike and looking for a way out of the confrontation, the Official Solicitor was sent in by the Government to look at the case. He applied to the Court of Appeal on the grounds that the NIRC had "insufficient" grounds to deprive the men of their liberty, and that the private detectives' evidence was also insufficient.

The men were set free on 26 July. The role of the NIRC was discredited; although the Industrial Relations Act remained on the statute books, it was largely ignored. Thatcher would learn from the case and later target funds rather activists.

A clever, determined man, Victor Turner was born and brought up in East London, he followed his father and his brothers into the dockyards, becoming a docker. His socialism was learnt from his mother, who took him as a child to meetings at Poplar Town Hall. He joined the TGWU, becoming a steward in the Royal Group, and also a member of the Communist Party, taking part in the battles to end casualisation.

Immensely popular with fellow dockworkers, he turned down offers of advancement to remain near his roots. His son Vic recalled: "He never wanted to be one step away from the men. He never courted adulation or esteem, he led the way because it had to be done. Dockers never went on strike for money, only for better conditions, and that's what he wanted."

The introduction of the Industrial Relations Act led to full-scale conflict between unions and employers. Turner played a prominent role in organising support for the dockers fighting to keep the Upper Clyde Shipyards open and in helping others such as the miners' children affected by the 1972 miners dispute. He was to continue his fight against the loss of jobs within the shipyards, but the days of the docks came to an end as containerisation took over, resulting in large-scale redundancies; Turner lost his job when the Royal Group finally closed.

He went to work for Newham Council as a Trade Refuse Officer and joined the Labour Party. He was elected to the council in 1984, serving as Mayor. Len McCluskey said: "There was life after the docks for Vic. Active in the Newham Labour Party, he continued to represent working people in their communities. Vic Turner, whether active in the workplace or in the community, never lost sight of working class interests and was never swayed from supporting that cause."

He was awarded the TUC's gold badge for his work in the trade union movement. TUC General Secretary Frances O'Grady remembered the impact that Turner had made: "For Vic Turner, trade unionism was about working class people looking after each other. It was a simple belief, but it was one that led him to organise in support of his fellow dockers when jobs were threatened, it was a belief that resulted in him being jailed; and soon afterwards it was a belief that led to him being released when workers across the country decided they should look after him and the other Pentonville Five.

"The same belief lay at the heart of his work on the docks and later as a councillor in Newham. And that is why I am pleased that Dan Jones' painting of the Pentonville demonstration hangs outside the TUC's General Council Chamber."

It was good to see the respectful obituary of Vic Turner (19 January), writes Eddie Johnson. I knew him for over 50 years, first when I served as the Tally Clerks representative on Jack Dash's unofficial London Docks liaison committee when Vic was one of Jack Dash's most trusted lieutenants. Later, when I'd left the docks to run the Two Puddings pub in Stratford he was a regular.

I remember when he was the Mayor of Newham he came to a charity night we ran for Terry Spinks and he let me wear his chain of office to have a photo taken. What was so good about Vic Turner was that he was incorruptible, and always true to his beliefs of the solidarity and honour of the working class. He never sold out, as many did in those days. I will raise a glass in his memory.

In 1973 Cinema Action members Pauline Swindells and Maree Delofski edited an award winning film starring Vic Turner and thousands of protestors. Every year following their victory the imprisoned leaders would gather to watch their film.

see

Arise Ye Workers

List of Cinema Action films

Democracy Now – Woody Guthrie at 100 (2012)

Woody Guthrie at 100: Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, Will Kaufman Honor the "Dust Bowl Troubadour"