Journalist Tim Devlin is once more on an investigative trail of nursery rhymes and, as ever, the depth of his research is very impressive. He goes all over the country, interviews descendants of families who may be featured in the rhymes and spends many hours in The British Library, The Bodleian and elsewhere. This new book which examines another fourteen rhymes is a welcome sequel to Cracking Humpty Dumpty, and is again rather beautifully and informatively illustrated by Katarina Dragoslavic.

Of course Devlin is by no means the first person to have done this and he now has a honed technique. He examines all the other explanations for each rhyme – in a pleasingly business-like but accessible style – debunks, the fanciful or impossible and finally comes to a tentative conclusion of his own.

Who or what, for example, were those four and twenty blackbirds? Well for a start, huge pastry containers out of which dwarves, animals or birds would burst as entertainment  at courtly dinners were a Tudor commonplace so the hapless “birds” hadn’t been baked at all. Were the birds the 24 letters of the Tudor alphabet in celebration of the first printing of the English Bible in 1535? Were they an allegory for the number of hours in a full day? Was the rhyme poking fun at Henry James Pye, appointed poet Laureate in 1790, whose verse was full of lines such as “vocal groves and feathered choirs”? Some versions feature “naughty boys” rather than blackbirds. Pirates? Probably not. As so often, it turns out that the dates are wrong. But, bearing in mind that the first sixpence was minted in 1551, Devlin wonders whether the rhyme could have been written in celebration of Edward VI’s birthday in 1553. He has studied the hapless young king’s “chronicle” (diary) in the British Library via microfiche and discovered a keen personal interest in the coinage. Fascinating stuff.

And what about that “cock-horse” so familiar to anyone who, in childhood, has ever been jogged on the leg of a strong male relation? Is it literally a mythical creature which is half-cock and half-horse as depicted on an Etruscan vase? Aristophanes used the hybrid in The Birds to characterise a “cocky” character. There’s a pub in Kent on the Pilgrim’s Way near the bottom of Detling Hill, called The Cock Horse. According to a recent issue of Dover Kent Archives: “The name is derived from the need to supply a cock [ie extra] to get stagecoaches and heavy wagons up a steep hill”/ Then there  are traditional hobby horses as children’s toys – a stick with a horse’s head at one end – which dates back, delightfully, at least to Sparta in the fourth century BC. And so Devlin goes on gleefully and filling me with glee too as we unpick Mother Goose, Pop Goes the Weasel, London Bridge, Little Miss Muffet and more.

In his epilogue, Devlin proposes the setting up of a National Centre for Nursery Rhymes because he is concerned (as am I) that they are rapidly disappearing from our culture. And he has some inspiring ideas about what this might include and how it might work. But it needs support and sponsorship. Contact him via  www.crackingnurseryrhymes.co.uk if you’re interested.

This book, ISBN 9781399985734, is published by Susak Press and available from www.crackingnurseryrhymes.co.uk 

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths

When I arrived at Bishop Otter College, Chichester to train as a teacher in 1965 all I knew about Ibsen was Grieg’s Peer Gynt music. I hadn’t done English A Level either. That’s a long story – all explained in my 2024 book, All Booked Up (Amazon and via bookshops if you’re interested). But back in 1965 I opted to do main course English which is what led to my becoming an English teacher. At Bishop Otter “English” meant literature in English, including translation. Thanks Miss Marjorie Hiller for opening the Ibsen door for me: You were truly inspirational.

Thus I first read Hedda Gabler – and saw a production not long after – in a classroom at Bishop Otter and I still have my old Una Ellis-Fermor, Penguin Classics translation, annotated as we went along. This I’ve just reread alongside the Patrick Marber version which the National Theatre commissioned and staged in 2016 with Ruth Jones in the title role – a production I saw and reviewed. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Hedda Gabler. It must be at least six.

Hedda, the daughter of the famous General Gabler, has married Jorgen, an enthusiastic but run-of-the-mill academic and they’ve just returned to their new home in Oslo (called Kristiania in 1890 when Ibsen wrote the play) after a six month honeymoon/research trip. She has married for status rather than love and clearly isn’t happy. She is reluctantly, but not openly, pregnant, detests Jorgen’s beloved aunt, despises her “school friend,” has history with two male visitors and treats the family retainer with patrician contempt. The obsession with her father’s pistols signals, almost from the beginning, that this can’t possibly end happily.

Rereading the text now, after a long absence from it, I’m struck by Ibsen’s long elaborate stage directions which Ellis-Fermor gives us at length and, I presume, in full although I can’t read the original in Dano-Norwegian to check. He is effectively both directing and designing the play in great detail. He must have been both a man of his time and a control freak. Marber, of course, like other writers of more recent versions (including Cordelia Lynn’s 2019 take on it, Hedda Tesman, for Chichester Festival Theatre) strips all that away and leaves the director and designer some space. He loosens the setting too. We’re in a “A city in Europe” in the present. The trouble with that is the inevitable anachronisms. You can’t have characters debating whether to use first names one minute – which seems about 50 years out of date – and commiserating with parking problems the next.

Plays, however, as I used to remind my students in almost every lesson, are meant to be seen not read. The text is dead until actors bring it to life. Nonetheless it is worth studying the text of any worthwhile play in order to consider the nuances and, if it’s something which has to be translated (Cf Chekhov and Strindberg) then it’s illuminating and sensible to read more than one translation.

And I never read a play text without thinking of Sylvia Young, she of Sylvia Young Theatre School fame. She once told me in an interview that, as a voracious child reader, she had soon read all the novels in the junior library but was regarded as too young to be allowed access to adult ones. So she read plays because they were the nearest thing she could get to novels and nobody noticed the “unsuitable” content.  And that was where her interest in theatre began.

So read a play or two for an occasional change. It’s quite rewarding.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Mother Goose Mysteries by Tim Devlin