Folklorist who recorded a secret playground world
In 1943, Iona Opie and her husband Peter were walking through a field in Bedfordshire when they saw a ladybird. “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home / Your house is on fire and your children all gone,” Iona recited. The ladybird did fly away – leaving her and her husband to wonder about this rhyme. “Where did it come from? Who wrote it?” Finding that the last anthology of nursery rhymes was published in 1842, they decided to devote themselves to the genre. After years of extensive research into history and folklore, they produced, in 1951, their most famous book, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. “It took 50 generations to make up Mother Goose,” Iona said. “Nursery rhymes are the smallest great poems of the world’s literature.”
Born in 1923, she was the daughter of the distinguished pathologist Sir Robert Archibald – but only saw him rarely, as he was mainly based in Sudan. A quiet, bookish child, she intended to follow in her father’s footsteps with a career in science, but wartime service in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force intervened. Then, she read a book by Peter Opie, I Want to be a Success (1939), written about his time at Eton. She wrote him a passionate letter; they met in London, and married soon after. She was 19, and knew, she later said, that she’d sacrificed her chances of an independent life. Within a year, she was pregnant. It was then that they began their life’s work, said The Guardian – serious, painstaking and demanding. There were no new clothes and no holidays; rather than spend money on greens, they ate nettles picked from the park. Their three children were left to entertain themselves, then sent to boarding school. “We were both puritans; we liked hurting ourselves,” said Iona. “Neither of us liked luxury. I wanted a hard life.”
Once they had completed their exhaustive researches into nursery rhymes, they turned their attention to children’s games. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), the result of thousands of interviews in scores of school playgrounds, revealed a complex, closed society – unsentimental and anti-authoritarian, with its “own code of oral legislation for testing, betting, swapping, keeping secrets”, and traditions passed down from generation to generation. A riddle told to them by a boy in Presteigne, in Wales, dated back to the reign of Henry VII. At the same time, topical jokes could, in the days when few families even had televisions, spread hundreds of miles in days. Peter died of a heart attack in 1982, but Iona worked on, publishing under both their names. The couple had amassed the largest private collection of children’s books in the world, which she sold to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for half its real value in 1987. Their three children survive her.