Obituary: Iona Opie

Iona Opie

13 October 1923 – 23 October 2017

Iona Opie, who has died aged 94, was the world authority on the history of British nursery rhymes. She combined a grace of spirit with an unequalled capacity for the daily toil of fact-grubbing research. Her initially reserved demeanor concealed a huge appetite for life and a great love and respect for children, not least her own.

Never going to university and bearing her first child of three at the age of 21, Iona stumbled into nursery rhyme research by accident. Wheeling the pram one day with husband Peter in attendance, the couple saw off a visiting ladybird with the traditional chant ‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home.’ Wondering where this rhyme originated led to visits to the library and then to the gradual assembling of a vast rare children’s book collection. This then formed the basis for studying a previously largely ignored topic. Hours were long and money remained tight, with no grants or university funding, although Peter could draw on a small private income plus occasional hand-outs from his family. But somehow there were was still just enough funds to send off all their children to boarding school so that the work could go on uninterrupted.

Their most famous book, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, appeared in 1951. This was followed in 1955 by the Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, featuring over 800 rhymes and illustrated with pictures taken from the Opie’s growing library together with woodcuts by Joan Hassall. Much plundered ever since by anthologists and illustrators bringing out their own collections, this and their Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes (1963) helped ‘these smallest great poems of the world’s literature’ stay in the forefront of English speaking children’s early reading for many years afterwards.

The couple then turned to children’s immemorial games. The result, based on visits to their local primary school plus reports sent in from all over the country, was Children’s Games in Street and Playground. Coming out in 1969, this was Iona’s personal favourite. In 1982 Peter died from heart failure but undeterred Iona now took on all the writing and researching on her own. The Singing Game (1985) and The People in the Playground (1993) were both highly accomplished as well as admirably readable works.

In 1986 Iona put their 20,000 book library on the market. This was the largest collection of children’s books in private hands and worth over a million pounds. Anxious to keep the collection together she sold it at half price to the Bodleian Library following a successful appeal for public funding. Disliking the rapid social changes in childhood and elsewhere that she saw going on around her she developed in later life some sympathy with Ukip’s policies of attempting to return to Britain as it used to be. Also plagued by growing deafness, she admitted in in an interview in 2005 that she had become ‘very bored’ with all matters to do with child lore. But she still liked starting each day by opening a nursery rhyme book and reading from it at random. For her, ‘If you acquire a nursery rhyme-ical attitude, you’re not at all put out by life’s little bumps and bruises. They just seem funny and entirely normal.’

Living on her own up to a few years before her death, with ten honking pet geese wandering around the garden of her large house in West Liss, Hampshire, she was in many ways a modern embodiment of Mother Goose herself. Her work with and later without Peter on the culture of childhood past and present remains as impressive as it is imperishable.

Nicholas Tucker is honorary senior lecturer in Cultural and Community Studies at Sussex University.