Dan Jones At Bethnal Green Library
Click to enlarge Dan Jones’ painting of St Paul’s School Wellclose Sq, 1977
Photographer Chris Kelly and I went along to join Dan Jones when he paid a visit to his splendid mural from 1977 of children and their rhymes in the playground of St Paul’s School, Wellclose Sq, which is installed at the Bethnal Green Children’s Library.
The Children’s Library is on your right as you enter the building and from the lobby you can see the huge colourful painting at the far end of a long room with windows facing onto the Green. Once I reached this point, I could already hear “The wheels on the bus go round and round…” sung by an enthusiastic chorus of toddlers and their mothers led by a librarian.
“In 1970, I was a youth worker and I ran a youth club in the hall on the right of the painting. I used to have two hundred kids dancing in there!” recalled Dan fondly, “And so most of the children in the school were known to me.” Living close by in Cable St, Dan, who began collecting rhymes in 1947, has followed the shifting currents of playground culture over all this time. “Some of these rhymes in the painting are still to be heard in the playground there,” he told me, “But others they don’t do anymore, or only sporadically.”
A local plasterer coated three boards with a fine coat of plaster to give a smooth finish for Dan to paint on and, inspired by Bruegel’s “Children’s Games,” Dan set to work upon the dining table in his front room, painting individual portraits of the children with their rhymes inscribed alongside. It took over a year’s work and Dan framed the life of the playground with the architecture of the school, including its weathervane in the shape of tall ship and Tower Bridge looming on the horizon – all portrayed beneath a distinctively occluded London sky. And now that most schools wear primary coloured shirts, it is fascinating to observe the wide variety of characterful clothing – reflecting the styles of the time – displayed by these children.
Astonishingly, the painting caused great controversy when it was first displayed, with the Daily Telegraph accusing Dan Jones of turning East End youth against the police force, because he included the rhyme – “There’s a cop, cop, copper on the corner, all dressed up in navy blue. If it wasn’t for the law, I would sock him on the jaw. And he wouldn’t be a copper any more, more, more…” A rhyme which Dan had simply recorded along with all the others in the playground.
At first, the mural graced the London’s Children’s Centre and for years it filled the narrow hallway of Dan’s house, but in the Children’s Library it fits perfectly as if it had been painted for this space. Dan’s picture hangs above the library corner, where children can play or sit on the floor and read books, casting a benign spell upon this favoured spot.
More than forty years have passed since Dan made his picture – the first of several on this subject and at this scale that he has done in subsequent years – yet it remains as fresh and immediate as the day he completed it in 1977.
Breuegel’s “Children’s Games,” 1560 – Dan’s inspiration.
Dan’s recent self-portrait
Dan Jones with his grandson Rumi
Photographs copyright © Chris Kelly
You may also like to take a look at
Chris Kelly & Dan Jones in the Playground
I opened this site at 1:58 am American Thanksgiving morning
and I am so glad I did.
Each lovely scene blew me a happy memories kiss.
That is how I remember spending school recess periods during
my innocent childhood. The worst indignity I ever experienced
was having rascal Alan Lee pull my ‘pig tails.’
My little coal-mining town along the Monongahela River was
on the trail to Pittsburgh, so of course General George
Washington dined and slept in quite a few of the still-standing
handsome brick homes.
The wonderful paintings remind me in many respects of the
‘primitive’ New England reflections of Grandma Moses who
discovered her talent when most senior citizens have resigned
their daily activities to occasionally moving their rocking chair.
Grandma’s originals are worth a fortune now. She is worth
Googling.
Thank you, GA, for adding value to my 82nd blessed
Happy Thanksgiving.
Wonderful! Thank you so much for sharing this.
This guy Dan Jones is a very kind genuine man .
Dan if you are reading this you might remember me from years ago . Chris Searle and Reality Press helped publish my first book of poetry .
Bless you mate and all your family .
Andy
A beautiful story. Breuegel’s painting from 1560 is clearly the inspiration, but Dan Jones’ 1977 version has itself become an icon of art history.
And the painting has lost none of its relevance — even the clothes are back in fashion after almost half a century!
Love & Peace
ACHIM
What a wonderful story. I too collect children’s rhymes and was lucky enough to meet that great collector Iona Opie when she was still alive. Like Dan she was an unassuming person but took what the children shared with her very seriously. I have been meaning to go back to the school I recorded the children’s rhymes back in the 1980s and this has reminded me to do so. The pictures of the children are delightful.
Certainly took me back sixty five years or so. Wonderful painting.
Sue
A lovely example of social history, beautifully painted.
The rhymes varied from area-to-area, town-to-town, city-to-city. In Bolton, we girls would sing, ‘Wasn’t me. Then who? Couldn’t be. Then you.’, which has similarities to one of the verses Dan Jones includes in his mural. I think this involved throwing a tennis ball within a circle.
I recall we would play a game in which one person, ‘the prince’ – pranced up and down a line of other kids – mainly girls – where we sang:
There came a prince a riding, a riding, a riding.
There came a price a riding
Tish-a-me, tash-a-me-toshaw.
What you riding here for, here for, here for?
What you riding here for?
Tish-a-me, tash-a-me, toshaw.
This would be followed by a response from the prince (which I can’t remember) and more tish-a-me tashy-me calls and responses until the prince chose a bride from the line, who would join him prancing up and down a few more times before the game ended. Sometimes, a very small boy would play the prince but not often as boys joining in girls’ games was considered ‘mard’, a northern dialect word for being soft. Gender roles were taken very seriously by boys. Not so much by girls, who readily took on male roles to enjoy these chanting, dancing games. My husband told me the boys liked to watch the girls playing these games, despite considering them soppy.
In the early 1980s, almost twenty years later, when I worked as a summer play leader, new call and response/role playing games were devised, which had non-gendered or more masculine roles – which, as ever, girls would happily take on – which helped boys to be more comfortable about joining in. Giants, Dwarves and Wizards springs to mind.
It’s good to know that children still play their own rhyming games even today. Games which belong only to children, unlike the ones devised by play leaders and youth leaders, which are great and more inclusive but not so authentic.
I love the children’s rhymes, they take me back to being a child in the 60s.
I was at primary school in the early ‘60s and many of these rhymes were familiar to me too. This took me right back to playing in my North London school playground. What a lovely jolly picture. It would be foolish to think that children’s lives were trouble free back then, but it feels a more innocent time somehow.
Lighten up, people! (the folks who were outraged at the nursery lyrics………..) When you re-read many of the Brothers Grimm tales and Mother Goose stories, they are replete with gothic violence. I chuckled about “showing my knickers to the football team”, wish I’d had that kind of moxie.
I can only imagine how much the individual children enjoyed spotting themselves in the mural. That would have felt like immortality! How wonderful. Did the people in the 1560 masterpiece have a similar thrill?
Thanksgiving Day in the Hudson River Valley. Gloomy, and wonderfully cozy. The house full of good baking smells, and holiday music. The beloved tunes, and the ones that make us cringe.