Spitalfields Life

In anticipation of his new exhibition The Singing Playground which opens at Rich Mix this Thursday, 6th February, here is my profile of Dan Jones, Rhyme Collector extrordinaire

Dan Jones

This is the amiable Dan Jones who has lived down in Cable St since 1967 and has made it his business to collect children’s rhymes, both here and all over the world since 1948. Dan has many hundreds in transcripts and recordings that are slowly yet inevitably converging into a book of around a thousand rhymes that he has been working on for some years entitled The Singing Playground which will be his magnum opus. He explained that the litany of classic nursery rhymes which adults teach children have barely altered since James Halliwell’s collection The Nursery Rhymes of England of 1842, when they were already old. In contrast, the rhymes composed and passed on by children are constantly changing and it is these that form the subject of Dan’s study.

When you enter the bright red front door of his house in Cable St, you can barely get through the passage because of a huge mural painted by Dan of the playground of St Paul’s School, Wellclose Sq, that is about ten feet tall and twenty feet long. Painted on wooden panels, it is suspended from the wall and jutting forward, which puts you directly at the eye level of many of the children in the painting and, thus confronted,  you see that all the figures are surrounded by rhymes. The effect is magical and one reminiscent of Breughel’s Children’s Games.

As well as collecting rhymes, Dan is a painter who creates affectionately observed murals of children in school playgrounds, all painted in rich natural hues and with such levity and appreciation for the exuberant idiosyncrasy of childhood that I was immediately beguiled. I have always loved the joyful sound of the children playing in the school playground that I can hear from my house, but Dan has found a method to explore and celebrate the specific quality of this intriguing secret world through his scholarship and paintings.

Once you get past the mural, you find yourself in the parlour lined with more paintings. Some even protrude from behind the comfortable armchairs, which are arranged in a horseshoe, like an old-fashioned doctor’s surgery, indicating that Dan lives a very sociable existence and that this room has been the location for innumerable happy gatherings over the last forty years he and his wife, Denise, have lived here. There are bookshelves brimming over with all manner of books devoted to art and social history, and children’s books on the coffee table for the amusement of Dan’s grandchildren, who wander in and out as we are talking.

Rhymes spill out of Dan Jones endlessly and I could have sat all day hearing the fascinating stories of the origins of familiar examples and all their remarkable different versions over time and in different languages. Dan has a paradoxical quality of seeming both young and old at the same time. While displaying a fine white beard and resembling a patriarch in a painting by William Blake, he also possesses the gentle nature and spontaneous enthusiasm of youth. I can understand why children choose to line up in the playground to tell Dan their rhymes, as they do when he arrives in schools, and why old people too, when Dan puts on them on the spot asking “What rhymes do you remember from your youth?”, would summon whole canons of verse from the depths of their memories for him.

The heartening news from the playground that Dan has to report is that the culture of rhymes is alive and kicking, in spite of all the distractions of the modern age. The endless process of repetition and reinvention goes on with ceaseless vigour. Most rhymes accompany action and melody, which means that while the words may change, other elements – especially the melodies – can remain constant over centuries or across continents in different languages and cultures, tracing the historical movements of peoples.

Perhaps the most astounding example Dan gave me was Ching, chang, choller (paper, scissors and stone), a game used to select a random winner or loser, which was depicted in the tomb of a Pharoah four thousand years ago and of which there are versions recorded in ancient Rome, China, Japan, Mongolia, Chile, Korea,Hungary, Sweden, Italy, France and USA. Dan recorded it being played at Columbia Road Primary School. By contrast, I was especially delighted to Learn that Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star was written by Jane and Ann Taylor in Islington in 1806 and to discover the Bengali version recently recorded by Dan at Bangabandhu School in Bethnal Green.

Sometimes, there is a plangent history to a rhyme, of which the children who sing it are unaware. Dan has traced the path of stone-passing games that were carried by slave children in the eighteenth century from West Africa to the Caribbean and then, two centuries later, brought to London by immigrants from the West Indies. Meanwhile, new rhymes constantly arise, as Dan explained, “Some burst forth just in one particular school playground to blossom like a spring flower for a few weeks and then vanish completely.”

Living in Spitalfields, surrounded by old buildings and layers of history, I am always fascinated to consider who has been here before. You have read the tales of the past I have collected from old people, but Dan’s work reveals an awe-inspiring historical continuum of much greater age. There is a compelling poetry to the notion that the oldest thing here could be the elusive and apparently ephemeral games and rhymes that the children are playing in the playground. I love the idea that these joyful rhymes, mostly carried and passed on by girls between the ages of eight and twelve – marginal to the formal culture of society – have survived, outliving everything else, wars and migration of people notwithstanding.

Dan’s wife Denise and his children, Davey, Polly and Sam walk in the foreground of his painting of Christ Church School, Brick Lane in 1982, as reproduced in his book Inky, Pinky, Ponky

Click on the image to enlarge Dan Jones’ painting of St Paul’s School Wellclose Sq, 1977

The Singing Playground an interactive work commissioned by The Museum of Childhood where you can to listen to Dan’s Nursery Rhyme recordings

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Dan Jones & Chris Kelly in the Playground

Taking advantage of a rare day of February sunshine yesterday, Doris Kurta took the opportunity to make a return visit to Bacon St where she grew up. “I’ve been back twice since 1938,” she admitted to me in excitement,“but this is the first time I’ve got out of the car. I’m just amazed, it’s a little bit frightening when I think how long ago it was.”

“Kurta isn’t my real name, we don’t even know what it was,” she confessed to me with alacrity, “My father came from a village called Kutna in Poland and he couldn’t speak English when he arrived and we think, when they asked his name, he thought they were asking where he came from so he said, ‘Kutna’ and they wrote down ‘Kurta.'”

Returning to the bustle of the Sunday market in Brick Lane, more than seventy years after she left it behind, offered an unexpected moment of contemplation for Doris. “We were very happy when we moved out,” she assured me unequivocably.

This emotionally-charged location reminded Doris of the fate her parents escaped by coming here. “My father lost all his family in Poland, except a nephew,” she explained, “My mother came from a large family on the border of Hungary and Romania. My grandmother told them, ‘As long as I am alive, the Germans will not take you.’ But, two days after my grandmother died, they came and took them and only one survived.”

Thus Bacon St is a significant address for Doris, even if almost none of the buildings of seventy years ago still stand. Bacon St was Doris’ childhood home and where her family’s fortunes turned around. Both her parents took flight from their homelands in fear yet, when the Kurta family left Bacon St – on 15th January 1938 – they were embarking on a new journey in expectation of a better life, and it was a hope that Doris saw fulfilled.

“I was born in Pelham St in Spitalfields but we moved to Bacon St when I was four months old and that’s where we lived until I was fourteen. Harry, my father, was a ladies’ milliner and Lily, my mother, also worked in millinery – sewing -and that’s how they met. She made everything we wore, even our overcoats. I had this wonderful pink coat that was a hand-me-down from my elder sister and it was still in good condition when I got it, but it wasn’t by the time I had finished with it. I remember there was a factory opposite that caught fire and my father wrapped me in that pink coat and took me to the window to watch. I had one sister, Annetta (known as Nita), an elder brother Sydney (known as Syd or Zelig) and a younger brother, Monty. 42 Bacon St was a huge house, but we lived in a flat with two small rooms for the six of us and a scullery with no running hot water.

At the rear, it sloped down in the yard and there were two cabinet-makers’ workshops, so there was always plenty of sawdust around and the boys used to make see-saws out of the planks left outside at the weekend. But it was a bit rough and my elder brother, Syd, fell off. My younger brother, Monty, couldn’t control the plank and it had a nail in the end which hit him and made a hole right in his head. I’m laughing now but it wasn’t a laughing matter at the time.

The area was mainly Catholic and Jewish in those days, and the Catholic priest was very friendly and he used to come round and try to explain his religion to us. He used to say to my mother, ‘I’m not going to try to convert you because you’ll end up converting me!’ The Catholics and the Jews kept apart but if anyone needed help, they’d go the distance, whoever it was.

Regularly, my mother would fill in forms to get us another flat from the Council but nothing ever came of it until one day a new social worker came round while my brother and I were doing our homework at the kitchen table. He said, ‘Is this where you do your study?’ and my mother said, ‘Look around, do you see anywhere else?’ He gave her a new form to fill out and within a week we moved.

We moved into the very first batch of council flats in Stoke Newington – Millington House in Church St. The rest of the block was empty and we were the first occupants. It was absolute heaven, we had three bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen but, best of all, a bathroom with a separate toilet. When we got there, the family lined up so that I could go into the bathroom first because they knew how important it was to me.

During the war, I worked in Bishopsgate at Cedar & Co, accountants near Liverpool St Station. One day, I was working late on my own on a Friday night and I got locked in. The boss had locked the outer door and I couldn’t get in touch with him because he lived in Surrey, and my own key was at Robert Dyas getting a spare one cut. So I called the Bishopsgate Police Station and told them my predicament. I’ve always carried a book with me so I settled down to read Benighted by J.B. Priestley while I was waiting. But the police and the fire brigade were in competition to get there first and they arrived in no time. I looked out the window to see a crowd had formed outside. They fixed a plank across from the next building and carried me safely over. When the officer asked me what happened, I said, ‘It was malice aforethought.’ I was trying to be funny but he didn’t get the joke because it was during the bombing and he had other things to worry about. One Monday, I came in to work and there was glass all over the place from the blast.

There were so many pubs in Bishopsgate, I would describe them as ‘character-forming.’ I’ve hardly ever been in a pub in all my life. I don’t drink. I’ve seen too much of what drink can do to people. We had two flats on each floor in Bacon St and, opposite us, lived a charming man yet when he was drunk he’d be terrible to his wife. He wouldn’t do it if she was in our flat, so she’d run across the landing when she heard him coming and he wouldn’t cross the threshold but stand and shout at her from outside, until my mother quietened him down. They had family wedding party once in the backyard and he got into fight with the bridegroom and they had to call my mother down to stop them, and she did. She was only five feet tall but she was wonderful. I don’t think I appreciated her enough at the time.

I became an auditor and we had clients who worked in the Spitalfields Market. When I first started, I didn’t know what an auditor was yet I took to it and I worked hard. People didn’t expect to see a woman doing that job but it was the war and they had no choice. It was difficult when the war stopped because the boys came back and expected to return to their jobs, so I just left and went to live in France for a spell. I went there at the invitation of the De Gaulle party and stayed in a house where boys who been in the resistance and survived the death camps were being taken care of. Then I lived in Paris in the Rue de Sevres for a year. I worked in a bank and my French wasn’t very good, so one of the customers asked me to speak in English on the phone. When I put the receiver down, everyone was giggling because apparently I spoke English with a French accent.

I acted with the Bethnal Green Players, we performed in Bethnal Green Tube Station during the war. There was a theatre and a cafe down there. Of course, we only performed comedy. Later I played the lead in G.K.Chesterton’s last play which was completed for us by Dorothy L. Sayers and we performed Shakespeare every summer at the George in Southwark. Arnold Wesker was a member and he always says I encouraged him to carry on with the theatre and it’s because of me he became a playwright!

On December 6th 1995, I moved from Stoke Newington to Edgware, where I live now, and my sister Nita came to live with me after her husband died.”

“I won the cup for gymnastics at the Bethnal Green Girls Club two years running. I didn’t get to keep the cup, but I still have my badge somewhere.”

Harry & Lily Kurta

“This is my mother Lily with her friend”

“Harry my father used to make extra money as a barman at the weekends”

“I am the one holding the blackboard at the centre of this photo of my class at Wood Close School”

“When I was evacuated at the beginning of the war, we were supposed to be sent to Cambridgeshire but me and my brother Monty were sent to Much Hadham in Hertfordshire instead.”

“This is my father with my younger brother Monty  at Millington House in Stoke Newington”

“This is me playing the lead in the premiere of G.K.Chesterton’s last unfinished play,  completed by Dorothy L. Sayers”

“This is me as Ophelia, performing at the George in Southwark”

“This is me playing the role of Mother in Arnold Weskers’ ‘Chicken Soup With Barley.'”

Doris outside 42 Bacon St yesterday, on the site of the building where she grew up

Doris Kurta

Portraits of Doris Kurta copyright © Jeremy Freedman

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