Category Archives: Cataloguing

Are you going a little ‘Brumas’? The Opie Archive opens a window onto a 1950s phenomenon

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The cataloguing of the Opie Archive of school-children’s play, lore and language is yielding some fascinating examples of playground terminology. Some is familiar from our own childhoods but one contribution from Sale County Grammar School for Boys dating from the early 1950s had us puzzled. The contributor had submitted the word ‘Brumas’, translating it as ‘a little bear on top – a bald man’.  Our confusion was compounded by further information from the child’s teacher and Opie correspondent who indicated the presence of some punning word-play, ‘A bald man – Brumas (the “Bare”)’. It took some 21st-century web-surfing to shed light on this bald spot in our knowledge.

So who, or what, was Brumas? Our search for the answer opened a window onto a phenomenon of the early 1950s – the first ever polar bear cub born at London Zoo in 1949. Although a female bear cub, the press had reported that the bear was male. Given her portmanteau moniker through the combining of her keepers’ names (Bruce and Sam), Brumas was a sensation. Her presence at London Zoo boosted visitor numbers as members of the public flocked to catch a glimpse of the new arrival. A report from The Observer newspaper in April 1950 records people standing ‘in solid blocks’ around the polar bear enclosure from 9am to 7pm to catch a glimpse of ‘the baby’, as this clip shows:

Not only a celebrity bear, Brumas was also a brand, with books, toys (such as this mohair model of Brumas and her mother Ivy held at the V&A Museum of Childhood), and even soap manufactured in her image. Her popularity also made her the subject of song, as this cabaret performance demonstrates. Not surprisingly, Brumas became a national phenomenon. Sir Michael Palin remarks in his 1992 account of his travels from ‘Pole to Pole’ that he is keen to see a polar bear, having been ‘brought up on Brumas’.

Equipped with this knowledge we’re now able to interpret this multi-layered archive entry. The joke rests in the use of the homophones ‘bear’ and ‘bare’ and relies on the widespread awareness of bear-of-the-moment Brumas, who came to public attention via popular media and commercial influences. Perhaps too, the widespread assumption in the media that Brumas was male affirmed the connection with male pattern baldness.

Reference to Brumas in teacher’s letter to the Opies (cropped). Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Opie 1 fol. 146v

We will never know who the unfortunate ‘Brumas’ of Sale was and are as yet unclear whether the epithet was common or confined to this area. However, this data demonstrates how assemblages can act as a prompt for our own cultural responses, informed here by the ‘desire for fun’ that the Opies observed as embedded in schoolchildren’s language, with nicknames an exemplar (The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, 1959, p. 154). In this case, Brumas’ fame became a stimulus for playful use of language that now, at this historical distance, recalls an event that impacted on the national consciousness.  Brumas died in 1958, but her linguistic legacy lives on in the Opie Archive.

 

Header image: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Opie 1 fol.143r

Playing the Archive team present their work

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On October 26 at the British Academy, the Playing the Archive team held its first interim conference, with a number of members of the Advisory Board in attendance.

Courtesy of @dylanyamadarice

After an introductory presentation by Andrew Burn, who talked about the project’s emerging themes of memory, nostalgia, continuity and change, and the structures of time and space, Julia Bishop and Cath Bannister offered an introduction to Iona and Peter Opie’s historical archive. Their presentation focused in particular on the Opies’ surveys as a means of better understanding their research methods. Afterwards, Cath and Alison Somerset-Ward offered an inventive account of the archive as an interactive ‘box of delights’, whose many-faceted exploration of the archive fascinated our attendees. Steve Roud then rounded off the morning session with a discussion of the challenges of creating a classification scheme for the Opie archive.

Box of Delights. Photo courtesy of @shelleuk

In the afternoon Jackie Marsh looked at the palimpsests of play across two projects conducted at a nine-year interval, drawing on social anthropology and new materialism to illustrate the mutually reinforcing relationship between children and their playground environments. This was followed by a fascinating presentation by John Potter and Kate Cowan, who looked at how children remediate popular culture (in particular YouTube), and how the use of GoPro cameras, 360 degree video and iPads offer a variety of perspectives for researchers of children’s play. John introduced us to the ways that the VAR technology showcased during the 2018 World Cup has made its way into playground games of football, and how ‘Neymar’ has now become a synonym for unconvincing play acting.

The team from CASA, Duncan Hay, Valerio Signorelli and Andy Hudson-Smith then presented their experiments in re-purposing old or obsolete technology as a means of engaging the public with the Opies’ work, and asked how these evocative, sensorially-rich technologies might constitute an ‘interface’ to memory. Finally, Helen Woolley drew on the Opies’ The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) to look at the calendar of play, and the distinct temporalities of time (daily, weekly, seasonal) that they revealed. In a tasty conclusion to the event, she offered the attendees a home-baked ‘soul cake’, a small cake made to remember the dead on All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. It provided a tasty conclusion to a wonderful day of discussion. Thank you to the Advisory Board for all their useful and far-reaching comments!

Mathias Poulsen, an advisory board member, has written a blog post with his comments, which you can read here.

Cataloguing by the Book

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The Sheffield cataloguing team are currently constructing the Place Name Authority in their catalogue of the Iona and Peter Opie Archive. The authority establishes a consistent way for these places to be referenced in the archive. Once created, it will allow end users of the digital archive to search for information by place and enable the mapping of items of children’s folklore. Those familiar with the Opies’ books will recall the engaging maps they contain charting the distribution of such specifics as ‘spitting death’ and truce terms.

Cover of Bartholomew’s Gazetteer of the British Isles

In order to include the locations of the schools from which the Opies drew much of their data, we have needed to hit the books this week, to ensure that future users will be able to search for games and rhymes in places whose locations have altered – on paper at least – since the Opies first began collecting.  Legislative changes to county boundaries since the Opies began their survey will impact on users of the digital archive searching for the childlore of a perhaps now obsolete area, or alternatively searching in a county incorporating places which were historically ‘elsewhere’. To address this, the digital archive will contain details of a place’s current county, and its county around the time data was collected.

The weighty volume pictured is Bartholomew’s Gazetteer of the British Isles, a topographical dictionary first published in the 1800s and regularly updated, and which features condensed but detailed information on the cities, towns and villages of Britain and Ireland. The edition currently proving its worth to the cataloguing team is a 1966 reprint of the 1943 edition, including additional amendments and entries from the year of its publication. While it’s second nature to turn to web for information these days, this compendium, contemporaneous with the period when the Opies were collecting, is helping us to identify the relevant counties. It’s the kind of reference book that we’re sure would also have been on the Opies’ bookshelf!

We are turning to the web to include longitude and latitude for each of the cities, towns and villages represented in the archive. These will amplify access to the rich and varied data gathered by the Opies and their ‘army’ of correspondents and collaborators.

A further task currently underway is the establishing of controlled vocabularies for defining attributes of the documents and the children’s folklore items contained within them.  Joining the team last week in Sheffield was project consultant Steve Roud, a respected folklorist, writer and creator of the Roud Folk Song Index and author of The Lore of the Playground (2010). Drawing on his knowledge and expertise, he is creating a thesaurus by which we will index the items in the archive.