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| Nursery Rhymes A Ward Lock All-Colour Picture Book © Ward Lock 1969 ISBN 7063 5143 6 |
Although no author or illustrator is attributed, several illustrations are clearly signed by Mary Brooks, and an earlier collection that contains these illustrations¹ does attribute the illustrations to Brooks.
For information about the illustrator, Mary Brooks, see my review of My First Reading Book of Nursery Verses.
Cover, back and front endpapers
The front and back cover show the interior illustration for the nursery rhyme "Little Bo-Peep". The cover colours are more intense and saturated than in the interior illustration. The front cover title, "Nursery Rhymes", appears in large red text. "A Ward Lock All-Colour Picture Book" appears at the bottom of the front cover, "All-Colour" in red and a different typeface than the black block text of the rest. The back cover includes the copyright and ISBN information.
The front and back endpapers and the title page are the same as in My First Reading Book of Nursery Verses (except for the title itself, which is changed here to "Nursery Rhymes"). For detailed information about the endpapers and title page illustrations, see my review of My First Reading Book of Nursery Verses.
Contents
This collection contains 52 nursery rhymes across 31 pages (unpaginated).
The first 15 pages of the book (showcasing 23 nursery rhymes) are a direct replica of My First Reading Book of Nursery Verses. The typeface, words, and illustrations are identical, with some infinitesimal differences in the placement of the typeface. As I have already reviewed the first half of this book, I won't repeat that analysis here – see my review of My First Reading Book of Nursery Verses.
I haven't yet obtained a copy of My First Reading Book of Nursery Rhymes to confirm, but it appears that the next 16 pages of Nursery Rhymes duplicate that book.² Starting with "Humpty Dumpty", there are 29 rhymes across 16 pages. My review below is of this second half of the book.
Rhymes
As with the first half of this book, the rhymes in this second set are often very short, so we only see a single verse of many rhymes that are usually longer, including "Wee Willie Winkie", "Girls and boys come out to play", and "I had a little Hen [sic]".
There were a quite a few nursery rhymes in this collection that were new to me, including: "The cock's on the wood pile", "Brow brinky", "Twelve huntsmen", "Little miss, pretty miss", and "Magpie, magpie, flutter and flee".
- "The cock's on the woodpile" is a lengthier rhyme than the two lines given here. The Opies note a 1740 Wiltshire manuscript has the cock on a dungpile.³ A move to a woodpile is a step up in the world!
- "Brow brinky" is apparently an action rhyme, where you tap the child's face as you name each part, from "Brow brinky" to "Mouth merry".
- "Twelve huntsmen" has a delightful origin story – it's the end part of a parlour game called "The Gaping Wide-mouthed Waddling Frog", where players sit in a circle and each answer the question "What is it?", the first person starting with "The Gaping Wide-mouthed Waddling Frog", the next saying a new second line plus the first, until the final person says the "Twelve huntsmen" line and recites all the former lines after, working their way back down to "The Gaping Wide-mouthed Waddling Frog". See Chants of numbers (from Lina Eckenstein's Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes, 1906).
- "Little miss, pretty miss" is the second verse of a rhyme about going up Pippin (or Primrose) Hill. See As I was going up Pippin Hill (Mama Lisa's World).
- "Magpie, magpie, flutter and flee" only pops up a few times online and the Opies' dictionary of nursery rhymes³ is silent on magpie lore, including on the more familiar magpie nursery rhyme "One for sorrow, two for joy..." It's been suggested (thanks Reddit!) that the "flutter and flee" line is a traditional rhyme used to ward off sorrow if you see a solitary magpie, but this doesn't align with the illustrations, which picture two magpies together.
This book also:
- uses the less common "Jacky" (rather than "Johnny") in "See-saw, Margery Daw" and says he "must have but a penny a day" instead of "shall earn but a penny a day"
- uses "by" rather than "in" for "I saw three ships come sailing" and has the ships sailing on "New Year's Day" in the morning rather than the usual "Christmas Day" – "I saw three ships come sailing by on New Year's Day" is apparently a variant with three pretty girls but as this rhyme only shows one verse we don't get to that part (See "Other versions" in I Saw Three Ships (Wikipedia)
- says "London Bridge is broken down" – a variant from "falling" which appears to be the older original (see the Opies³)
- includes the rhyme "Leg over leg" which is quite similar to "Old Farmer Giles"
- uses "can't tell" rather than "doesn't know where" for Bo-Peep, and ends "and bring their tails" rather than "wagging their tails"
- features Greedy John rather than Greedy Nan in "To bed, to bed"
- uses the end variant "Off and way" in "Bell-horses, bell-horses".
Illustrations
There are 16 pages of illustrations in the second half of this book, with only two full double-page spreads. The pages are fairly packed, often with three rhymes per page (6 per double-page spread), but there are illustrations for each rhyme. Humpty Dumpty is presented as a single page rhyme and illustration, but we know from the 1959 edition of My First Reading Book of Nursery Rhymes² that this was originally a double-page spread, the left-hand side of the illustration showcasing all the kings' horses and men.
The two double-page spreads we do get are of "Little Bo-Peep" and "The Queen of Hearts" and both feature soft romantic images of beautifully dressed women – you can see Bo-Peep on the cover; here is the stunning Queen of Hearts:
The other images lean more towards chubby, rosy-cheeked children and adults, often depicted in active, dancing groups, or individually, in quiet contemplation or play.
For "Rock-a-bye, baby, thy cradle is green" the baby is featured in the foreground in a cradle in a garden; I enjoyed the way the other figures from the rhyme appear splashed in watercolours amongst the flowers beside the cradle – including Johnny the soldier (who doesn't make it into the actual rhyme in this shortened version).
I also enjoyed the illustration of red herrings hanging from a tree in the woods for "A man in the wilderness", the way a happy medieval man and his happy pig looked very alike in the illustration of "To market, to market", and this illustration of Wee Willie Winkie (a favourite for me in this collection):
Summary, availability, and reprints
This vintage collection of nursery rhymes contains some usual and some less common nursery rhymes, all beautifully illustrated by Mary Brooks.
I noted above that it appears to be a combination of two other nursery rhyme collections also published by Ward Lock in 1969, and that there is an earlier collection that contains these illustrations. That is Bo-Peep Rhymes, a 1966 collection jointly published by Sandle Brothers and Ward Lock. That collection contains many of the same illustrations but with different typography, and additional rhymes and illustrations as well.¹
Of note, there is another collection published by Ward Lock and illustrated by Mary Brooks titled Nursery Rhymes. It was published, I think, in 1967, and contains entirely different illustrations that use a different medium than Brooks's more typical watercolours:
Nursery Rhymes – Contents
For the contents of the first 15 pages of Nursery Rhymes, see my review of My First Reading Book of Nursery Verses.
The contents of the remaining pages are listed here by their first lines:
- Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
- To market, to market
- Leg over leg
- The cock's on the wood pile
- The hart he loves the high wood
- A man in the wilderness asked me
- If I had a donkey that wouldn't go
- Little Bo-peep has lost her sheep
- "To bed, to bed"
- Wee Willie Winkie runs through town
- Girls and boys come out to play
- Twinkle, twinkle, little star
- Hush-a-bye, baby [Daddy is near]
- The Queen of Hearts
- Bell-horses, bell-horses
- Smiling girls, rosy boys
- See-saw, Margery Daw
- Ring-a-ring o' roses
- London Bridge is broken down
- One, two, buckle my shoe
- I had a little hen
- Brow brinky
- Rock-a-bye, baby [thy cradle is green]
- Twelve huntsmen with horns and hounds
- Multiplication is vexation
- Little miss, pretty miss
- A swarm of bees in May
- Magpie, magpie
- I saw three ships come sailing by
Footnotes
¹ See Bo-Peep Rhymes (Etsy). It also includes rhymes and illustrations not included here, such as "Cobbler, cobbler, mend my shoe".
² A 1959 edition of My First Reading Book of Nursery Rhymes that I found online (no longer available) appears to include all the nursery rhymes here but also additional ones, like "Sing a song of sixpence" and "Remember, remember the 5th of November". The 1969 edition may well be different.
³ The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, edited by Iona and Peter Opie, ©1951, 1997 (2nd edition).