It’s a part of growing up that few children would recognise now.

Not just the games that kids would play out on the streets with their mates, but songs, rhymes and chants passed on from older siblings and parents. The terraced streets of cities all across the UK and Ireland used to ring with them. Equal parts folk wisdom, nonsense, tradition and larger than life characters, with a hundred local variations – what did you sing?

The livewires in this film were the students of St Mary’s Primary School on Divis St in Belfast.


Clip taken from Dusty Bluebells, originally broadcast on BBC One on Friday, 31 March, 1972.




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