Tag Archives: wartime Britain

Eton College, a journey to India, and wartime Britain: Personal stories from the Opie Archive

The Archive of Iona and Peter Opie, at first glance, is an archive of professional papers, covering the folklorists’ extensive research on childlore, games and play from the 1950s through to the 1990s. Researchers looking at the history of childhood, and at even at how the ‘world of children’ was observed and documented, will no doubt find a rich resource in the children’s original papers, as well as in the Opies’ working files, their professional correspondence, and the notes for, and drafts of, the Opie publications from The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes to The People in the Playground.

What is probably less well known is the fact that the archive also includes a significant proportion of personal papers and correspondence – the personal archive of Peter Opie, covering his own childhood and teenage years, his years at Eton College, his early career as an author, his time serving in the Army, and the early years of starting a family and finding his vocation of collecting books and researching childhood folklore. These personal papers, which focus on the 1930s-1950s, include correspondence with friends and relatives, diaries and scrapbooks, personal documents, photographs and memorabilia. Another sequence comprises the raw material, notes, and drafts for Peter Opie’s early autobiographical books, short stories and other writings.

An aspiring writer: Drafts for Peter Opie’s first book ‘I Want To Be A Success’, early 1938.

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