CHILDREN’S TOYS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 December 1938, Page 9

CHILDREN’S TOYS

PRESENTS THROUGH THE AGES. HOOPS & DOLLS OF EARLIER. DAYS. The custom of giving presents to celebrate the Great Birthday dates from very early times, and the little boys and girls of long ago looked forward with eager excitement to Christmas morning. A 15th century writer gives us a very pretty picture of young Prince Edward, afterwards the ill-fated Edward the Fifth, playing in Windsor Park one Christmas morning with a “right faire hobbie horse of painted wood” which the King, his father, had given him that morning, and in an old manuscript of that time we see a print of a little fellow on a wooden horse being dragged by two other children toward a toy quintain.

Toyshops were unknown in those days but in the Christmas fairs and markets parents could buy for the children "drums, horses, rattles, wooden babies, trumpets, balls, and brightly coloured windmills.” In Tudor days, toy lambs, two a penny, were hawked in the streets of London. "Their fleece was of white wool spangled with gold, the head of composition with cheeks painted bright red and black spots for eyes; they had horns and legs of white wood, and a piece of pink tape was fastened round the neck.”

Hoops have been popular since the days of the Roman Empire, when the little Roman children trundled their hoops of iron and bronze along the streets of Rome.. Both hoops and skipping ropes were extolled by an Elizabethan educationalist as a “most excellent and wholesome recreation” for boys and girls alike. We read that Queen Elizabeth as a child delighted in her hoop of solid silver, with bells inside which jingled as it ran along, and in her gilded skipping rope with handle? of ivory inset with precious stones.

Dolls or wooden babies, as they were called, are mentioned continually throughout the centuries. In fact, both balls and dolls date back to a very early time and there are references to the former in the 9th century.

In an Elizabethan print entitled “Children at Play” we see three little girls putting a doll of jointed wood to bed in a wicker cradle, and a doll’s mug and covered salt cellar and sugar basin lie beside them. This print is interesting as showing how little the toys and games of children have altered through the years. In the centre some boys are playing at soldiers with' toy drums and swords, on the left some children are engaged in Blind Man’s Buff, and in the foreground two boys are flying kites, one holding a hoop and stick, one spinning a top, and two girls are skipping. If the costumes were changed the group might easily have been taken today, and no toy would need modernising.