Rugby And Cricket Replace Marbles And Knuckle Bones

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 15, Issue 97, 18 September 1950, Page 7

Rugby And Cricket Replace Marbles And Knuckle Bones

Children streaming from the little red schoolhouse for a game of marbles, knuckle-bone, or perhaps hares and hounds, were a familiar sight of 30, 40 and 50 years ago. But today rugby and cricket dominate children’s play hours. This is what Mr B. Sutton-Smith, M.A., a young Wellington school teacher, says after a two-year investigation of the games children have played over the last 100 years. Many once popular games have completely disappeared, he says, and others seem to be fast following them. His research took him to many parts of New Zealand where elderly people told him of games they used to play, games which are urnknown to the youngsters of today. Mr Sutton-Smith believes that because the impression has been gained in schools that rugby, cricket and allied sports are the only games worth playing, children have less outlet for their emotions through their games than did their grandparents. “Children, when left to their own devices by adults, fashioned the games as their own emotional needs demanded,” he says. “Today, emotions that are not provided for in organised sport have to find their outlet through other channels, such as drama and art in schools.” When intermediate schools became established, he says, the tendency for younger primary school children to play organised sports oecame even stronger. Previously the school rugby team was drawn from boys in the top two standards. Now they are formed from boys in standards three and four, and the younger boys in the lower classes follow their elders in the choice of games. Girls, he says, have been less affected by the svfring to more adult games. Hop-scotch and skipping still have their seasons, but the traditional boys’ games of marbles and tops are steadily fading from the playground scene. Imitative games—“cowboys and Indians” and the more recent “cops and robbers”—are played by younger children than in previous years. Rhyming games such as “Green Gravels” have gone except from the minds of those who look back nostalgically on their school days. Mr Sutton-Smith found that there have been three distinct periods in the history of games in New Zealand in the last 100 years. .