By Leslie Daiken
Published by the Dolmen Press, Dublin 1963
From the streets of Dublin, Leslie H Daiken’s collection of children’s street-songs, war-cries and samples of oral literature.
From the McAllister Collection. Donated to the Museum of Childhood Ireland 2023
About Leslie Daiken:
Leslie Herbert Daiken Born in Dublin on June 29th 1912 – died in London on August 15th 1964, was an Irish advertising copywriter, editor, and writer on children’s toys and games.
In the 1930s he was a poet active in leftist politics, and editor of the duplicated circular Irish Front.
His family surname was Yodaiken, and Daiken was sometimes known to friends as Yod.
He also published work under the name Ned Kiernan.
Daiken was born in Dublin’s Little Jerusalem to Samuel and Rosa Yodaiken. His parents were Russian-Jewish. Daiken’s father was a rubber and scrap metal dealer. (Dublin and Glasgow.)
He attended St Andrew’s, and Wesley College, and in the 1930s attended Trinity College, where one of his first year lecturers was Samuel Beckett. Daiken was an active member of the Dublin University Socialist Society, and a founding member of the college’s Gaelic Society.
In 1932, and 1933, he won the Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for English Prose, and while a student at Trinity he published short stories and verse in Choice, The Dublin Magazine, and The New English Weekly.
In 1944 Daiken married Lilyan Marion Jean Adams (born 1908), a Canadian actor. They lived at 19 Prince Albert Road, Primrose Hill, London, and had two daughters, Melanie (1945), and Elinor (1947).
On becoming a father in 1945, Daiken’s main focus moved on from political activism to children’s games and toys, and by 1951 the basement of their London home had become a toy museum.
Among the books he published on the subject were Children’s games throughout the year (1949), Children’s toys throughout the ages (1953), Out she goes: Dublin street rhymes with a commentary (1963) and World of toys (1963). He published a guidebook for children, entitled London pleasures for young people (1957).
He made television and radio programmes for the BBC on the subject too. His film One potato, two potato, a compilation of children’s street rhymes, won the Festival Mondial du Film prize in 1958.
His radio play The Circular Road was about a Jewish-Irish child, which detailed a child’s bereavement in the Jewish-Irish community.
In the 1950s Daiken founded the National Toy Museum and Institute of Play, today part of the Toy Collection at Hove Museum and Art Gallery.
Conor Cruise O’Brien Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana recruited Daiken in 1963 as a lecturer in education.
Not long before his death Daiken’s film called “The Piano” about teaching white and black children in a school in Africa, premiered at the Cork film festival.
Read Donal Fallon’s excellent blog on Daiken: